Adding a nice title to a video can help introduce the video (not to mention help to make it look professional). The design element will vary, depending on what you’re looking for (simple 2D with no animation versus 3D with animation), but that’s a personal preference and will be dictated (at least in part) by what you want the end-result to be.
In today’s post, I will show you how super-easy it is to add a title to your Final Cur Pro project and even uncover some (seemingly) hidden features that will help to make your titles come alive.
First, let’s look at how we add a simple title. With our project open, we need to click on the “Titles” button to open/engage our title browser.
At this point, it’s as simple as browsing through the various title options to find the one that will work best for your project. You can hover your mouse over each title and move your mouse left and right to preview what the title will look like. Note that some titles are designed to be an overlay title (meaning the background will be transparent allowing the layer just behind it to show through) while others will occupy the whole screen.
Once you have decided on the title you want to use, just drag and drop to your timeline.
To edit the text for that title, just double-click the title element in your timeline and start typing…
In some cases, you may want to play with fonts, styles, colors, etc to customize your title. Doing this is as simple as changing these attributes in a Word Processor. First, we need to highlight the title element in our timeline.
Next, we’ll head over to the title inspector on the right side of Final Cut Pro and click on the “Text” tab. This is where we will find attributes like size, font style, alignment, depth, and much more.
At the top of the “Text” attributes, you will notice a dropbox that will allow you to change styles completely. We have options for 2D and 3D styles. Take time to explore those on your own.
Believe it or not, the text style options go way beyond what we see here. To discover even more styles, scroll down on the “Text” tab until you get to the “Material” section. From here, we can click the drop-down box to reveal 11 categories of material types including paper, fabric, metal, wood and more.
If you’re looking for something more, you may want to explore various 3rd-party titles. One suite of titles that I would strongly recommend comes from a company called FX Factory. The package is called “Ripple 3D Animations” and it’s free (they have many more titles, filters, generators, etc that you can pay for, available through their free browser app). These title styles allow you to add even more cinema-quality titles to your Final Cut Pro projects.
