I bought Captionator for Final Cut Pro and ran into a problem right away. There are many caption styles to choose from, but the app does not really show you what they will look like in the end. You can customize a lot more inside Final Cut Pro, and each title has different options, especially for animation.
I did not find a good video on this. Even the videos by the developer were not what I expected. So I made my own: a sample project that I transcribed with every title, so we can both see which ones are animated and how.
What I found
- Simple styles: every animation disappears.
- Karaoke styles: these come with different animation options. They look similar to the highlighted-word captions you see on TikTok. This is the one I find most useful.
- Custom Title Karaoke: you can change the title and build your own custom styles with animations. I already made one.
- The Final Cut Pro preset: the text gets cut off. Highlighting a word as it is spoken is a cool concept, but this one is not it, and I won’t use it as long as it looks like this.
I don’t like several of the styles, mostly because Final Cut Pro adds weird borders and does not allow nice text for some reason.
Customizing
You can change the text length and the number of lines. The default lines are quite long. For a TikTok look you probably want fewer words per line. The app is powerful but overwhelming the first time you open it, and the instruction manuals are not very useful. I’m breaking it down into small steps in a series of videos.
If you would like the sample projects for each title, let me know in the comments. I can upload the library to my website so you can download it.
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