A free Final Cut Pro for Mac title that moves lines of text across the screen in a random order.

Use this title to show large amounts of text very quickly.

Uploaded Friday 26 September 2013

This free plugin is for Final Cut Pro for Mac version 10.0.6 and newer.

You can choose any typeface, size, colour and linespacing for the text. The text can move from left to right or from right to left. You choose whether the lines move together, or whether their horizontal animation hardly overlaps.

Use this title a film needs to show a cloud of text: as many concepts as you want at the same time or to illustrate information overload. In this case two copies of the Alex4D Random Move Horizontal title were used to show many corporate video cliches in a very short time.

Controls

Direction choose whether the text moves from Left to Right, from Right to Left or whether it drifts from the centre of the screen in Setup mode.

To use the plugin, set the Direction to Setup mode. Then click the Text tab of the inspector to edit the text you want to move.

As well as entering your text, you can choose which typefaces, sizes, colours and line spacings the text has. You can also change the horizontal and vertical alignment of the text in the text box, and the size and position of the text box. In the case of the text box shown above, its vertical alnignment is to the top of the text box, this means when the lines animate, they’ll move across the top of the screen.

If you use the distort tool in setup mode to make the source text box non-rectangular, when the type animates, the text will seem to move in perspective.

As well as controlling the opacity of individual lines of text using the Face parameter in the Text tab of the inspector, you can use the Video tab to control the overall opacity and composition mode for the text. Once you are happy with your settings, go to the Title tab of the inspector and choose the Direction you want the text to move.

Animation Overlap ranges from 0 – animate each line one after the other to 100 – animate the lines almost all at the same time. The title takes the same time to complete the animation, so if each line animates on its own (when the Animation value is low), the text will move more quickly.

Random Seed is a long number which determines the randomly selected order that the lines of text animate. Click Generate to get a new randomly selected number – the animation order of the lines will change.

Distance controls how far the text moves across the screen. If some of your lines of text are very wide, you might want to increase this value, otherwise the longer lines of text might not fully move past the screen and off the edge before the end of the title in the timeline.

Download the free Alex4D Random Move Horizontal title plugin for Final Cut Pro for Mac

Click to download the installer:

This plugin is free to download and use, but if you’d like to show your appreciation for my work, please donate here:

Once installed, you’ll find it the Alex4D section of the Titles browser:

If when you try to run the installer you get a message stating it can’t be opened “because it was not downloaded from the Mac App Store” – your Mac OS X security preferences are protecting you. To change them, or work around this, visit this post at blog.alex4d.com.