Titling Plugins?

[Walter Biscardi]

[dave rawson] “I’m an AVID editor transitioning to FCP. So far I’m really dissapointed with FCP’s titling. Besides going into Live Type or Motion, are there any cool titling plugins out there that people are using?”

We use the Boris 3D titling tool within FCP and Photoshop if needed. But Boris works quite well and is a vector based titling tool so it’s extremely clean. The trick is to make sure you do all title placement in the Boris Control tool, not using the Motion Tab in the Viewer.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Andy Mees]

A basic titling plugin that allows multiple fonts, styles and colors with live compositing over a preview window should be, in the grand scheme of things, a simple plugin to build using the FxPlug SDK …. I’ll have a bash at it but I fear my programming skills are way below the “grand scheme of things” level

Perhaps Martin Baker / Digital Heaven would be interested in doing this. I’ve a feeling folks would gladly pay for it.

[Peter Wiggins]

[Andy Mees] “I’ve a feeling folks would gladly pay for it.
“

You think so? This plugin is pretty easy to write, however with motion being so good at graphics I can’t see a market for it.

Peter

[Andy Mees]

well they’re not going to pay through the nose Peter, but think how often we hear this complaint … it seems plain that folks are generally averse to bouncing their clips out to Motion or Livetype in order to do basic titling tasks, and that they’re unhappy with the basic titling plugins that are built-in.

as you say, it ought to be pretty straight forward to write … so make it a freebie

[Peter Wiggins]

I think I’ve done my quota of Freebies for a while with CoverFlux

Peter

[Christopher Wright]

And thank you for that one sir! It has come in very handy on quite a few recent projects!

Dual 2.5 G5, IO, Kona LH, IO, Medea Raid, UL4D, NVidia 6800, 4Gig RAM
Octocore 8 GB Ram, Radeon card, MBP, MXO
Windows XP Adobe Studio CS3, Vegas 8.0, Lightwave 9.2, Sound Forge 9, Acid Pro 6, Continuum 5, Boris Red 4, Combustion 2008, Sapphire Effects

[Chris Poisson]

I would stress Walter’s advice about using the Boris controls, BUT, DON’T use Boris animation controls, especially animating tracking, they suck. Boris drop shadows suck even worse.

And to Mr. Bogie, had to laugh about the AE/Motion comment, because I love AE I’ve never been able to get my arms around Motion.

Have a wonderful day.

[Peter Wiggins]

No problem! glad it is in use 🙂

Peter

[Micajah Smithson]

Peter
I’d be willing to pay for it, and I think there are many FCP editors who would also. If you account for your time spent switching in and out of Boris, Iit would pay for itself in one job.
I know you would like to point people to Motion as a resource, and I do enjoy using the IR plug-ins within it -keep up the great work.
But a straightforward title plug-in with kerning tools would be a killer.
Micajah Smithson
West Coast Projections
San Diego, CA

[Skip Hall]

Hi Walter,

I apologize again if I’m off-topic, but I’m under a bit of a deadline and have already read two entire threads looking for an answer to this.

I’m making a credit roll in FCP using Boris Title Crawl, which I’ve done a number of times before… but never encountered this particular problem, and nothing I’ve tried seems to fix it.

The roll is for a large cast list (dance recital), so I need to have headings for several groups of performers. I’ve opened a .rtf file in TextEdit, changed it to plain text, and restructured the list so the names are stacked, and not in “paragraph” form. Then I copy the list from TextEdit, and paste it into Boris’ composition window, replacing a piece of properly formatted text. Then, I adjust font sizes, colors, drop shadows, leading, etc., until the roll looks like I want it to look.

Several of my group headings, however, are impossible to underline. No matter what I do, the underline extends several spaces beyond the intended characters.

I know the simple fix is to just not underline the text… but that would be too easy… right? AND I’d need to go back over about a dozen similar credit rolls to reformat those, or risk being exposed as an inconsistent graphics editor.

Any thoughts on this? Thanks for your time and any help you can offer.

Skip Hall
Homeworks Video Productions
Suffolk, Va