On this week’s MacBreak Studio, we do a little self-promotion as we take a tour of Ripple Training’s four new 3D Title plugins.
These plugins are built on the new 3D text features in Final Cut Pro 10.2 and Motion 5.2, so they of course require these versions to run (and these versions of FCP X and Motion in turn require Yosemite so if you haven’t yet made the leap, now’s a great time).
These plugins are delivered through the FxFactory application, so we start with a quick tour of FxFactory for folks who may not be familiar it – I think of it as a combination of an “app store” for plugins as well as a robust plugin management system.
Then we dive into each of the new plugins, starting with the “behemoth”: Ripple 3D Title Styles. This rather large collection of over 200 templates combines style choices and animation options into a single title template. The large animated previews make it easy to see exactly what the material looks like by quickly skimming through the thumbnails. Once selected, the Title Inspector reveals a large number of parameters for adjusting the text and animating it. If you have a relatively new iMac, MacBook Pro, or Mac Pro, you can loop playback of these titles in real time while trying out different animation options, which is quite incredible and also a lot of fun. You can even add a keyframed animation on top of the built-in presets.
Ripple 3D Title Scenes put your 3D text in full 3D environments including walls and floors with reflections, lights, and shadows. Just about everything is animatable with both built-in presets and keyframes, including a camera for creating custom camera moves around your text as it animates on and off.
Ripple 3D Title Animations are a set of free text animation templates that expand the capabilities of the built-in templates by adding the ability to automatically blur the background video or replace it with a gradient, to keyframe the position and rotation of both the text and a built-in camera, and they include an extended list of animation presets.
And finally Ripple 3D Title Drops give you the ability to add your own image as a texture to your 3D text, which is a lot of fun to do. There are three template designs, and with each all you need to do is click the drop well, then select your image from the Browser to wrap it around your text. You can adjust the scale and position of the texture and you have a full set of animation options.
All four of the Ripple 3D Title plugins are available as fully functional watermarked trials through the FxFactory application – except Ripple 3D Title Animations, which is free, so there is no watermark.