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Provides: Titles/text generation for video
Format: Download
Developer: Yanobox
Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5, Final Cut Pro 6, Final Cut Express 4, Motion 3, Adobe After Effects CS3, ATI or NVIDIA graphics processor with 128 MB VRAM (integrated Intel graphics processors not supported)
Review Computer: iMac 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, Final Cut Pro 7
Processor Compatibility: Universal Binary (Intel or PPC)
Price: $99.00 (15 day demo available)
Availability: Out now

I love title sequences. In TV, movies, but especially in trailers, the use of words, typefaces, and graphics to set the emotion of a piece just makes my little geek heart pound.

Motype is a generator for animating text. It comes packed with a lot of fun, professional looking presets that animate the letters alongside glowing backgrounds to give it a lot of visual punch—and that’s if you just go with the presets.

Tweaking the settings, however, is simple. You can alter the typeface, obviously, but also the rotation and motion of the text and graphics, altering the look and feel. The best part is that while Motype can animate the whole process, you can set the “start” and “final” points of the text, making sure it’s readable for the audience.

The presets have a range of moods, from mysterious letters that decode, to big sweeping marquees, to text sizzling with energy that charges the viewer. Motype uses a lot of motion blur and particles (the shapes, duration, and “lifetime” of which are all configurable), along with 3D camera effects—something is constantly happening, giving them all a lively feel. The plug-in does all the animation without keyframes (you can set which mathematical model is used to control it in the presets), but you can set keyframes if you need point-to-point control.

The one limitation is that Motype is so well-designed for visual punch that it’s also focused around short, single lines of text. You can, however, easily stack the effects on top of each other if you need more than a few words at once. This is, of course, a tiny criticism of a package that’s designed to strike viewers with a mood, rather than communicate large swaths of text to them.

To demonstrate the look and feel of the package, I whipped up this fake teaser trailer for my wife in about 10 minutes. The music is from the fantastic World of Goo soundtrack.

For people who need energetic, professional titles with little effort, Motype is the package you’re looking for. If you’re the font nerd that I am, you’ll easily lose yourself in playing with the presets and settings to get the perfect looks.