See Intro to captions in Final Cut Pro for background information on captions.
Ready…
- Create or import captions for your project. See Create captions in Final Cut Pro and Import captions into Final Cut Pro. (The caption text can be in any language.)
- Edit the captions as necessary. The text content of each caption will become the text of each title, so a caption with two lines will become a title with those two lines. See Edit caption text in Final Cut Pro. Captions can be joined and split in Final Cut Pro: see Adjust and arrange captions in Final Cut Pro.
Set…
- Add one or more titles to your project to use as title templates.
- Select each title template and set the font, style, size, color, animation, etc. you want to use.
See Adjust titles in Final Cut Pro and Text inspector controls in Final Cut Pro. - Drag the project (or compound clip) from the Final Cut Pro event and drop it onto the captionAnimator window.
- The list shows the title templates found in your project. Use the checkmarks to select one or more title templates.
- If you have multiple title templates in your project, the new titles created will rotate between the title templates.
- Tip: For more control you can tag title templates with custom Roles to distinguish them from the regular titles in your project. See Create custom roles in Final Cut Pro. Then captionAnimator will offer you a list of these title templates and will ignore the other titles in your project.
Go!
- Optionally use the Characters per title entry box or slider to split the caption into multiple shorter titles. (This feature is only available in the workflow extension.)
- If you have captions in multiple languages, use the Language popup menu to choose which caption language is used to make the titles.
- To have the new titles connected to primary storyline clips, choose Connected titles; or choose Secondary storyline to have the new titles added into a secondary storyline.
- Click the Go! button.
- Choose which library you want to add the new project to:
- The new project has the same name as the original “- with Titles” added to the end.
- Each caption will become a separate title using the selected title template(s), and tagged with the Captions subrole.
- Note: The easiest way to hide captions during play-out is to use the Timeline Index. See Show or hide captions in Final Cut Pro.
IMPORTANT: Some effects may not be present in the new project returned to Final Cut Pro from captionAnimator because they are not in the XML sent to captionAnimator. For example, Magnetic Mask information is left out of the XML.
As a work-around, you can copy titles into the original project. The easiest way to do this is to have the titles in a secondary storyline.
- Open the project created by captionAnimator.
- Select the secondary storyline containing the titles and choose Edit > Copy.
- Open the original project, move the playhead to the start of the project, and choose Edit > Paste. The secondary storyline should be connected to the start of the first primary storyline clip (or you can move the secondary storyline into its correct position).
You can break apart a Secondary Storyline to individual clips by selecting the Secondary Storyline and, from the Clip menu, selecting Break Apart Clip Item, or press Shift+Command+G.