Final Cut Pro HD | H•O•T Hands-On Training [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

1.

Open Chapter 09 Lesson 1. You'll find it inside the Lessons folder on the FCP HDHOT DVD included with this book. Double-click Seq Ready to Title to load it into the Timeline.

Notice at the beginning of the sequence there's a 5-second gap. This gap is where you will put the opening title for this scene.

2.

Start by placing the playhead anywhere in this gap. This tells Final Cut where to locate the text clip you are about to create.

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3.

Click the small pop-up menu in the lower-right corner of the Viewer that has the letter "A" inside it. This is the Generator menu. Scroll down and choose Text > Text.

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4.

Before you enter any text, drag the new text clip from the Viewer to the Canvas and drop it on the Superimpose overlay.

The text clip is immediately placed above the clip in which the Timeline playhead is located and trimmed so that they are both the exact same length. Notice, unlike with most other edits, you did not need to set an In or Out, or even move the playhead to the start of the clip. Final Cut calculates all that for you automatically. For those who demand exact technical precision, Final Cut looks for the lowest numbered track that contains a lit Auto Select button, then places the text clip in the next higher track, trimmed to match the lower clip for time and location. In most cases, this means your text super (TV jargon for a title "superimposed" over video) will appear on V2, timed to match the clip on V1.

5.

Next, double-click the text clip to load it back into the Viewer.

The advantage to using this three-step process is that you not only automate the process of creating a text clip, placing it on the Timeline and trimming it to the correct length, but you also are able to see in the Canvas all the changes you make to the text clip because the playhead is already located in the middle of the new text clip.

I use this technique, or a modification you'll learn in the next exercise, virtually every time I work with text.

6.

With the clip loaded into the Viewer, notice that a new tab (Controls) has appeared at the top. Click this tab to make adjustments to the contents and formatting of the text in this clip.

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The top half of the Controls window is where you enter text. The bottom half is where you control how it looks and where it is placed on the screen.

7.

Start by entering the title of this sequence: Hurricane Irene 1999. At the end of each word, press Return to insert a line break. This forces each word to appear on its own line of the screen.

Next, from the Font pop-up, choose the typeface Impact. (If Impact doesn't exist on your system, use Arial Black. However, by using Arial Black, you may need to adjust some of the formatting from that shown in these illustrations.)

Another helpful technique to working with text and effects is to switch the Canvas from displaying only the video image to displaying the video image and wireframe. The wireframe allows you to make changes to the size and location of a video clip. Although you will work with this feature a lot in the next chapter, for now, it will be helpful in placing text on the screen.

8.

Go to the Canvas window. From the third small pop-up menu at the top, choose Image+Wireframe.

9.

Next, change the font Size to 70 and adjust the Tracking to 1.5 and the Leading to 5.

Tracking is the spacing between characters. (Smaller numbers mean closer text.) Leading is the spacing between lines of text. (Smaller numbers mean closer lines.)

Finally, you need to move the text so it centers properly on the screen. The best way to do this is to use the Origin control.

10.

Click once in the circle containing the crosshair to select it. Then, go to the Canvas and click where you want the center of the graphic to be located. Continue holding the mouse and drag to move the text around the Canvas. When you are happy with the location, let go of the mouse to position the text.

This technique of using the crosshair to set the position of text, graphics, or an effect is used a lot throughout the rest of this book.

To precisely set the position of text or graphics, you can enter the coordinates directly into the Origin. The first number sets the horizontal position, the second sets the vertical.

11.

In this case, enter 0 in the first box to center the text horizontally and 31 to move the text up a little bit.

12.

Finally, because this is the beginning of the sequence, you need to put a quick fade up on the beginning of the title and dissolve from the title to the first video. To do this, select the In of the title and apply a 20-frame Cross Dissolve.

13.

One way to set the duration of a transition is to select it, and press Ctrl+D. Then enter the new duration into the Duration dialog.)

14.

The Out of the text clip isn't long enough to support a dissolve. You need to extend it. A quick way to do this is to select the Out of the text clip and press the + key on either the keypad or keyboard. Then type 10 and press the Return key. This uses timecode to extend the Out 10 frames.

15.

Finally, apply a 10-frame Cross Dissolve to the Out, and you are done. Save your work and quit Final Cut if you want to take a break. However, there is still more you can do with text, as you'll learn in the next exercise.

NOTE | Action Safe, Title Safe, and Full Screen

As you will soon discover, this chapter is filled with " Wouldn't it be nice if…?"

Well, in this case, wouldn't it be nice if all the elements in your program could go to the edge of the screen? Well, they can't, mainly because of the way television sets are manufactured and the way they age.

TVs, as you can imagine, are produced in huge quantities under a variety of conditions and quality control. Experience has taught that, essentially, every set loses some of the picture at the edge of the frame. This is because consumers want to see as big a picture as possible, and don't like seeing black around the edges. So the manufacturers zoom the picture slightly so it fills the screen. However, because this zooming in is not absolutely precise, some edges of the picture are often lost.

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To compensate for this, Final Cut, and other professional video tools, draws a rectangle around the picture 5 percent in from each edge. This rectangle is called Action Safe. It is the area within which you need to keep all essential action; otherwise, some percentage of the TV sets out there will not be able to see it.

To compound matters, as TV sets age, their picture tubes zoom in, losing even more of the picture around the edge.

To compensate for this additional picture loss, Final Cut has a second rectangle, drawn 10 percent in from each edge, called Title Safe. When you are creating titles, company logos, sponsor phone numbers, or any other essential text information, be sure it entirely fits inside the Title Safe rectangle.

You toggle the display of these rectangles inside Final Cut by choosing Show Title Safe from the View menu or from the View pop-up menu in the Canvas (or Viewer).

NOTE | Tips on Designing Video Graphics

There isn't room, in a single book, to cover designing television graphics in the detail it deserves. So, rather than explain each of these in detail, here are some key guidelines you can use to improve the look of your graphics:

All video, in all formats, worldwide, everywhere, all the time, period, is 72 dots per inch. Video is low-resolution. Printing is high-resolution. You cannot get the same look in video that you can create on your computer screen or a printer. Just accept this as a fact and move on.



Avoid text with very thin lines in the font, like the bar in this "e." The bar disappears on video and makes the character impossible to read. This font does not work well at small point sizes. If you must use a font like this, make sure to set the text large on the screen.



Avoid text that's so ornately scripted you have to look at the letter several times to figure out what it is. Your viewers don't have that much time. Even if you make the font really large, you won't see the smooth curves you expect, but lots of tiny little stair steps along the edges of each curved line.



Avoid fonts with little "feet" or "bars" at the end of the characters, called serifs. These serifs often flicker and make the text hard to read.

Avoid using any text in point sizes smaller than 24 point.

Avoid using highly compressed or condensed fonts; they are too hard to read.

Avoid using lines thinner than 4 pixels; they will flicker.

Avoid using highly saturated colors. In Exercise 4, you'll learn how to use scopes to make sure your colors are safe.

Avoid using pure white (more on this later). Again, in Exercise 4, you'll learn how to use the Waveform monitor to maintain good video levels.

Basically, if someone who hasn't seen your design can't read it in less than 4 seconds, your design is too fancy. Figure out a way to make it simpler. Remember, video is low-resolution.