Final Cut: Free plugin to fix small ‘Scrolling Text’ fault

If you want to use the ‘*’ character to create centred, movie-style closing credits, you cannot use any character with an ASCII value above 127 on the left-hand side of your credit list. If you do, the position of the * is determined incorrectly meaning that the centering doesn’t work, a character vanishes and the * remains.

This due to a bug in the ‘FindString’ fxScript function, the interpreted language that implements the generator.

The only likely 8-bit ASCII character you’ll want to use is the possessive closing apostrophe – as in Barry’s Mum*Jane Goldman which produces this result:

If you use
£££££££££££££To the left*To the right
as your text in ‘Scrolling Text’ you get:

If you’ve been having these problems with Scrolling Text, my alternate free plugin might help.

Download Alex4D_scrolling_text_v1.01.

Put the ‘Scrolling Text v1.01.fcfcc’ file into

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins

or

Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Plugins/

Restart Final Cut, and you’ll see a new generator in the ‘Text’ section of ‘Video Generators’

If you are scripting, if you are using FindString to find a single character, you can use the following routine instead:

on myFindChar(string stringToSearch, string charToFind)
float pos, stringLocation
string chartotest

stringlocation = kUndefined

pos = length(stringToSearch)
repeat while (pos > 0)
pos = pos – 1
CharsOf(stringToSearch, pos, pos+1, chartotest)

if (chartotest == charToFind)
stringLocation = pos
end if
end repeat

return(stringLocation)
End

Which you use with the following snippet:
index = myFindChar(curline, "*")

…which looks in a string named curline for an asterisk and assigns it’s position to the float named index.

Note that my programming is a little rusty, so this script might not be able to deal with every input possibility.

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