I'm cutting a freebie for a local Basketball competition all star weekend. They give a lot of cash to charity and support the community and it was too easy for me to offer to shoot it for them. I'm cutting it now and thought I'd give the two games a little spice by putting on a lower third graphic like on the NBA.

I normally use either the text in FCP or live type, but now motion seems the only option for text anyway. Thing is the super (the league logo and a space for scores) needs to not only be there for the whole show (1 hour) but also change when they scores change.

I have only just started thinking about it but am going along the lines of: create a logo and splash of colour in motion, lay it over the video and then do the scores in the type tool in FCP. Thing is I have to render all the motion stuff which effectively measn rendering the entire timeline. Any thoughts on a better way?

I'd add a layer with a STILL image (knocked out from the background in Photoshop) saved as either a PSD or TIFF (formats that support alpha channels/transparency) and add that above the video layer and then add one or two text generators on layers above that and use the knife tool to cut the generator when the score changes and update the text within the generator.

Still need to render but rendering still images and text generators SHOULD take less time than rendering a layer of video on top of a layer of video.

Thanks, good advice

create your motion video as a short loop. put it in your sequence and export with current sequence settings. reimport that new clip and lay on upper track. use crop to cut down the top and bottom to reveal the below footage. Copy and paste that loop until you have covered all your timeline.
Put your stats text layer on top and export the entire clip.

no rendering should be required at all.
(I just tested this quickly and as long as you stay in the same format as your sequence you will not need the render)
let me know if you need some clarification on this.
Darrick

The nice part about doing it this way is you can have a moving lower third rather than just a still graphic. plus no render.

create your motion video as a short loop. put it in your sequence and export with current sequence settings. reimport that new clip and lay on upper track. use crop to cut down the top and bottom to reveal the below footage. Copy and paste that loop until you have covered all your timeline.
Put your stats text layer on top and export the entire clip.

no rendering should be required at all.
(I just tested this quickly and as long as you stay in the same format as your sequence you will not need the render)
let me know if you need some clarification on this.
Darrick

The only downside to this I have discovered is if you want to use opacity in your lower third (which I do frequently) you will not be able to do this properly since you loose your alpha key ability. but for a standard straight edged lower third with motion (movement) graphics, this works well.
sorry for the triple posts I ran out of time to edit? and I keep thinking about things I missed in the original post.

Hope the OP sees this or else somebody else can possibly also benefit from it...
All the best!
DV

Thanks great tips. I think I'm going to stay with a straight edge just to avoid any opacity hassles. It's a circular logo but I'll put it in a coloured box and try to make it look funky.

Let people know how I go once finished.

He was absolutely right.

After some experimentation and a lot of frustration: The clip out of motion can be animated but no opacity. If there's any alpha required it will require rendering once it's in FCP. Same with the text. If you add a drop shadow suddenly you need a render :(