You don’t need to buy expensive plugins
to add cool titles to your project in Final Cut Pro.
Final Cut Pro includes one title,
most people don’t even know about,
that has endless potential for animation.
It’s called the custom title,
and you can find in the Build In/Out category.
Let’s take a look at what you can do with it.
When you first add this title to your timeline,
all you get is basically the basic title.
You can adjust the text and appearance of it,
but right out of the box there is zero animation.
The real magic of the custom title
is revealed when you select the title inspector.
This gives you a ton of animation controls
for animating your text in and out.
First, let’s take a look at a few general controls,
and then we’ll build a few different titles,
just to show you how versatile this title really is.
For the In Controls, what you’re doing here,
is basically setting the starting point for your animation,
and Final Cut Pro animates the text back to the point you see here.
Let me show you.
Let’s move our playhead to the start of the clip,
and bring the opacity slider all the way down to zero.
Now, if we move our playhead ahead one frame at a time,
as you can see,
the opacity of each character gradually comes up,
until the opacity of the entire title is at the original 100 percent.
The length of this animation
can be adjusted with the In Duration slider.
This can be set to anywhere from 5 - 60 frames,
making our text animate on slower or faster.
We can also choose our animation unit sizes with this title.
We can set it to animate in one character at a time,
one word at a time,
one line at a time, or even the entire title.
The sequencing dropdown menu
sets the direction of our animation.
By default, this is set to From,
meaning the title animates from the in parameters to the original.
If we set this to To,
our title will animate from the original parameters,
to the settings selected in the In Controls.
Setting this to Through
animates our title from the original settings,
to the settings you select with the In Controls,
then back to the original.
Through Inverted is the opposite of that.
If we want to add more than one part to our animation,
we need set the sequence to From Keyframes,
and keyframe our animation.
The Spread slider adjust the spread of our animation.
With this set at one,
our first unit will animate on,
then our next one, and so on.
Bringing this up will start animating subsequent units
before the animation of the unit before it is complete.
And, last, the variance slider basically randomizes all the In Controls.
All the other In Controls are pretty self explanatory.
The Out Controls blow are the same,
except they are used to adjust the out animation.
Now, lets take a look at how easy it is
using these controls to make animated titles.
Remember, all the In Controls set the starting point of your text.
So for this example,
let’s set the duration all the way up to 60 frames,
and set our unit size to Character without spaces).
Let’s bring the opacity all the way down
to make our characters fade in,
and let’s also make everything grow in size,
so bring the scale slider all the way down too.
We can make out characters flip in by
setting the starting rotation to 180 degrees,
and come up from the bottom,
by dragging down on the Y Position value.
To smooth everything out, let’s bring up the blur slider,
set the In Spread to around 3,
and set the Speed Type to ease out.
For our out animation, let’s maybe just add the fly through effect,
where the camera moves in towards the title,
making the viewer feel like there flying though the text.
This is super simple.
Just move your playhead to the last frame in your clip,
and in the Out animation controls,
open the position dropdown to reveal more controls.
Click on the Z Axis value,
and drag up until your title disappears.
Add some blur, and set the Out Speed to Accelerate.
With just a few simple adjustments,
and Zero keyframes, here’s our title we made.
Let’s look at another example,
this time trying the Through animation.
First, let’s bring down the in opacity down to zero to fade in our text,
and bring the In blur slider all the way up.
Bring the duration slider all the way up to emphasize this effect,
and change the In Sequencing to through.
For the out animation, add the same parameters,
but this time, set the unit size to word.
For our next example,
let’s use keyframes to make an overshot title.
The first thing we need to do for this,
is change the In Sequencing to From Keyframes.
Anything we adjust from now on,
we’ll have to use keyframes
but this will allow us to add more than one value to each parameter.
For example, let’s use the Position Parameters
to make our text fly in towards us,
over shoot the original size and bounce back.
We can do this one character at a time,
but I think this looks much better animating in
one word at a time.
With our playhead at the start of the clip,
expand the In Position parameter,
and bring down the Z value until the text is fairly small.
Add a keyframe here.
Move about 5 frames ahead,
and to overshoot the text, bring this to a bit over zero,
maybe somewhere around 50.
Move a few more frames ahead,
and bring this value back to zero.
Let’s speed up our animation with the duration slider,
and keyframe the In Opacity to fade in at the start.
Let’s also make our out animation random.
Move your playhead to the end of your clip,
and in the Out Controls,
bring up the Out Variance slider.
Set your Out Duration,
and to fade your text out,
by bringing the out opacity slider down to zero.
This title preset in Final Cut Pro is so versatile,
I’d strongly recommend making this your default title.
This way, you can just use the keyboard shortcut Control T
to add it to your timeline,
and make it as subtle or flashy as you need.
Try it about and see what you can come up with