Creating Your Own Custom Titles For Final Cut Pro Using Motion

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create your own custom titles for Final Cut Pro using Motion. 

Now when you're in Final Cut Pro of course it is fairly easy to add titles. You just go up here at the top left. You select the Titles & Generators Section. You look at the different titles. Maybe you select a category like Basic Text and then you Drag & Drop one of these into your project's timeline. Then here you go. You've got some title text there. You've got some properties. You could change the text and you've got a title. But what if you want to get something very specific to your project. You want to create your own titles with your own styles. You only have a limited number of these titles here. Can you create your own? 

The answer is Yes! Previously you would have had to buy Motion, the app for motion graphics that kind of is a companion to Final Cut Pro. But now with Apple Creator Studio, if you have that ACS subscription, you're going to have both Final Cut Pro and Motion. So it's easier than ever. So let's get rid of this title here and create our own custom title. 

I'm going to switch over here to Motion and you can see when you start Motion you have a project browser. One of the project type is Final Cut Title. That's exactly what we want here. So we'll just double click on that one and it will create a new project for us. It's going to fill some things in. It's going to put some text here at the bottom and it's just going to have Type Text Here. This is the preview area. Also, you're going to have these layers here. So make sure you select layers and you're going to see the Project layer and then everything in Motion is done in groups. 

Basically what you're doing here is building a little animation. The animation is going to be very simple. It's just going to have some text. It's going to move onto the screen. It's going to fade away and there will be some things you can change about it. Grouping is important because you don't want to have to move and manipulate each project individually, but more likely in groups. This default group here has some text and it's got this turned off layer just called the title background. This helps because you're making a title and a lot of times you don't have black behind it, you've got things. So a gray background is useful, but you could just leave that off. It's just for your convenience. 

So now we've got this here. We can use this text or create our own. But let's use this text. Let's drag this up here and let's lock it using the little snaps here to the middle like that. Let's change some things about it. So, with it selected I can go to the Inspector here and I can see all the different properties, behaviors, filters, and text for this. Under Text let's go and change the font. I'm just going to change it to something else, like this. Let's make it centered. Let's make it bigger. Save all the different font properties here like this. With it bigger, like that, we probably also want to have it centered inside of the textbox. So we've got it now like that and that's a good start. But let's make it our own here by adding some shape objects to it. You can click down here and you've got your rectangle, circle, and line shapes. Let's go ahead and create a circle shape, like this. I'll just draw the circle shape like that. So we'll do that and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to select it here. You can see there's Group, there's Circle, and you can see the circle, and the type, they're part of the of the same group. I want to move the circle underneath the type and I want to change its color.

So, under the Inspector here, under Shape we've got the fill color. So I'm going to change it to something else.So let's just make it a little like a really dark blue here. Now we can position this to be right in the middle, like that. So we've got an oval and we've got some text on top of it. These two element here. 

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Now, what we want to do is we want to have some sort of build-in. We don't want them to just appear. We want it to, say, come down from the top. So since we want to move both the text and the circle at the same time we're going to go to Group here. So anything we do with the Groups is going to move or manipulate both the text and the circle. We're going to animate it. We've got the Timeline here at the bottom. We haven't done much with it yet but you can see here it starts at frame 1 and goes all the way over here to the right. We can go and, say, let's have a Key Frame and have that Key Frame be somewhere like maybe Frame 120. This is 60 frames a second so that's two seconds in. What we're going to do here with that Group selected is we're going to go to Properties and look at Position. You want to keep it the same. We want to be at zero zero right there in the middle. So, we're going to add a Key Frame. You click this little diamond shape there. That create a Key Frame. We could actually see it here. If you don't see it here in the Timeline you've got this little control here where you turn it on. 

Then we're going to go and slide all the way back to the beginning and we're going to set another Key Frame for the position there. Now the two Key Frames have the same position so nothing changes. But while we are here on the first frame we're going to actually move this. Move it all the way up and put it above the frame there. You can see here that with the position changed we can see we've got X, Y, and Z Key Frames. Now as we slide between these two we can see the animation. Then it hits this Key Frame and there's nothing else going on. We're going to go all the way to the end here. We're going to go right to 480. So, about 2 seconds before the end of this. We're going to do it again but not Position. 

This time we're going to use Opacity. We're going to set a Key Frame for Opacity here. Then we're going to go all the way to the end here and set another Key Frame for Opacity. But this time we're going to change the Opacity down to nothing. So it's going to change between those two Key Frames from 100 to 0. So, it moves in from the top and then fades away. Now we've got all that. Let's go ahead now and Save. I'm going to do Command S to save and we're going to create a name for this. We'll just say Test Title. We're going to give it a Category. I previously used a category called Test Titles but you can create a new category.

So create it for like whatever type of project you're working on. However you want to group them together. I'm going to say Save Preview Movie so we can see a preview if we ever need to, like reminder ourselves six months from now how this should look and I'm going to publish. 

