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subtitles – lower third, solid background for one line of subtitles only…
Dear gurus,
I am adding subtitles to a fcp project and seem to be missing something:
I chose lower third and solid background, and everything is fine until I reach a point when there is only 1 line of subtitle text (as opposed to the default 2 lines).
Here I leave text 1 blank, add my 1 line of subtitles to text 2, which is all fine, but then when I chose solid background, the solid background ‘box’ covers 2 lines of subtitles although there is just one….this does not look good.
I have searched but can’t seem to find a way of making the solid background only appear behind the one line of subtitles….I must also say that I assume this is a fairly simply task of clicking a box somewhere..but I can’t find a box or anything else that helps.Sorry if this question is so simple that it is silly!
Thanks in advance for your help,
Julienne.Ps…if anyone could direct me to a good and thorough step-by-step instructions/tutorial on masking in motion I’d also appreciate it!
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6 Replies
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Crop the title from the bottom using the first line, or from the time if you use the second line of text.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things. I ski. My Blog: https://blogs.creativecow.net/Jerry-Hofmann
Current DVD:
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Hi Jerry, thank you for the quick reply and simple solution.
I should really have figured that out myself! – I was just sure there was a tickable box of some sorts somewhere!
All’s good that ends good 🙂 I ski too.
Julienne. -
To make life simple you can copy the text gen with the crop and paste attributes>crop to all the one line subtitles so they match
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Thank you Michael 🙂
to clarify my ‘ps’ question:
I have to mask a microphone cable.
I send the clip to motion, create a clone, add a beziere mask and outline the area (with the red dots). I then add the gaussian blur at a setting of about 5 and all is fine, but the microphone cable moves slightly over the duration of the clip and my microphone cable slowly reappears.
How can I track the microphone cable in motion so that my ‘hand drawn’ mask follows the cable?I might repost this issue seperately as it doesn’t really belong under the title ‘subtitles’, but if you feel like offering any advice on this post it will be very appreciated as always!
Thanks again!
julienne. -
You should be able to keyframe the mask and move it to compensate for the mic movement. I do simple masks like this using the CHV clone tool plugin in FCP. It is a commercial plugin and part of a bigger repair suite that is often useful.
With really tricky masking you could rotoscope frame by frame
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Hi Michael and creative cow gurus and thanks for the advice again.
I have sort of followed your advice, although I found the keyframing confusing and ended up using the motion tracking behaviour ‘match move’ instead.
On retrospect this was perhaps not the best choice – although the microphone cables are not visible, I feel the gaussiun blurred mask area sticks out due to it moving, although this is not very important as the audience will be looking at the characters and reading the subtitles as opposed to looking for any faults on the ground.
However, the blurred area is not constant, it is an area of the screen and as the shot moves the area it is blurring changes in colour. At times this really sticks out so much that it would actually be better to leave the microphone cable visible as it is far less eye-catching than an area of the ground suddenly changing colour.
Would this issue be avoided if I were to keyframe the mask instead of using ‘match move’?
If the answer is yes, could you please direct me to a good tutorial on the matter of keyframing – I have watched many, but still find the issue of keyframing difficult…I really hope you can give me some further advice!
Much appreciated 🙂julienne.
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