How to get consistent speeds with scrolling/crawling text?

Question

Has anyone found a clever way of making consistent scrolling speeds between separate scrolling text clips?
I have dozens of clips of scrolling (and crawling) text in my movie, but haven't found any way to make them scroll at the same speed. The speed is determined by the length of the scrolling clip, but each of my clips has different amounts of text, so I can't just make them all the same length.
So I play around and try and get it close, but some always end up moving faster than others.
Thoughts?
thanks,
Scott
G4   Mac OS X (10.4.4)  

Answer 1

Is your text vertical or horizontal?
With vertical scroll, I make a huge empty paragraph with a bunch of "Enter"-spaces. Example:
Then I just fill in what I need. I make sure my initial 'empty' paragraph is big enough to fill my biggest piece of scrolling text. Then I just place the big effected clip on it's own video track.
For horizontal scroll, it's a bit different. I simply type in the longest piece of text that i'll be using and use that as my template. For shorter lines of text, I put in blank spaces. To ensure that the longest and shortest text lines are going at the same speed, I put the longest clip on it's own video track, and the shortest clip on another video track, but directly above the other one. I then put a period (".") at the beginning and end of my short text line and see on my timeline if the period appears at the same time as the first/last letter of my longer text block. Example:
V2 = . The sky is blue .
V1 = Dogs eat grass and cats meow. Cows don't bark.
Once I see that it's at the exact same speed, then I replace the periods with spaces.