How good is your spelling?
Even if it's great, and even with Final Cut Pro's built-in spellchecker, it's still easy to make mistakes, particularly when adding titles to video that include people's names.
This is where the powerful combination of the Timeline Index and the Find and Replace Title Text command comes in.
As Steve Martin from Ripple Training shows us in this week's episode of MacBreak Studio, the database foundation of Final Cut Pro X really shines when it comes to checking and correcting typos in your project titles.
While Steve talked about many different uses for the Timeline Index in last week's episode, here he focuses specifically on demonstrating how you can use it to methodically check all your titles. Because it contains a list of them all in order, and because selecting a title in this list both selects the title and moves the playhead to its start point, you can quickly and confidently review every single title in your project. Without using the Timeline Index, it can be easy to miss a title, particular in long-form documentary work, where you might have dozens of lower thirds introducing interview subjects.
If you find individual errors, you can simply double-click the title in the timeline to highlight the first word – and use the arrow keys in the Viewer to navigate word-by-word through the title.
If, however, you discover a consistent series of mistakes across multiple titles – as in the misspelling of a last name that is used repeatedly in the example shown here – Final Cut Pro X has a great command (found in the Edit menu) that lets you replace all instances of that word in a single keystroke.
Check it out above and use these tools in your next project.