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Using Motion Templates in Apple Final Cut Pro, Part 1

Jan 19, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

After shooting, color-correcting, editing, sweetening the audio, and performing other similarly time-consuming project tasks, it's intimidating to think about adding customized animated text or other effects to your projects. Fortunately for all of us, Apple makes these types of garnish fast and easy by enabling Final Cut Pro to deploy and customize Motion templates. You don't even have to know how to use Motion to do so.

In this edition of Final Cut Pro Insider, I'll detail that workflow. Next edition, I'll take you inside of Motion to create a custom title therein, and show how to import that title—without rendering—into Final Cut Pro. It's one of the nicest and most useful bits of integration in the Final Cut Pro suite.

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About Motion templates

Let's spend a few moments discussing Motion's templates. Apple ships a bunch of them—some SD, some HD, and some in families with templates for opening titles, transitions, lower thirds, and the like. This makes it very easy to put together a polished, cohesive look. Not surprisingly, if you Google "Apple Motion templates" you'll find a host of third-party sources for additional Motion templates for $10 to $50. Before you go off and start creating your own templates, you might search and see if you can find one that you can adapt for your own use.

You can access Motion templates from within Motion, of course, or from within Final Cut Pro. If you access a Motion template from Final Cut Pro, you can customize the text, font size, and tracking, and add your own content to the drop zones as I'll detail below, but you can't change characteristics such as font or font color. For that, you'll have to use Motion itself, and I'll detail how to do so at the end of this tutorial. Next time, we'll make those changes and create a custom opening sequence using Live Fonts.

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