How fast can you read text in a movie?

Reading is a part of our daily life and integrated into videos a cool way to add new information. But as you all know, reading takes some time and can make a movie horribly slow – an attribute that most of our videos should get rid of.

So what should you do when you sit in front of your computer trying to read out the words in your movie loud and slow to see if the text is visible long enough? You can maybe ask your mom and see if she gets the text right but yeah – don’t be that guy and stay classy. Try a new approach – the science of reading.

The average reader can read around 200–240 words a minute and yeah — we are talking here of books. Fast readers can get up to 400 words a minute, a quite impressive amount of words when you imagine reading words as fast as Eminem rap them. If we do the maths, we see that e.g. you can have 6–8 words in a two seconds clip. When you try that by yourself you will see that that amount of words is still not readable. So you have to act on the assumption of the slowest readers out there which read 120 words a minute. That is not because your audience is that slow in reading, it because it takes a lot more time than expected to start reading in a video. This is why:

First, think about your focus. Normally you watch a movie because of its moving objects (otherwise you would read a book). Because your eyes always try to follow the moving objects and not the static objects (like text), it takes some time to realize and start looking at just that static ones (your text). Second, think again about the movement of your eyes. Mainly your eyes rest or jump in large intervals from one place to the next when following the moving objects of a film or after a cut. Your eyes will not follow your object in a structured, mostly left-to-right directional way as if you would do it while reading. So again, it takes a while to start reading and change your eyes movements from the large jumps to the structured reading eye movement.

So for your next project keep in mind that 120 words a minute are a good estimation of your audience reading speed. Additionally and if you understand the moving object theory you maybe get it why Apple is showing us much faster – but still readable – texts in their new movie 107 seconds.

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