Creating a custom Lower Third
FCPX has plenty of great built-in templates for Lower Thirds, but for higher-end projects and clients, you might need or want to create something a little more original and less recognizable. The relationship between Motion and FCPX makes this easy and even a bit fun. We'll design a simple Lower Third with a few elements in this recipe, and then show how to get the title to appear directly in FCPX as a reusable, editable template.
How to do it...
1. Open Motion.
2. From the Template Chooser window, click on the Final Cut Title icon. If you like, modify the options in the upper-right corner to fit your needs. We'll keep them as is.
3. Click on Open. We are brought to the Motion interface with a few items already in the timeline. These are merely placeholders:
In fact, in the timeline we see what looks like a title box of some sort, but we don't see it in the Viewer. This is because the Viewer is set to 100% scale and we are not actually seeing the entire frame.
4. Click on the Viewer scale button above the Viewer and set it to Fit In Window:
Now we can see the entire frame as well as the placeholder textbox.
5. Double-click on the textbox (where it says TYPE TEXT HERE). Write in FIRST LAST, hit Return, and type DESCRIPTION:
6. Double-click on the word DESCRIPTION and hit Command + 3 to open the Inspector. A long list of parameters will appear on the left of the screen. We could spend all day in here, but we'll keep it simple.
7. Pick a new font and size of your choice. We chose Strenuous at size 70.
8. Click the Style tab and choose a new color for the Face parameter. We chose bright green.
9. Back in the Viewer, highlight the entire FIRST LAST text line and make changes of your choosing to the text in the Inspector. We chose the Misadventures font at size 80 in a bright blue color.
10. Hit Escape to exit the text edit mode. The textbox itself should still be highlighted.
11. In the Inspector, click on the Right Alignment button to right side align the textbox:
The textbox will immediately align to the right:
12. Click-and-drag the textbox anywhere you want on the screen. We'll drag it up a bit to make sure it fits within a title safe area for broadcast.
13. Hit R to turn on the Rectangle tool:
14. Click-and-drag in your Viewer to create a rectangle shape that stretches across the lower third of your screen. Do not be worried that it covers up your text. We'll fix that shortly.
15. Choose Object | Send Backward (or hit Command + [). The white rectangle should now be below the text:
Let's enhance the look of this Lower Third just a bit more by adding some transparency and a bit of movement by having the text animate in.
16. In the Inspector, drop the Opacity down to 50%.
17. Click once on the TYPE TEXT HERE object in the timeline to highlight it.
18. Hit Command + 2 to bring up your Library tab.
19. Click on Behaviors in the left side list and then Text Sequence in the right side list. More folders will appear underneath:
20. Click on the disclosure triangle next to the folder Text-Energetic.
21. Highlight Blast In, watch the preview in the upper part of the window, and click on the Apply button:
22. Click on the play button underneath the Viewer to play your newly added text animation.
23. Read the next recipe to learn how to properly save this title as a title template accessible right in FCPX!
There's more...
The Title Background box
As you may have noticed, we ignored the grey Title Background placeholder in this exercise. While you can drop in an image to see how your title may appear on top of a particular clip or image, you can also simply choose to ignore its existence and it will not show up once we access the title template in FCPX.
See also
The next recipe is sort of a must, as it explains the proper steps on how to save this new lower third so it appears in your Titles browser in FCPX.
