Hey guys, what’s up.
My name is Serge, and welcome back to my channel.
In today’s video, we’ll take a look at how you can add
text message animations to your videos in Final Cut Pro.
Before we get started, there’s a couple things you should know.
One, this video is not sponsored.
I bought and paid for this plugin with my own money.
And two, yes, you do need a plugin for this.
Well, theoretically, if you have Motion 5, you could build your own,
but then again, theoretically, you could build a house,
but some jobs are better left to professionals.
The professionals that built this plugin are non-other
than Mark and Steve from Ripple Training.
They built this amazing RT Messages plugin
and were kind enough to give my viewers
20 percent off this one and all the other Ripple Training plugins.
More details at the end of this video.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look
at how to use the RT Messages plugin in Final Cut Pro.
First, let’s take a look at how to install this plugin.
I’m going to do everything in real-time,
just to show you how fast and easy installation is.
After purchasing this plugin, on Ripple Training’s website,
click the download button to download the Zip file.
The file is only 2.1 megabytes,
so even if you have slow internet, this will take no time at all.
Double click your downloaded file to unzip it.
Open the Installer and click the install button to install it.
That’s all you have to do, and almost instantly, your plugin is installed.
When you open up Final Cut Pro, RT Messages will be in your titles browser.
Down in my timeline, I have a demo clip
with markers placed on the actions in the video.
This is where we’ll add our messages.
Place your playhead where you want the first message to come in,
select the Chat Text clip, and press Q to connect it to your timeline.
Ripple trim it to the length you want.
Triple-click on the text inside the text bubble to select it all,
and replace it with your own text.
The text bubble automatically adjusts to fit your text.
The first message is an incoming text,
so let’s set the tail location to left
and change the color of our bubble to light grey.
You can reposition this text bubble by either using the on-screen controls
or the controls in the inspector.
To add a response to this text,
move your playhead to where you want the next message to come in,
and add another Chat Text title.
Change the text,
and reposition the text bubble.
To keep the spacing of your messages consistent,
the RT Messages plugin also comes with a very useful set of guides.
To enable them, scroll down in the titles inspector, and select guides.
Once again, you can either use the on-screen controls
or controls in the inspector to adjust these.
To add another incoming text,
let’s select our first text and press Command C to copy it.
Move your playhead to the next marker,
and press Command V to paste it.
Select the middle clip, the one where the guides are enabled,
and move the horizontal guides down below the second message.
Select your top clip, and use the Y Position parameter in the inspector
to move it straight down.
Holding down the Option key while dragging
will enable you to make more precise adjustments.
Change the text in this message bubble.
Select your response message again,
copy and paste it on the next marker,
and adjust the positioning and text.
Next, let’s add a video message.
Move your playhead to the next marker,
select the Chat Image title, and press Q to connect it to your timeline.
In the inspector, click the drop zone button,
and select either a still image or a video from the media browser.
Click apply clip.
In the viewer, double click on the clip inside the message bubble,
and adjust the size and positioning of your drop zone clip.
Click off the clip to disable the transfer controls,
and in the inspector, adjust the height and width of your bubble.
Use the built-in guides to position your image bubble.
Let’s add one more text bubble, and this time,
instead of text, use an emoji.
Adjust your spacing guides, copy one of your received texts, and line it up.
Triple-click on the text to select it,
and press Control Command Space Bar to bring up the Emoji keyboard.
Select your emoji, and click on it to replace the text.
Go through all your clips, and deselect guides to hide them.
Here’s what we have so far.
Let’s make this even better.
First, for incoming texts, let’s add some incoming bubbles.
Move your playhead to before the first incoming text,
and from the titles and generators browser,
select the Chat Incoming title and add it to your timeline.
Move your playhead to where the bubbles overlap
and use the text bubble as a guide
to adjust the size and position of your incoming bubble.
Ripple trim your incoming bubble to where the text bubble starts.
Repeat this for all your incoming texts.
And last, let’s add some sound effects to our text messages.
When you downloaded this plugin,
you may have noticed there was also a Final Cut Pro library included.
Go back to your downloaded folder,
and double click on this library to open it up.
Inside here, you’ll find 5 individual text message sound effects
and one audition clip with all the sound effects in it.
Select the one that matches the action in your project,
and add it to your project.
Line up the marker on the sound effect clip
to the start of your message clip.
Add a sound effect to every message for this cool animation.
One more thing I want to touch on with this plugin
is inside the included library,
you also get a project template you can copy and paste into your project.
In this template, all the message clips are keyframes
for a scrolling message effect.
All you have to do is change the text, and if necessary,
change the timing of your keyframes.
A big shout out to Steve and Mark for making this plugin.
If this is something you might be interested in,
Ripple Training is offering a 20 percent discount
on this or any other of their plugins.
To get this, use the coupon code Serge-20 during checkout
for 20 percent off.
And if you do have Motion
and are interested in making plugins like this,
Ripple Training has a great video
where they walk you through the process of making this plugin.
You’ll be amazed at how much time and effort goes into these.
I’ll link it in the description below.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you back here next week.