Final Cut Pro Quick Tip
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To save some space on the timeline and make this a text treatment you can use again and again, nest the two tracks into their own sequence. In the future, if you want to use this text trick in other portions of your video, you can simply duplicate the sequence in your browser window, open the duplicate, change the name and add the sequence to a new position in the timeline.
Want to take it a step further? Let’s say you don’t want the moving video to go all the way across the bar, but rather you want to have it fade out to a solid color. That is also very easy to do.[an error occurred while processing this directive]Double click the nested sequence to open it in a new timeline window. Make sure Video Track 1 (the moving element) is selected as the target track, then add two new tracks below Video Track 1. Sequence>Insert Tracks>Insert 2 Video Tracks>Before Base Track>OK. This prevents you from having to manually move the original layers up.
From the Viewer window, render a custom gradient. Choose the shape, direction, and width, but leave the start and end colors to the default white and black. Set the duration and add it the lower third sequence on Video Track 2.
Now create a color matte (Matte>Color). Go to the Controls panel and choose a nice color that will blend your moving video element into a solid color. For this example I am using a dark blue. Set the duration to the length of the rest of the sequence and add it to Video Track 1. For this trick to work, the color matte layer must be cropped and positioned exactly like your moving video layer. Control+Click (or right click if you have a Macally mouse), and select Copy. Control+Click the solid color layer on Video Track 1 and select Paste Attributes. We don’t want to copy the Content, but we do want to copy the Basic Motion and the Crop settings. Because I did some scaling to the original layer, I select that as well. Hit OK, and the attributes from the video layer will now be applied to the color matte layer. That in itself is a very cool trick!
Finally, click on Video Track 3 (the moving video layer), Control+Click, and change the Composite Mode to Travel Matte - Luma. This will use the luminance values from the layer below to set transparency for the moving video layer. Because we have the solid color layer waiting below, we end up with a nice transition from video to solid color for our bar element.
There you have it, a simple, yet dramatic way to add life to text elements in Apple’s Final Cut Pro.
Stephen Schleicher is the producer for www.digitalanimators.com and www.digitalwebcast.com. When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products he can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at stephens@digitalmedianet.com
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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