This week on MacBreak Studio, we have a special guest visiting from the U.K.: Alex Gollner, AKA “Alex4D”. Alex has been a generous contributor to the Final Cut Pro X community since the beginning, sharing ideas and many free plugins that he has created.

Today he dives into the world of publishing templates from Motion for use in Final Cut Pro by showing a neat trick for creating a background for text that automatically adjusts for different text widths and heights. In other words, whatever text you type in Final Cut Pro X, the background will always perfectly match it.

The essence of the technique Alex demonstrates lies in using a filter rather than a shape object. While shapes in Motion are incredibly powerful and flexible, and they can be linked to many other parameters, they can’t be made to automatically change width or height depending on the text string length. In fact, that is the basic issue: Motion doesn’t store the text string length as any sort of parameter that can be manipulated.

But by using a filter – the simple border filter specifically – the text is perfectly outlined no matter what is typed or what font or size is used. The only problem is that the border is very tight to the text and doesn’t really look very good.

Alex solves this issue using another powerful feature of Motion: clones. By cloning the text object and adding a second instance of the simple border filter, he is able to combine the two filters to create any border thickness he wants.

Finally, Alex shows us how to link the color of the borders to each other so that by changing the color of one, both change. From there, it is a simple matter of choosing what parameters to publish so that they are available for the Final Cut Pro X editor to manipulate.