Save Your Favorite Text Styles in Final Cut Pro (Saves Hours!)

This is a title tip every Final Cut Pro editor should know, and the tip at the end is one most FCP editors never even discover, since Apple hides it pretty well.

Build the look once

Add a basic title to your timeline with the shortcut Control T, then hop into the title inspector. From here you can adjust the text, the font, and the size. Type something in and want every character capitalized? Click the all caps button and Final Cut does it for you instead of you retyping it. There's also a slider that adjusts the size of every character except the first one; if you want all your letters the same size, just swing that slider to 100.

Scroll down to Face and you can build a nice gradient into your text. Head to Outline to add one around the letters, add some Glow, and finish with a Drop Shadow so your title actually pops off the footage behind it.

Save it so you never build it again

Recreating that same styled look every single time you make a video would be annoying as all heck. So once you've built it, open the dropdown menu that says Normal and select Save All Format and Appearance Attributes.

Worth knowing: format and appearance are actually two separate things you can save independently. If you don't care about the glow and outline and just want to keep the font, the all caps setting, and the text size, save only the Format Attributes. If it's the opposite (you don't care what font or size it was, but you love the glow and outline you added), save just the Appearance Attributes. Realistically, most of you are going to want to save both.

Name the preset something you'll actually remember later, like "light metal look," and hit save. Next time you add a basic title with Control T and open that same dropdown, your preset is sitting right there waiting for you.

Don't sleep on the built-in styles

While you're in that dropdown, scroll down to 2D Styles. Final Cut ships with a bunch of pre-made titles with their own textures and looks, and they're a genuinely good starting point to select and tweak to your own taste. There are 3D styles too, though those lean a bit more iMovie than Final Cut Pro. No offense if you're still on iMovie, but if you're watching this, it might be time to upgrade.

How to actually delete a title preset

Here's the tip I think a lot of FCP editors don't know. Say you've got a bunch of saved title presets and decide you don't like one anymore, that "Hello There" look you made last year. You'd think Apple would give you a delete button right in that dropdown, or at least let you right-click to reveal it in Finder the way you can with your library browser. Unfortunately, that's not an option, and I'm not totally sure why.

So here's the workaround. On your Mac, click Go in the Finder menu bar and hold down the Option key. You'll notice a Library option appears out of nowhere, like a little Houdini act. This is your user Library (there's also a system Library on your Mac, but that's not the one you want). Select it, and you can let go of Option.

From there, work your way down: open Containers, find the folder for Final Cut Pro (typing "F" will jump you to files starting with that letter), then go to Data → Library → Application Support → Motion → Library → Text Styles. That last folder is where every title preset you've ever saved actually lives.

Each preset is made up of three separate files. To delete one, select all three (hold Shift and click the last file), then press Command Delete, or just drag them to the Trash if that's easier to remember. Quit and reopen Final Cut Pro, click on your title, and open that dropdown again. The preset you deleted is gone for good.

Small habit, but it'll save you real time on every video from here on out.