How to Use Static Text in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I am going to teach you about using static text. So let's learn how to put some static text into our project here. Again just open up text by clicking little a and going down to text and then text and then you have a nice little text that comes up. Let's go to our controls and just kind of type something like C.J. South, just put my name in there. Now just go ahead and click and drag that and drop it into your time line. Let me just drop it on the bottom layer. All right so if you notice now I have my text. You can see in the canvas window that hey, my text is there in the canvas. Now you are going to want to double click that text to bring it up in your viewer. Now when I am changing my controls in the viewer, I can now view it in the canvas. So if I change the name to expertvillage it instantly updates it in my canvas. Same with the font too, so I think I will just stick with this. Let's make this size a little bit bigger here. Okay. The style, let's change that to italic, alignment no, center fine, that's cool and we can just leave it wipe. You have to remember its static text. So it is just going to kind of sit there. A great application for this is to just have like a fade in at the beginning. But it is important that when you are working with text to bring it into time line before you start playing around and adjusting it because if you are trying to use it in the viewer, you have to keep clicking back and forth between the video and controls and video and controls. You know to get what you really want. So let's go ahead and change our tracking here. So you can see what tracking does it kind of separates or brings the word closer. All right now, if I am going to lay this on top of some footage I just go over to some footage in my time line here and just plop it right on top. Now everything around the text it's all blank space. It is transparency so when it is on top of an image, as you can see you can see the image behind it but the text is still in front of it. But if you were to put image on top of that, you can't actually see the text at all so always make sure that the text is on the top layer. You want it above all of your video footage. "