Using white text in FCP

[Walter Biscardi]

choice of font and background are wholly up to you depending on what you’re doing. There is no “correct font / background” for broadcast, it’s whatever you and the producer determine are right for your project.

To keep it broadcast safe, keep your whites to 85 – 90% and use your scopes to determine whether or not your whites are too hot.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Director, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

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Great Titles with the DV Codec
By Philip Hodgetts

https://www.creativecow.net/articles/hodgetts_philip/titles/index.html

Simple but valuable info.

[Jeff Carpenter]

You can certainly make any font work, but serif fonts can be more difficult to get perfect sometimes.

Serifs:
https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/serif.html

Because video is make up of horizontal lines, the tiny little bits on serif fonts can get lost or distorted between lines if your text is too small. It can certainly be done, it’s just something else to watch out for as you adjust your text.

[Andrew Wise]

I don’t think you will have a need for a drop shadow on a black background.
For other color backgrounds try:

OFFSET: 3
ANGLE: 135
COLOR: BLACK
SOFTNESS: 10
OPACITY: 75

There are no hard & fast rules (that I know of). Just play around with the settings and use what you think looks good.
Andrew

[Arnie Schlissel]

[walter biscardi] “There is no “correct font / background” for broadcast”

True, but there are definitely wrong fonts! In general, you should stay away from any thin fonts. Script, serif & italic fonts should be used with caution.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[John Calhoun]

I generally don’t use the text tool or boris in FCP; I usually use Photoshop. I can be a lot more creative in PS and is a necessary tool when dealing with graphics from clients. If you don’t know PS, you need to add it to your list of applications.

(if you don’t know PS don’t sweat these steps. Just print them out for later) For broadcast safe in PS, add an adjustment layer to your graphic and clamp your “output levels” to 16 and 235 (not 0 and 255). This will look a little strange in PS, but will look ok on your NTSC monitor and be broadcast legal.

It’s also better to add drop shadows in PS to save on rendering time on slower machines.

To merge your graphic elements onto a single layer *including drop shadows and glows*, create a new layer and hit Command, Option, Shift “E”. This will merge all of your layers in a single pass. You can then save and import into FCP as a PSD or save the single layer as a targa (.tga) file, but you then need to make an alpha channel. To do this you Command click the layer to create a selection, then go to Channels and hit the ‘Save Selecetion as a channel’ button at the bottom. This creates your alpha channel. Then just ‘Save As’ a Targa file at 32 bits.

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