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Ah! Final Cut Pro text! It's great for what it is, and it's certainly handy to be able
to add text on the timeline. But the text interface has remained the same for several
versions of Final Cut, and it's assumed that for anything beyond the most basic of titles,
you'll be jumping over to Motion to add your text flourishes and animations.
But then there's that thing called the deadline, when you're working flat out to finish your
work, and just don't have the time to spend jazzing up titles in another program. And
it's also possible, that it's been a while since you've fired up your copy of Motion
or After Effects, and reminding yourself how your graphics program works also takes up
valuable production time. So here's a quick tip for making your title
text a bit more interesting without having to leave Final Cut Pro. And I've done that
by adding Magic Bullet Looks to the text itself. And that's the interesting thing... it's just
as quick to add Magic Bullet Looks to text as it is to footage.
And in this particular case, I've made this text look a little more interesting by adding
a couple of effects to it. Let's reset this look, and drag on a gradient, stick a diffusion
on there... and in this case I'll reduce down the size, increase the grade a bit, to generate
this cloudy sort of fog in- between the letters. And then, throw on my old favorite the vignette
at the end, just to make the edges look a little more interesting. And that's it!
But there's a hidden ingredient, which is making it do this flickering effect. And that's
because Magic Bullet Looks ships with this range of Misfire Filters, which lets you mess
up your video. I know you've probably spent hours making
sure that you've got the lighting right, and you're shooting at the right frame- rate,
and you've got your exposure organized correctly. And you've done all those things to make your
video look as good as possible... and then you're going to mess it up?
So that's probably why you've been tempted not to use these Misfire Filters. But here's
a case when you can grunge up your timeline, without hurting a single frame of video footage.
And for messing up text, I really like the Misfire Flicker. And the great thing is you
don't have to spend very much effort making this work.
The default settings for Flicker, are for the frequency about half-way, and the flicker
amount quite low. But I've done some experimentation with this, and I've found that if I move the
flicker up to half-way too, that's a nice balance between flickering and readability.
So I want to grunge it up a bit, but I still want the viewers to be able to read the text.
And I've found that if I put the flickering right up to 100, then it's a little too much.
But, just by grabbing this one slider, and moving it to about half-way, means I get this
nice effect. But the interesting thing about it, is that
it flickers the slightly darker areas more than the lighter areas. And because I put
on this vignette, the 'S' and the 'T' at either end of the text
are slightly darker. And they're the ones that are flickering the most.
So if I wanted to go back in to Looks Builder, and move my vignette around, and highlight
just the first bit of the word... make the vignette a bit smaller, for example... then
go back to the timeline and play this... then the lightest areas of this text, in this case
the beginning of the first word, flickers less than the text that is more faded.
And that's it! That's the technique. I'll leave it up to you whether or not to tell
your Art Director that you slaved all afternoon to come up with this particular effect!
But it's certainly a quick and dirty way of jazzing up your title slightly, and then moving
on to your next edit, without leaving the timeline.
If you've got a few more moments you can always try experimenting with some of the other Misfire
Filters. On this next clip, I've added Misfire Gate Weave. And I've put it as the first filter
in the chain, so it's moving the text, before Looks is added.
And this means that if you had a really tight vignette or spot exposure, then it would begin
to move that text slightly in and out of the centre of that exposure. And the other quick
thing is that these are the default settings of Gate Weave. You can increase the Weave
Frequency, and I've played around with this a little bit, but increasing the frequency
makes this look more like a regular system. So that would make it look like you were actually
making it weave in and out of a film gate. Which may be the sort of thing that you want,
but in this particular case I just want a bit of random movement. So leaving it on this
default setting works the best I've found. And I can also ramp up the noise frequency,
but this has the effect of making the text a little tricky to read. And again, that's
what I'm after, a nice balance between edgy movement and readability. So for this effect,
the default settings are just right, and don't take very long to apply.
If you play around with the diffusion a bit more, you can get this sort of effect, which
softens up the text but keeps the edgy movement going on. And of course, because this is Final
Cut Pro text, you can just jump over into the Controls Tab, and change the font.
On this last clip, I've combined a number of different tools, to see if I could make
this text look a little more edgy. And on this one, I've used the Swing Tilt tool at
a slight angle to make the blurring seem a little uneven, so there's more blurring at
the top right here, and more blurring at the bottom left, but the rest of the letters are
reasonably crisp. And I've added some Film Grain to grunge it
up a bit, and most interestingly this Telecine Net Tool right at the end of the chain, which
has the effect of softening these Shutter Streaks.
And the softer they are, the less pronounced they are at the bottom and the top of the
screen and it also means, because they're slightly softer, they're going to flicker
a little more than the main text. And this is why I've got a Spot Exposure on the text,
to keep this a little more dominant and to keep the edges a little more flickery when
they hit that flicker filter. But I'll upload these source files and this
Final Cut timeline to RedGiantPeople.com, and so by all means hop over there and download
the preset and just have a play with how you can come up with something pretty quickly,
that is so much more from the basic titles you get in Final Cut, but hasn't taken very
much time. And the one beautiful thing about this, is
that there are no key frames! I like to use as few key frames as possible in Final Cut,
because the fewer there are, the easier it is to tweak and reconfigure the effects, but
most importantly, the fewer the key frames the faster I can get through the edits, and
the faster I can deliver the job. So anyway that's it for this tip, but until
the next time, good luck and have fun! By Simon Walker
www.simonwalkerfreelance.com