Did you know you can do interactive, realtime title design directly inside Final Cut Pro X?
This is the subject we tackle in this week's edition of MacBreak Studio. While Motion is the primary companion application for creating motion graphics for editors using Final Cut Pro X (or for anyone else for that matter), because FCP X is built on the same rendering engine, and because all the titles, transitions, and effects built into FCP X are actually Motion projects, much of the power of Motion is available right inside of FCP X.
Today Mark Spencer shows Steve Martin from Ripple Training one way to approach interactive title design by using the Custom title. This powerful title looks rather dull in the preview thumbnail (it doesn't even animate) but in reality it can be used to create a broad variety of animated titles thanks to the long list of parameters for animating text onto and off the screen.
By first setting a range in the timeline and enabling looping, you can adjust these parameters during playback for immediate feedback on the look and timing of your animation. Based on the sequence text behavior from Motion, you can animate the position, scale, opacity, tracking, blur, and more for the text on a character-by-character basis, and then adjust how the animation moves through the characters based on the Spread and Direction values – and the duration of the title clip.
The Custom title does have a limitation: you can't control the point around which letters rotate. However, every problem is an opportunity, especially when you have Motion, so I demonstrate how you can easily expand the functionality of this title effect by opening a copy in Motion and publishing an additional parameter that lets the Final Cut Pro X user adjust the anchor point for the rotation (and scale) of the text.
So don't pass over those rather boring title previews: there's more there than meets the eye. And if you can't quite get a title (or any other effect for that matter) to do exactly what you want, then try opening it in Motion and publishing a few more parameters.