Now I'm going to switch back to Final Cut Pro. I'm going to look under Titles now and notice I've got Test Titles here. There is the test title I added. I'm going to drag it here to the Timeline. Now we can see it move and fade out. Now, with this title here on the screen like that we can select the text and we can change it to something else. Like that and now we've got kind of a customized title there. So let's take it a few steps further here. The first thing I want to do is I want to make sure I can change the timing for this. Right now it is ten seconds. 60 frames at 60 frames per second. So if I were to stretch this, notice here after two seconds we are done. It is slid in. When we get to 8 seconds it will fade out. If I were to stretch this over a much longer time the drop down is actually going to go way more than two seconds. It is going to take almost 5 seconds for that to happen. The entire thing is stretched out. 

That's not what I want. So, let's go ahead and delete this from the Timeline there and switch back to Motion. What I'm going to do is I'm going to tell it when you stretch this title to stretch the middle part, not the beginning and the end. The way I'm going to do that is I'm going to go in the Timeline here to way past the end of opening animation. Now I'm going to add a Marker. I'm going to Control Click, right click, or two-finger click to add a Marker. Then once I added that marker I'm going to again right click or two-finger click on it and I am going to Edit the Marker. I'm going to set it to the Build-in Mandatory Type Marker. In other words everything up to here keep at the real timing. Then I'm going to go further along, just to like here. It doesn't really matter because the idea is this is going to be another Marker and I'm going to again Edit this and I'm going to say, this is the Mandatory Build-out. So everything before the Mandatory Build-in keep that the same timing. Everything after keep that the same timing. Everything between the two of them, that you can stretch. Since nothing is actually changing it will workout really well. I'm going to do Command S to Save and I'm going to switch over to Final Cut Pro and I'm going to drag this in and you can see it does the same thing as before. But now if I were to stretch this way out you can see it still going to drop-in in two seconds. Like that. I stretched this a little bit too far here. Let's stretch it back. It is going to build-out over the last two seconds. The fade is going to happen over the last two seconds. All the stretching is going to be done in the middle where nothing is really changing. So that advances things even further. 

So that advances things even further. Let's go and once again make a change here. I want to be able to use this very easily throughout everything I do. So, I want to have certain parameters I can change without having to dig into all the settings. After all, the idea is to create a title that I can reuse over and over again. Not just once. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to publish some parameters. Let's start with this circle here. I want it to be whatever color I want. With the circle selected I could go to Shape here in the Inspector and you can see the Fill Color. This is where I can change the color. I could also click on this little button here on the right side of Fill Color and I can Publish this as a parameter. We could do it for that. 

Let's go ahead now and go to the Project Level. For Project Level, under Project Inspector you can see Publish Parameters. There's Fill Color like that. So you know you've got your red, green, and blue. You've got your color selected there. I can actually go in here and I could change even what this is called. I can Save again. Let's go back into Final Cut Pro and add this again in here. When I add this in, if I select it, notice here I can select the title and it says Publish Parameters. There it is. I can go now and I can change that one parameter. 

Let's take that knowledge and actually add in a little bit more animation to the title and do a Publish Parameter for that as well. I am going to go in here and for the text I'm actually going to add a Behavior. There is no Behavior for it right now. But if I were to go in here to the Library, go to Behaviors, and then say let's just go to Text Animation, I can see there's a variety of Text Animations. One of them is Type On to actually type the text so if just doesn't appear. I'm going to drag that to that layer. So now you could see as this drops down it's actually typing on the text over the course of the entire existence of the text. So the first thing is that is not exactly what I want. I want Type On. Just Type On here in the Timeline to first of all finish up somewhere about here. I want it to start somewhere around here. So everything drops down and then it Types On. 

Now if we manipulate the Timeline we see that it drops down like this and then Types In. Unfortunately before the animation you see it all there. That's okay. I can just say Don't Show the Type On until we get to this point. So we can, you know, match the two of these up here. So now it drops down. There's no type. Then there's Type, but it's  typing it on to here where it's finished.  So, let's go here to selecting this Type On layer. That will, under Inspector, show us Type On here. We can decide whether or not we want to Fade In. Fade In would actually fade each letter in rather than having it just appear. We can make that a Parameter as well that's Published. We can also make the checkbox here for whether or not Type On even does its thing. We can take that and we can Publish that. Now if we go to Project we can go, under Project we see Publish Parameters. We could see it says Fade In. We can see, you know, type Fade type Fade In and we could say typing on just to make it clear, like that. We can even reorder these. So it's On and then it's Fade In like that. Now we'll Save. 

Then we can add other Parameters as well. You can change things like the text, font, and all of that. But we can certainly go to text here. Go to the Text Properties and where it says font we can go in here and say Publish that as well. So now we have the Publish Parameters of the things we're going to change the mot often. Make sure it's Saved. Go back to Final Cut Pro. Let's add it again, like that. We could see here it drops down, it types on if we select it. We look to the Publish Parameters. We've got the font. We could say, you know, don't do the typing, just have that go on or do the typing but don't have it fade. So each one just appears as like a typewriter is typing it. We could change the background color there. We could have added more parameters for the text and such. So there's a lot you can do with this. It'll stretch nicely now for our use. 

This just scratches the surface really of what you can do because you can apply any kind of, you know, effect and particle emitters and all sorts of different things.  Add shapes, add more text, do all sorts of things with movement and Key Frames and Opacity. All of that to create a title as complex or as simple as you want. Create a set of those that are yours and different from everybody else's and look good on the type of projects you want to do. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.