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Can you start a title crawl on screen?
A quick search on “title crawl” brings such an overwhelming number of hits I got, well, overwhelmed. If anyone can point me to the right thread I’d appreciate it.
I’ve got to build a lot of title crawls. I’d like to do it within fcp. I’d like for them to fade up when the first word hits about mid-screen and then fade out when the last word hits about mid-screen. As best I’ve been able to figure out, both fcp’s crawl and the Boris crawl plugin insist that the text starts all the way off-screen right and ends off-screen left. I may, of course, fade up and fade out when the text hits the appropriate point on the screen, but this calls for a lot more rendering and, more importantly, makes it really hard to figure out timing.
Say for example, I would like to scroll this sentence across the screen at a reasonable pace.
I think about 10 seconds is a good duration. I’d like it to start fading up when “Say” is just shy of mid-screen and fade out when “pace” is just past mid-screen. I’d like fade up to fade out to be 10 seconds.
Do I have to cut something in that is longer than 10 seconds and keep tweaking till the sweet spot hits 10:00? If not (and I hope someone writes back, “of course not; don’t be an idiot”) is there a way to do this without leaving the app?
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.1
Color 1.5.1
Quicktime 7.6.4
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
9 Replies
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I haven’t used crawl this way but it should work. Use the Motion tab to shift the crawl left to the center of the screen. You might have to keyframe the tail in the Motion tab for it to end the way you want.
John
MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.1, Motion 4.0.1, Comp 3.5.1, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.1)Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN
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If you’re asking what I think you’re asking.
I’ve done this before in FCP and for some reason, I can’t recreate what I thought I did a year ago.
However, if you use the Boris Crawl, you can set the “Position X/Y” to what you want it to be. You don’t have to keyframe it.
I would just go to the first frame of the generator and then set the Position X/Y.
Note, I think you have to render this anyway.
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You could use the clip opacity to et the result you’re after.
Click the overlays button (it gives you a black line for opacity at the top of your video tracks and the pink line for audio levels in your audio tracks), choose the pen tool and add keyframes on the line in the same way you would for audio adjustments. You could have opacity for the crawl at 0% to start and then the next keyframe combo could give you a fade to 100% at the point you want it, just do the reverse at the end.Hope this helps!
Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production -
“…if you use the Boris Crawl, you can set the ‘Position X/Y’ to what you want it to be. You don’t have to keyframe it.”
Yeah, I just tried that, Paul. The XY Position adjustment works as it does in other effects: it adjusts the location of what’s on the screen at the moment. It doesn’t adjust the crawl position. If I adjust at the beginning of the clip there’s no text yet on the screen and no amount of manipulating the XY Position will do anything about it.
I don’t think I’m being very clear, is it? Let me try again.
After I figure out how long a sentence takes to read — let’s say 10 seconds — I’d like to cut it onto the timeline for exactly that duration plus, let’s say, :15 on either end for fade up and fade out. I’d like it to fade up with the first word already nearly to the middle of the frame and out just after the last word passes mid frame; this is the core of my issue. Both FCP’s and Boris’s crawl seem to insist on the text starting off frame right and ending off frame left (or I can Reverse Direction, but they still start and end off frame).
I could, as another Paul suggests in another response to this thread — and as I suggested in my initial question — keyframe the opacity up and then down when the text hits the appropriate place on the screen, but then the visible duration will be less than 10 seconds. I’m sure, given enough time, I could come up with some algebraic formula to determine how long a sentence of X characters would need to be cut into a sequence so it would move at Y rate and fall in my desired sweet spot for Z duration.
But neither my math nor my patience are that good anymore.
Is FCP simply the wrong tool for this? I do know that ultimately I should step outside to Motion or After Effects, but for purposes of scratch edit, I’d really like to do it here.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.1
Color 1.5.1
Quicktime 7.6.4
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing, Paul. But it makes it really difficult to determine visible durations.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.1
Color 1.5.1
Quicktime 7.6.4
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
I think I understand. Try this.
– Create a Boris Crawl and put it in the timeline. Don’t worry about being exact right now as you just need to see if this works for you or not.
– Put the playhead at the beginning of the clip in the timeline. You won’t see any text on screen yet.
– Load that clip back into the viewer
– Double click the clip to bring it into the viewer.
– Click on the Controls tab
– Click on the Position X/Y crosshair. This will bring up a red crosshair in your Canvas.
– Click and drag your mouse in the Canvas to the left. At some point, you will see the text move onto the screen. When you let go, that will be your start point of your crawl.
Hope that helps.
Paul (one of them)
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Oops, bullet points 3 and 4 are the same. Just do one of them.
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Ah, you had me so excited there for a moment, Paul. The positioning seems to work for one end of the clip or the other, but, even with keyframing, I don’t seem to be able to make both ends cooperate.
I’ll fiddle some more with that suggestion.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.1
Color 1.5.1
Quicktime 7.6.4
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
Found it – the posts are correct here when they suggest using the Position X/Y cross hairs to adjust the starting position of the text crawl, however what toke me so long to work out how to do it is that I had already move that layer away from the center of frame and reduced the frame’s size – so when I tried to find the red X/Y cross hair it was outside my canvas window and so nowhere to be seen.
If you’re having trouble finding the cross hair – make sure the layer you’re working on is front and center.
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