Add karoke-style titles to your songs
Karaoke Graphics: from Freebie to Finished Product
The following is a guest post by Peter Wiggins of idustrial revolution.
Karaoke Graphics started off as a freebie and grew into a fully-fledged set of plugins here on FxFactory!
I had read a series of forum posts moaning that adding karaoke graphics in Final Cut Pro took forever. The traditional way is to enter the text in one FCP title, then duplicate that and place the copy above. Then change the color of the copied text and mask out the words using a crop to match the pace of singing.
A real pain in the rear basically and forget changes to the lyrics or text formatting as you have to alter both lines exactly to match up.
The old method means changing the text exactly on both lines
No problem, idustrial revolution to the rescue with another world-famous freebie. I had one working nicely within half an hour. Side note here: Building graphics that stick together when one is updated or moved is actually harder than I imagined. The XY controls in the Inspector are easy to link, but what happens when somebody drags the text in the viewer?
But then I had a thought: There must be a better way of doing this in Motion using behaviors. I was right and after a couple of abortive attempts and a lot of tinkering (sometimes you have to make a plugin wrong for you to work out how to make it correctly) I had a plugin that would animate by changing color letter by letter.
Full customizable controls in the Final Cut Pro inspector
This means that the syncing of the lyrics to the singing is independent of the formatting. So you can change the font, the size, the justification, the position, etc. without losing the timing. You can also change the display method easily to animate by word. Handy if you have a lot of lyrics to go through in a short time period.
One unexpected bonus, because the plugin is handling the display change of characters, it also works with 3D text which gives the graphics a professional look and certainly ‘ups’ the readability.
You can see by this time the plugin had outgrown its simpleness and had also outgrown its freebie origins. Add in a few different title pages and prompts and we end up with a complete karaoke video graphics toolkit. We have also include the original ‘wipe’ graphic should you wish to use that method of revealing the lyrics.
And thus XEffects Karaoke Graphics plugins for Final Cut Pro were born!
You can download and install the trial version of idustrial revolution’s Karaoke Graphics through FxFactory, currently on sale at $29.
About Peter Wiggins
Peter is a broadcast Final Cut Pro editor working in England concentrating on high pressure, quick turnaround sports and events. He has pioneered many ‘edit whilst ingesting’ workflows that have now become industry standard worldwide. Since 2006 he has written and published Final Cut Pro plugins and templates under the idustrial revolution brand.
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