Apply Title Punch to Titles and Media with Alpha Channels
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Unlike normal effects and transitions, the Title Punch set is designed to enhance media that contains transparency information contained in the Alpha channel.
As most titles have an alpha channel, they're ideal for Title Punch, but you can also apply Title Punch to .png images, clips that have been keyed in programs like Nuke or After Effects and then encoded in 4444, or clips you've applied a key to inside of FCPX.
You can quickly verify if a clip has meaningful Alpha information by going to the View menu and selecting Alpha:
Note the listing for Alpha will always be there - you're just visually checking to see if it's (hopefully) not all white. Don't forget to switch CHANNELS back to All when you're done.
Attaching a Title Punch Effect to a normal title will result in what we had designed:
Attaching a Title Punch Effect to a normal title will result in what we had designed:
Attaching a Title Punch Effect to an unkeyed clip will return results that might not be what we intended – but it still might be cool. This is a clip with Letters attached to it:
Or it may look simply ghastly – compare the Decay effect when applied to a title vs a clip:
You may find that occasionally a title looks nothing like the demo (Whaaaaat? Crrrrazy! Never happens!) when the title you are using is on top of a clip. In the following snapshot, you can see two seemingly-identical Titles placed over the same clip:
Here’s what it looks like when something is wrong. On the left is a problematic title without the effect – there’s nothing so far to indicate if there will be a problem. When you apply some of the Title Punch effects, however, you may end up with the kitchen mold we find in the right image:
Compare that to what it should look like: pure grunge bliss!
So what’s the story here? The reason, as you may have deduced from the text I used in the snapshots, is the presence of an object one finds in Motion when building a Title Template, the Title Background Object. If it’s one of your own titles, you can open it up to find, in it’s most simplified form, something like this:
The presence of the Title Background object pulls in the alpha information from underneath it, and this mucks up the condition for Title Punch that the clip has a distinct Alpha channel. Unfortunately, there is no work-around that we can build into the Title Punch set.
The solution to this problem is to either disable or remove the background clip when using a Title with a Title Background object:
Inserting the Title Punch templates into your timeline
As with all FCPX templates, you can apply the content in one of two standard ways.
The first is to select either the clip or edit you wish to apply your Effect or Transition to...
...and then double-click on the effect or transition you want from the UsefulFX-Title Punch set:
The second method is to drag your Templates to the timeline, either to a Clip (for Effects), an Edit (for Transitions) or a blank spot (for Titles):
The advantage of the first is that you can apply the same template to many elements at the same time.
Effects
Decay, Letters, Smudged, Splotched, Subtext
These five Effects are all used to add texture to your titles, with the option to have a background. They all share common controls, so all of these parameters will behave similarly regardless of what template is used for the snapshots below. The Letters and Subtext templates have additional controls to insert your own grunge texture:
These are all applied to a Title or clip with Alpha:
Drops
This is quite similar to the grunge effects, except it has a dynamic component to it: the drops are made with particles. Due to a, uh, let's use the word "peculiarity" in FCPX, you cannot animate the particles generated - it will only take the first keyframe's value. To work around this, we've exposed how many particles exist at the beginning ("Start Drops") and then how many are added per second. If you want a static image, set a high Start Drops value and a Drops per Second of 0. The Random Pattern parameter can be used to redistribute the particles in a different pattern.
Disintegrate, Melt
These also resemble the grunge effects, in that they can be used to eat away at your title, except they don't have the background image attached to them.
Cut-Out
Hole Punch
You can also choose to composite it over a background clip. The Invert Mask button will then swap the Drop Zone and Background around:
Rack Defocus, Rack Soft Focus
These two also depend on a Drop Zone being fed into the template (alas). The difference between the two effects are that Defocus looks fabulous and has control over the flaring shape, but it's also sloooooooooow. The Soft Focus effect is very fast to render, but of course doesn't look as good.
Both have built-in animation curves, but by default the animation is set to Manual. Keyframe the Manual Focus Point parameter to animate between the foreground and background being in focus. Use a value of 100 to put the foreground entirely out of focus, but of course I couldn't snapshot that and have it be legible, now could I?
Both have built-in animation curves, but by default the animation is set to Manual. Keyframe the Manual Focus Point parameter to animate between the foreground and background being in focus. Use a value of 100 to put the foreground entirely out of focus, but of course I couldn't snapshot that and have it be legible, now could I?
Reflection, Shadow
These two 'vignette' templates both have special camera-animation controls. This control helps avoid having to modify too many keyframes in the FCPX curve editor, which, frankly, I believe will be appreciated. When Camera Transition is 0, it will take the controls of Camera 1 (including Camera 1 Distance). When Camera Transition is 100, it will take the position of Camera 2. If the Camera Transition does not equal 0 or 100, you will not be able to see the On-Screen-Control, as this helps avoid confusion between modifying Camera 1 or Camera 2.
Both templates also allow you to substitute the bundled textures with your own clips via the Drop Zones.
Both templates also allow you to substitute the bundled textures with your own clips via the Drop Zones.
Speed
Stage
Yeah, this is the one we like to play around with too. Go nuts.
Text Flare
Transitions
Burning Scan, Slow Burn, Transmogrify
Similar to the grunge effects, the three Title Punch transitions have a Look parameter to test different intermediary textures:
Titles
Eraser, Oops, Redact, Underline
These are Titles that get placed on top of other Titles in order to draw over them. Each has a set of different styles, and a built-in animation feature to draw the shape on.
Eraser is a special case, because it will poke a hole in whatever is underneath the Title. However, this causes problems when you have a clip underneath the Title.
Here is the Before/After of applying the Eraser to this composite:
Oops indeed.
To fix this, set your animation as best you can, hold your nose, and make a compound clip with just the two titles - do not include the background clip(s).
This will bundle the erasing to everything within the compound clip and exclude everything below it. Here is the result before and after making the compound clip:
Flip24, Flip25, Flip29.97
Oh come on, we couldn't resist. This is not a true Title Punch-er (er) per se, as you just use it as a normal title. Use Flip24 for 24 fps projects, Flip25 for 25 fps projects, and, yup, that’s right, Flip29.97 for 29.97 projects.
