Why would you want to “lock” a font?
That's a question we tackle in this week's MacBreak Studio, where I show Steve Martin from Ripple Training how you can do exactly that.
With the integration between Final Cut Pro X and Motion, it is a common scenario for a motion graphic designer to create templates in Motion and then publish them to Final Cut Pro X, where the editor can then easily access them, apply them to projects, and modify them.
The key verb is modify: while the Motion designer is free to choose which parameters to make visible in Final Cut Pro X through the publishing function – like the color and position of graphic elements – normally all text parameters are always available. So not only can the editor edit the text itself, they can also change the font, size, alignment, color, position, and if they feel so inclined, even add an outline, glow, and drop shadow, each customized to their liking. While this flexibility might feel empowering to the editor, it can give the motion graphics designer headaches if they are trying to maintain a specific look and feel to their design work.
The trick to allowing the editor to still edit the text while keeping them from modifying other design aspects of the text is two-fold. First, in Motion, for every text layer there is an option to make the text editable in FCP X via a checkbox in the Inspector. This option was likely included so that text that shouldn't change, like legal disclaimers or part of a logo, won't be accidentally edited. All text is editable by default, but unchecking this checkbox for a text layer makes the text unchangeable in FCP X. In fact, you'll find the Text Inspector completely blank.
The second step is to publish only those parameters you want changed. To make the text editable in FCP X, you publish the text box from Motion. The editor won't be able to edit the text directly in the Viewer like other titles; rather they'll need to go to the Published Parameters in the Inspector. It's not much more effort to do so. I'd also recommend publishing the font size and the text position. This way, the editor should have enough control to properly scale and align the text to the surrounding graphics.