From the course: Final Cut Pro Essential Training

Creating a title - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro Essential Training

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Creating a title

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- [Instructor] This chapter is all about getting familiar with titles and generators inside of Final Cut Pro. Earlier in this course, if you stood with me during the quick start chapter, we got a sneak peek of how we could add titles to a project. To follow along, we're in the chapter 11 event, and I have the chapter 11 underscore one project open in the timeline. Since we're not going to be using the effects browser right now, we can actually close it. So, that's clicking on the top left hand corner. The shortcut for that actually happens to be command five. I'll press shift Z, just to fit all of the clips in my timeline a little bit better, now that we have that extra real estate. And on the top left hand corner here, this is where the title and generator sidebar is. If we click the disclosure triangle next to titles, we'll see a number of categories where we can select titles for various needs. Let's take a look at the bumper opener category, and if you're looking to preview a title, you can skim over it to get a sense for what it does. Very similar to what we did with effects. We're going to want to add this pull focus title to the timeline. There's a little trick to get it in right where your playhead is. In fact, if you take this title and double click it, notice that it is now connected at the point of where that playhead was. In my case, this was not right at the beginning of the clip. That's easy to correct. I'll actually press command Z to undo that. Use my skimmer to then click, and move my play head to the beginning, select the pull focus text again, and then double click. Now, it's at the beginning. Let's preview this because there's some animation in it. In fact, if I move to the beginning and press the space bar. (gentle music) - [Voiceover] Well, the. - [Instructor] We see the title actually, kind of, scales up gently and then scales out before it leaves, not to mention it leaves the background blurry, which can be really handy sometimes when introducing a story. Let's actually manipulate this title. So, it says something. I'm going to double click on the title in the viewer and we can change it directly here. So, this happens to be in Nova Scotia, and we're going to make the subtitle Canada. And a quick way of moving there is to use these arrows on the top left hand corner of your viewer. I'll click on the right one to go to the next text layer, and I'll type in the words, Canada. Let's make some changes to this text by highlighting it, and I'll draw your attention on the right hand side where we have all of its properties showing up in the inspector. One thing we can do is increase the tracking in this instance. So that, that fills a bit better on the screen here. And I'll also increase the size so that the Canada text roughly matches the width of the Nova Scotia text. We can actually even increase the tracking above a hundred percent if we needed to just to have it close to matching that width. Now, when you're done with a title, or these fields, you can actually press the escape key to exit and just see how that looks without the overlays that are currently being on the text. The next thing to do is I want to select my first piece of text and just notice that you can drag this around the screen. We have these snapping tools, just to make sure that the text is aligned appropriately on both the horizontal and vertical access. In the inspector, we can also see this line one's font choice. And if we would like to switch it, we can click here. And any font that is installed in your system, if you click and hold, we get a sense for the different types of fonts that are there. I wanted you to keep in mind. I have hundreds, if not thousands of fonts that are on my system, that you might not have access to. So, don't worry about the larger list or the differences here, but let's select Helvetica New as the main font. And just because we want that to be more bold, we'll actually make this bold. And then, I'll increase the size there just a little bit. Now, let's select the Canada text, and then click and hold to match up that font. So, that was Helvetica New, but in order to have a bit of contrast between the weight of the text, so this being set to bold, we'll actually take Canada text, and let's keep it at a medium size base. I would also like to make a stylistic change to each of these different text fields. So, I'm going to select Nova Scotia. And in order to do this, we're going to scroll a bit down to see that there are actually stylistic properties to our text. And there is the face, which is white and the outline, which is black. Instead, we're going to activate a drop shadow to just sit at the very back of the text. And I'm going to show the properties of this drop shadow, which we can increase in opacity, blur a little bit, and also, add a bit of distance there. So, this is just going to add a bit of separation from the background. Can see how the outline also works with this. And if I show the outline properties, notice that the width is three. Let's bring that down a bit to something really small, a value of one. And I'm going to play with the drop shadow a bit more too. 'Cause the opacity is too much. I'll bring that down to a value of 50, so it's quite subtle. Let's go to the Canada text and also make some changes. And keep in mind, we can also move this around. So, it's closer or further away from the Nova Scotia text. We now have access to its style parameters. We will go and show the outline properties right now. We'll set with the value to be much smaller. Let's set it to two 'cause it's much thinner in weight and also activate a drop shadow. Showing the properties of that, I'll keep the opacity at 75, blur it a bit, and don't forget that distance. I'll move this to a value of about 13. Keep playing with some of these parameters. As in getting the look of your text can sometimes take a while in a project. The sky is the limit in terms of changes that you can make. In the next movie, we'll become familiar with how we can add a lower third to this project.

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