If you’re a Final Cut Pro user,
there’s a good chance along with Final Cut Pro,
you also own the two companion apps from Apple.
Motion 5 & Compressor.
And, if you’re like 99 percent of the users out there,
you probably don’t use these apps nearly enough.
These two companion apps, especially Motion,
are often overlooked,
but could be an amazing tool to help level up your Final Cut Pro projects.
Today, I’m going to show you my three most frequent uses for Motion
when editing videos in Final Cut Pro.
Number one is making custom titles.
Final Cut Pro comes with a ton of awesome built in title presets,
and there’s almost unlimited possibilities with third party plugins,
but sometimes, you just need something custom.
Motion 5 is a great tool for this.
Here’s my workflow.
When editing my project Final Cut Pro,
when I come to a point where I need a custom title,
all I do is add a default title and enter the text I need.
I don’t worry about the details like font, color or placement,
all that’s going to be done in Motion.
All I’m worried about at this stage
is where the title goes in my timeline,
and the text I want in it.
This doesn’t distract me from my edit,
and I can keep going.
Once I’m ready to format my titles, I head over to Motion,
and open a new title project.
The length of this project doesn’t matter,
but I do take the time to make sure the resolution
and frame rate are the same as my Final Cut Pro project.
Here, I can adjust the appearance of my text,
add background elements,
and use one of many built in behaviours
to animate my text or graphic elements.
To keep this tutorial a reasonable length,
I’ll keep this example fairly simple,
but you can do so much more in Motion than Final Cut Pro.
Once I’m happy with my preset,
I publish it to Final Cut Pro and save it in a custom category.
Back in Final Cut Pro, to replace my default title,
all I have to do is navigate to my custom preset
in the titles and generators browser,
grab my preset, drag and drop it over my default title,
and choose replace.
Since I entered my text before,
it automatically fills out the text in my custom preset,
with the font, color and any other elements I built in Motion.
My second most frequent use for motion is modifying title presets.
I have a ton of custom titles I downloaded from Envato Elements.
When I add one of these to my timeline,
I have to replace the default text,
and modify any of the available parameters.
If I’m going to use the preset in more than one project,
to save time, I use Motion to modify these presets,
so when I drop it into my timeline, everything is already done for me.
Select the title you need to modify in the Titles and Generators browser,
right click on it, and select open in Motion.
Here, adjust the text, appearance or any animation in this title here.
Once you have it looking the way you want,
choose file, save as,
give it a different name and publish this preset to Final Cut Pro.
You can now just drag and drop this preset into your timeline,
and all the adjustment you would have to make
are already done.
Before we move onto my last example,
I want to take a minute to talk about the sponsor of this video,
Envato Elements.
It’s an all in one subscription service,
and a perfect place to get awesome title presets
to use in your next project. But that’s not all.
A subscription to Envato Elements
gives you access to over 59 million digital assets.
You get unlimited downloads of stock video,
royalty free music and sound effects,
video templates, graphic templates, web templates,
still images and much more.
And, new items are added every single week.
You can try it free for 7 days,
and if you don’t love it,
simply cancel it any time during your free trial,
and you won’t be charged a penny.
This is super helpful if you’re trying to grow your business,
or your YouTube channel,
and don’t have an unlimited budget.
Click the link in the video description
and see how Envato Elements can
help YOU make better videos.
Now back to Final Cut Pro.
Even though Final Cut Pro has almost every tool you need,
there are some things that are considerably better in Motion.
Take Object tracking for example.
Final Cut Pro has an amazing Object Tracker built in,
but for some things, like tracking a screen,
it just falls a little short.
Tracking a screen in Motion will give you much better results.
Let’s try using Motion to replace the screen in our next clip.
First, we need to export this clip out of Final Cut Pro.
Press R on your keyboard to switch to the Range tool,
and click and drag out the range of this entire clip.
Hit the share button in the top right corner,
and export the selected range as a master file.
Open Motion, and in the bottom left,
select Import as project.
Navigate to your exported clip, and click the Import button.
Next, in Motion, import your clip you want to use as a replacement.
With the replacement clip selected,
add a Motion Tracking behaviour
and select Match Move.
Switch to Four Corner point tracking,
and adjust your clip to fit the screen.
Click analyze to track your clip.
Export this clip as a movie file,
and Import it back into Final Cut Pro.
Use this new clip to replace your original clip in your timeline.
I wish there was an easier way of doing this,
but so far, this is the best I could come up with.
There’s a ton more you can do in Motion,
but these three tips is what I use most.
If you want a more in depth tutorial
on screen replacement using Motion,
let me know in the comments below,
and I can do a full video on that topic.
And, if you want to learn more about Motion,
my friend Dylan Bates, aka the Final Cut Bro,
has some amazing tutorials.
I’ll link his channel in the description below.
Thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you back here next week.