Free Final Cut Pro plugin: Interface 2037 title

As Prometheus is coming out this week I thought I would make a title effect that recreates the computer interaction scenes from the 1979 film Alien:

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Here are the controls:

Font: If you have the Centrum Light font installed, the effect will use it by default, otherwise it will use Helvetica Regular.

Horizontal Scale: To recreate the effect exactly as it is in Alien, the text has a horizontal scale of 173%

Colour: The colour of the text and line.

Underline Length: Controls the length of the line that appears below the text once it builds on.

Colour: The colour of the text and line.

Scale: Scale the title, ranging between 0 and 400.

Lines of text: If you have entered more than one line of text, set the number here and the beam that appears before the text builds on will line up with the first line of text.

Build In: Uncheck this to disable the animation.

Background: The text can appear on a coloured background when overlaid on video. Set the colour with this control
Opacity: Set the opacity of the background
Edge Blur: Blur the edges of the background (although the scale goes up to 64, you can use values up to 600)

Here are the on-screen controls:

Use the control to reposition the text. The corner controls define the corners of the background behind the title.

Final Cut Pro X title effects cannot include audio, so I’ve supplied the sound effect in a separate file. Once you add copies of the title to your timeline, connect the audio so it starts the same time as the title:

Remember that you don’t have to overlay titles on top of video. They can be added to the primary storyline too:

Installation

The most common name for the font used in these parts of Alien is ‘Berthold City’ – this font is available as part of a pack of 6 for $205 on this page at MyFonts.com. The same font is also known as ‘Centrum Light’ which this effect defaults to using. You can download from fontspring.com. It costs $12.95 if you want to use it in all forms, $9.95 if you don’t need to use it on your website.

If you have download the font, double-click it (to start the Font Book font admin application) and click the Install Font button to install it:

Download this disk image:

It includes an installation script for Spherico’s Motion Template Tool application, if you don’t have it on your Mac, download it. It is a freeware/donationware tool that simplifies effects installation for Final Cut Pro X users. MTT installs effects for Final Cut Pro X in the correct folders, creating them if need be. You don’t need to have Motion 5 or MTT installed for these effects to work.

Once you have MTT installed on your computer, double-click the ‘Install Alex4D Interface 2037 1.1.mtt’ file.

If you don’t want to use MTT, install these effects in Home / Movies / Motion Templates / Titles / Alex4D:

If you find this free plugin useful, you might like my Alex4D Animation Transitions plugin pack:

Find out more about Alex4D Animation Transitions.

There are many more free plugins on my Final Cut Pro X page