Prevent scrolling text judder in Final Cut Pro, Premiere, and Resolve. Calculate your exact integer-locked pixels-per-frame (PPF) speed to guarantee buttery-smooth playback.
Locked Motion
Final Duration
Why did my duration change? To prevent the aliasing and jitter caused by sub-pixel rendering (calculating motion at 0.000 px/frame), we forcefully lock the scroll to exact whole pixels on the grid.
Motion typography on cinema screens fails when NLEs (like Premiere or Final Cut Pro) attempt to move high-contrast text by fractions of a pixel across frames. By defining your scroll speed via a rigid integer-based Pixels Per Frame (PPF) multiplier, the text redraws perfectly on the pixel grid every single frame. This completely eliminates the stroboscopic "hiccup" effect without relying on heavy temporal motion blurs.
Smooth credits come down to one number: how many pixels the text moves each frame. If that number is whole (say 6), every frame moves the same distance and the roll glides. If it's fractional (say 5.96), some frames move 5 pixels and others 6, and the viewer sees a stutter or judder, most visibly on thin white type over black.
So instead of picking a duration and letting your editing software work out the speed, work backwards:
Example: a 15,000 px credit roll in a 4K (2160 px tall) timeline at 24 fps, aimed at 2 minutes. Distance is 17,160 px, raw speed is about 5.96 px per frame, which locks to 6 px per frame (144 px per second) and a final length of about 1 min 59 s.
If the locked speed is too fast to read comfortably, raise the target duration until it lands on a lower whole number. Shorter credit lists or a lower frame rate change the result too, so recalculate whenever the credits change.