How to create adjustable backgrounds for FCP Titles/Captions/Subtitles

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Clients are often looking for backgrounds to Titles/Captions/Subtitles these days and ideally the backgrounds are adjustable with 75% opacity. If you use Final Cut Pro, how do you create these?

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Simon Says easily generates captions and titles for FCP (and many other NLEs) in 100 languages in minutes.

Customers are asking us about how they can add backgrounds to these Simon Says FCP Titles so we put the question to Apple. Here's what they said:

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"Shipping Lower Thirds Basic title does this.  If they open in Motion, they can see how it is built. It uses a shape, align to behavior & link like this:"

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They then added:

"1. They would need a custom motion title (they could start with the lower third basic and copy it)

• Set the text to center

• Modify/Publish the opacity of the Back Plate (this is solid in the shipping title)

2. Once the title is installed they can create a title in FCP

3. Export XML use that XML data as a template

4. Then generate xml themselves using that template XML data

• update the start, offset, and duration for whatever timing the user needs

• update the text-style with their text.  On import the motion rig adjusts to the text length"

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There ya go! Use Simon Says to generate FCP Titles and then Motion to complement with the generated backgrounds!

To get started generating FCP Titles, download Simon Says AI for FCP and macOS.

If you already have an SRT file and want to convert it to FCP Titles, use Simon Says Convert.

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