Dot Crawl

    Dot crawl affects the edges of colour and manifests itself as moving dots of colour along these edges. It is an inherent flaw in both the PAL and NTSC video systems and cannot be eliminated fully once it has been introduced into the video stream. It is an artefact of composite video processing (see my Video Connectors article for further info on this), and is commonly seen when watching TV programming or programming from VCR.

    If you use a composite video connector to watch DVD, you will see this artefact all of the time. Fortunately, it is readily eliminated by using an S-Video, component video or RGB video connection, unless it is inherent in the DVD's source material, which is rare. The most common place to see this artefact on DVD is on logos which have been sourced from composite analogue master tapes.
 


Postmortem - immediately after the opening RocVale logo.
This example and the one below are a loop of 18 frames (approximately 0.75 seconds).

This is a close up of the above.
Note the moving dots of red and white along the edges of the letters.