modify all text titles at once?

[Nicole Haddock]

Are you saying you have the same title and would like it to reflect in the timeline OR that you want to add, say, a drop shadow or some other effect to all your titles, which are all different?

If A- no, not unless you started the title in Photoshop, but you can copy/paste to your heart’s content.
If B- change one title, right click copy, go to the next title then right click Paste Attributes and choose the attributes you want. If all your titles are on one track, you can lasso and apply the attributes all at once.

[Ethan Chan]

Sorry for not making it clear.

I have subtitles on one track which are simple text. Suppose I want to increase the font size or change font type – how can I change them all at once?

“If all your titles are on one track, you can lasso and apply the attributes all at once.” – so does this work for my question?

If so, how can I do lasso on FCP? Thanks for the help.

[Nicole Haddock]

The easy answer is the last part- to lasso a group of clips, hit A for the select tool, go to your timeline and just draw around the area you want. Alternatively, if everything’s in the same track, you could just hit the T for the select track tool and grab everything that way.

Now for the not so easy. I’m assuming you did your subtitles in FCP. If you want to add a drop shadow, easy to do. But you want to change the font and size… well, I just tried and there’s no way to apply it to all.

Since hindsight is 20×20, if you had done the titles in Photoshop and imported them as TIFFs, you could have built an action, applied that to all your files or layers, and the changes would reflect in FCP. Still time intensive, but there’s no ideal fix all solution that I’m aware of at least. Maybe someone else will know?

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Ethan Chan] “Suppose I want to increase the font size or change font type – how can I change them all at once? “

Take a look at Traffic from xmedit.com. It’s made just for this kind of thing.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Steven Gonzales]

You can change an attribute like font size with XML.

Export the XML, then find the attribute you want to change, then use global search and replace in a text editor to modify that specific tag, save the xml, and re-import.

It takes a bit of looking to find the specific attribute tag, but you can search on the subtitle text, and look at the tags nearby.

[John Young]

Thank you so much!
I had been learning FX scripting (not a bad pursuit!) to attempt this task. I was unable to find a way to modify all 400 + texts to change the font size & position with scripting
XML made it very easy.
I exported as a XML file.
I did a global search and replace in that XML file for the first parameter, and replaced it with the second.

find <value>28</value
replace with <value>43</value>

find <vert>0.375</vert>
replace with <vert>0</vert>

I found the position was in a different number format than I had expected. I made the desired changes to the first text, than searched in the XML for the parameters associated with that text.

I saved the XML file, and re-opened it as a new project.
I still had lots of cleaning up to do, but it will take MUCH less time than opening 400+ text slugs and changing them.

I am captioning IMAX films for the Fleet Science Center in San Diego.
They play back as a quicktime file with a protools session.

[Alex Elkins]

I know this is a relatively old thread but hopefully someone can answer this quick question;

Is it possible to apply universal changes to text done in Boris 3D? I have a bunch of subtitles (fortunately not too many!) that I did in Boris because of its ability to wrap the text to a certain width, but I can’t find anywhere in the XML the code to change any of the parameters. I just want to change the font and style (bold).

Thanks,
Alex Elkins

[Newton Niu]

hi~~i have the same problem… when you mention re-open it in a new project… what does that mean?
i export xml, find all the font and changed them, saved it. then?
i import the new xml in the original project, but nothing happens. the font remains the same… please, help!

[Eric Bowman]

I’m trying this technique and I’ve had success for the most part, but here’s my issue. I have subtitles with line breaks. Every time I export, change some things in the XML, and import it back into Final Cut I lose all the line breaks.

Any suggestions as to what I’m doing wrong?

Eric Bowman

[John Young]

make sure you save the XML file as an RTF, not a TXT. That should do it.