Useful Tools for Editors: Clip Info Titler

Here’s a simple little tool for Final Cut Pro from the folks over at Assisted Editing. Like many of their tools, Clip Info Titler is based on FCP’s ability to export and import XML files. It takes an XML of a bin full of clips and creates a sequence that includes a text overlay, reflecting data about those clips, applied above each one. At $99 it might sound expensive, since you could enter the data manually and create your own text overlay by hand. But imagine doing that for tens of hundreds of clips and you can see the time a tool like this Clip Info Titler might save. The application is simple and fast. First, you select clips from the FCP Browser and export a single XML from those clips. Next, load that XML into Clip Info Titler and choose your settings and parameters from the application’s single window: Send that sequence back to FCP and you’ve got a timeline with the media on video layer 1 and titles on V2 with the information. The only glitch I saw in my testing was that the sequence sent back to FCP was a DV-formatted sequence. To correct the formatting, I opened the FCP Sequence Settings dialog box and loaded the correct Sequence Preset for my clips. This is what one of my results looked like: If you need more readable fonts you can also format the XML in such a way that Clip Info Titler will use the FCP Outline Text generator. Assisted Editing’s page for Clip Info Titler makes these additional points:

• Clip Title Overlays are added in seconds, not hours or days
• Automatic Titles are more accurate than manually made ones
• You can customize the content of the overlay in Clip Info Titler
• You can customize the appearance by sending a sample Title in your exported XML
• Add a Timecode Reader Filter for each clip by clicking a checkbox in the application (First Frame Timecode verifies accuracy for forensic or legal purposes.)

Since FCP doesn’t have a tool that’s as useful or deep as Avid Media Composer’s Timecode Burn-In tool, it’s nice to have a third-party utility like Clip Info Titler to help bridge the gap. And a demo is available.