Freebie: Crawling Text in Final Cut Pro X

Published on July 9, 2015

I have another freebie for you. This is a bundle of 10 crawling text templates for Final Cut Pro X.

What is crawling text? It's the text that scrolls horizontally across the bottom of the screen, and unfortunately it's not easy to do with Final Cut Pro X's built-in tools.

This should help solve that. These titles will make it easy to add crawling text to your projects. Once you install them, they'll show up in your Titles Browser in Final Cut Pro X.

They require at least version 10.2.1 of Final Cut Pro X.

Click here to download the free crawling text bundle.

If you need a reminder on how to install these titles, this video should help:

(Make sure you add the extension ".localized" to the "Titles" folder. The full name of the folder should be "Titles.localized" and everything after the dot might be hidden.)

I made these templates with Apple Motion. And of course you could do the same thing if you wanted, but I'm hoping this helps save you some time.

I should note that you'll sometimes hear this type of animation called "scrolling text", which is technically correct because it is scrolling horizontally. That said, it's more commonly called "crawling text", or a "text crawl" when it's horizontal, and "scrolling text" when it's vertical.

How to use the crawling text

You can control the speed of the crawl by changing the length of the text and the length of the title's bar in your project. If you want the crawl to go faster, shorten the bar. If you want it to go slower, lengthen the bar.

You can change the colors of the graphic elements by using the color wells in the inspector.

You can change the text itself in the inspector as well.

If you want to make other changes outside of these, you'll need to use Motion to do it. And this kind of customization can be easy to do if you're familiar with Motion.

Anyway, please enjoy the crawling text bundle! I hope you find it useful!

This article was last updated on October 6, 2020