You might’ve seen a text box attached to an arrow, which looks very professional, in many of your favorite YouTubers’ videos! Many people have even asked me, and others who write for this site, “what is that called?” or “how did you get that text box animation thing?”. That “text box thing” is actually known as mCallouts and is designed by a very talented team of designers known as MotionVFX. Before we start, I would like to get something out of the way. This plugin is ONLY available for Final Cut Pro (aka FCPX). They offer many other plugins for After Effects as well, but this particular one is only available for Final Cut Pro users.
Another thing is that they recently released a new version known as mCallouts Tech, which I haven’t tried out yet, but I’ll make sure to get some coverage on that as well. The one we will be looking at today is called the mCallouts Simple. MotionVFX also offers a demo for both of these plugins, so you can try them out if you are curious. But keep in mind, that the demo only includes 1 template/design, while the full version has over 50!
PHEW! Now that that’s over…
As I said before, mCallouts is basically a plugin that will let you attach a string with text to your subject in the video. Just imagine the text tracking effect in After Effects, and make that much more professional and less time consuming. The mCallouts plugin will automatically scan the area where you place the track box. So you can drag that and drop it on anything that you want to stand out in your video. Then, you just hit track and if your subject in the video is in motion, the plugin will scan that and move the text according to the way the subject in your video is moving. Sounds really confusing, I know, but it’s pretty cool and actually not that hard.
I don’t have any clips that I can use this plugin on right now (I delete all the clips after my video has come together), but if you see my recent video (Youtube), you can see that I tried to use this plugin to it’s full potential. It really made the video more interesting and much more professional!
Many people on thetech.ninja team also use this plugin, and I’m happy to report that they LOVE it!
Here’s what Kevin has to say:
Here’s Elijah’s take on the mCallouts plugin:
Laslty, here are some screen grabs of the mCallouts plugin at work from my recent video!