Final Cut Pro, LiveType and Markers.

For those of you who are using Final Cut Pro 4, you also received LiveType (an amazing application for creating interesting titles and other graphics) for free! It is very useful to bring timing markers from your Final Cut Pro project into LiveType so that LiveType events can be queued to occur at specified times. For example, you may want a title to appear or perform an action at the same time as a sound effect. To accomplish this, you set markers in Final Cut Pro, and export them to a file that can be imported into LiveType.

Step 1 – Set markers in Final Cut Pro

1. In Final Cut Pro, open the sequence to which you will later be adding titles from LiveType.
2. Deselect any clips that may be highlighted in the Timeline.
3. At the point where you want a LiveType event to occur, set a Marker by placing the playhead at that location in the Timeline or Canvas, and then choose Mark > Markers > Add. (Alternately, you can press the M key to set a marker if that keyboard shortcut has not been customized.)

Step 2 – Export the markers in a movie for LiveType

1. Once you have set markers as desired, select the sequence that contains those markers in the Browser.
2. Choose File > Export > For LiveType. Give the file a name and save it.

Step 3 – Import the file with markers into LiveType

1. Open LiveType if it is not already open.
2. Choose File > Place Background Movie.
3. In the dialog that appears, select the file you exported from Final Cut Pro and click Open.

Markers you set in Final Cut Pro appear in the LiveType’s Timeline Ruler!

The following are just a few things to remember:

1. If your Final Cut Pro sequence already has markers set for scoring, chapters, compression, or other uses, it may be easier to duplicate the sequence and remove extraneous markers before performing the steps above. This is suggested because all of the sequence’s markers will be exported for LiveType, potentially causing confusion.
2. Marker names and comments do not appear in LiveType. If you have many markers, it may be a good idea to take notes about them to avoid confusion in LiveType.