Scrolling Text Looks Bad I want to have a text scroll through a video. I use Kdenlive for editing and rendering and it supports having a scrolling text and simply made it black text on a white background.

It scrolls very fast, way faster than would be readable. Which is intended. However, it should still look crisp (appearing clear, sharp, etc.).

When I stop at any point in the video, the text is as sharp as it could be. However, when playing the video, the text looks blurry.

It doesn't appear to be a player issue. I tried 3 different players, same thing. When I take a screenshot while playing the video, the text looks sharp, too.

I use a 60 fps LCD laptop monitor with 4 K resolution scaled to 1920 px x 1080 px by the operating system and tried 30 fps and 60 fps video.

The problem vanishes when I stand 4 m or more back.

Is this a known problem and is there a solution? Like using colors which aren't as different as black and white for the text and the background or actually lowering the frame rate or showing smaller/bigger text or anything?
Some general advice on motion graphics / rolling text, i dont know KDEnlive so i dont know how to achieve that in your specific software.


Make scrolling speed fit your framerate. If your framerate is 25fps, the text should scroll at 25 / 50 / 75 / 100 / 125 etc. pixels per frame.
If you are using a progressive scan playback device like a projector or a computer screen, make sure your project is set to be in progressive and not interlaced. If necessary, de-interlace video that was shot interlaced before using it in the project.
Never use fonts or graphics that have lines which are only 1px, if you need to do that, duplicate the layer and put a copy of the graphics with a very soft gaussian blur (1 or 2px blur) in the background.
Put a soft shadow around the font, also very subtle, 1 or 2px dissolved shadow.