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Using Motion Templates in Apple Final Cut Pro, Part 2

Feb 2, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

If you preview the project via the playback controls beneath the Canvas, you'll see the background play and then the clock cut in abruptly at 60 frames. Because we're anal video people, let's add a fade transition. You'll do this above the Canvas by choosing the Add Behavior dropdown list and choosing Basic Motion > Fade In/Fade Out. Make sure the Broken Clock group is selected in the Layers pane or you could apply the fade to the chalkboard background. Preview again to see your fade, and smile and nod in approval. That's our cool gadget; now onto our funky text.

Let's add the text at about 4 seconds in, so drag the playhead to about 120 frames. To keep things tidy, let's add the text in a separate group, so in the Motion Menu, choose Object > New Group. Then click the Text tool (the big T) in the Motion Toolbar and Type "Time Saving Tips [carriage return] by [carriage return] Jan Ozer." Motion even allows you to use your own name, if you'd like.

We're going to have to make some adjustments to the text. In the Motion toolbar, click the HUD icon to open the heads-up display, select all the text, change the font to Impact, increase the font size to 75, change the alignment to center, and move the text over to the right. Don't spend a lot of time on this because we'll be changing fonts in a second.

Now we're going to add a Livefont effect to the text. In the Utility pane, return to the Library, click LiveFonts on the left and Pro Series on the right, then scroll down until you see Flip Count on the bottom. Then drag the Flip Count effect onto the Text layer in the new group you created a moment ago.

Motion adds that effect to the text. With the HUD, you can further customize the text, perhaps by increasing the size and reducing the line spacing. If you want to mess with the timing of the effect, click the text in the Layers tab of the Project pane, then click over to the Text tab of the Inspector tab of the Utility Pane. Scroll down and you'll see LiveFont Timing on the bottom of that pane. OK, we're done.

Now save the Motion file in a location that you can easily find and then run Final Cut Pro. Open a sequence with the same settings as the Motion project—in this case, DVCPRO HD 720p30. Then import your Motion project and drag it into the sequence. You might have to render the sequence for full-frame playback, but there's your Motion project in all its glory.

You can play a video of the short introduction that I created by clicking here. Granted, it's a silly little project, but hopefully it introduced you to the content and effects that Motion supplies—and the simple workflow that allows you to use them in Final Cut Pro.

Related Links

Using Motion Templates in Apple Final Cut Pro, Part 1 After shooting, color-correcting, editing, sweetening the audio, and performing other similarly time-consuming project tasks, it's intimidating to think about adding customized animated text... Apple Soundtrack Pro Tutorial As with video, it's hard to capture audio perfectly. Fortunately, Apple Soundtrack Pro makes it easy to correct many common problems. In this article, I'll detail how to remove pops and clicks from your audio file, boost volume via normalization, and remove background noise... Optimizing Encoding Performance with Apple Final Cut Pro, Part 1 We've had a fun time so far with this column, digging inside an Apple Mac Pro to install a Blu-ray recorder and benchmarking Snow Leopard...

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