Titles for interviews in documentaries

[sitttle]

I'm Making a documentary with Final Cut and I am wondering what kind of titles would look the best for interview with people, where I would put their name on the top and who they are on the bottom. I have the Boris FX plug in for titles and it allows you to do a lot of different kinds of 3d texts, but I was also wondering if and how you could get the stripe to appear behind the title like how they do in the news. Thanks.

 

[professor aire]

The last documentary I worked on I simply used Boris Graffiti and created a sharp looking text, w/out a background to it. I've not used Boris FX, but I know in Grafiti you can utilize image layers; you might be able to create an image gradient and import it in as a layer in FX and scale it to fit behind the text you're placing on screen. The other option is to create an image with the text already on it that you import in as a layer on your project timeline. The problem with this can be dealing with the alpha channel as well as getting the alignment of your titles the precise way you want them. Its been a long time since I worked with Final Cut, I edit on Avid systems generally, so I don't remember how hard it'd be to deal with that image as a second layer and whether it'd be worth it compared to placing a text plugin and arranging things that way.

Hope that helps,

Christopher McNeely

 

[turkeyjerky]

if you have access to Motion, make the lower thirds in that. you can then put the Motion project file directly into the timeline and FCP will render it for you.

in the new Final Cut Studio 2, you can save your Motion file as a template and then apply it directly to a FCP project

 

[sitttle]

Ya I was able to use the option in Final Cut to create a gradient, cropped it, saved it as a second layer, and then but text from Boris FX over it as a third layer. Thanks for your help.