We all need to do tummy tags. Name captions, usually running along the bottom of the screen. It’s part of the plumbing, rather than the showy part of a production. There’s a simple FCP generator if all you want is two lines of left aligned text at the bottom, with perhaps a strap behind it. But what happens when you’re doing a corporate job title? Time to launch Motion or LiveType, and there’s fiddle and faff, and rendering, it’s all a hassle unless you have the time to set up a Motion template and adopt a format for a series.

A lot of us are knocking out stuff for a variety of uses, where all you want is just a neat little name caption – just a little more than the standard generator can provide. Often it ends up as three little chunks of generator, a couple for the text plus another for the background, and it all gets a little messy and needlessly complex as you begin to wonder if you’d be better off in Motion after all…

Well, I’ve simply got to rave about this…

http://alex4d.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/free-final-cut-plugin-lower-third/

Okay, so as well as doing

• three lines of text on a lower third
• justify-right and centre as well as justify left
• control over box behind (so it can bleed off bottom and sit halfway through the top line

It now does the insanely useful:

• graduates off to the left or right for that expensive feathered edge look
• position text anywhere (not just lower third, not just inside text-safe)
• put returns inside the textbox to wrap into multi-line text areas
• provides a 3 layer hierachy of text with as many lines as you’ll need

This one little plug-in covers about 97% of my needs for lower thirds. No rendering required, no trips to Motion, only one channel in your timeline, quick to set up a style and modify it, and it’s free!