Style, position, and animation
Font, color, outline, shadow, glow. A 9-zone anchor. Eight animation presets
Three tabs share the back half of the editor. Style is ⌘2, Position is ⌘3, Animation is ⌘4. The player shows everything you change in real time. What you preview is what bakes into video and what FCP imports.
Style
Two-column on a wide window, single column when narrow. Top-right has a preset menu and a Reset button.
Font: family picker covers every macOS-installed family. Weight goes Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Heavy, Black. Size in points, default 40pt. Words per line and lines per caption sliders mirror the ones on the Captions tab.
Color: foreground color in hex, default white. Text transform: None, Uppercase, Lowercase.
Outline: toggle on, set width (default 2pt) and color (default black). The single most useful control for keeping captions legible against bright backgrounds.
Drop shadow: toggle on, set X offset, Y offset, blur radius, and a color with alpha. Defaults are 0, 2, 4, and black at 75%. A subtle shadow helps where outline starts to feel heavy.
Glow: toggle on, set radius (the size of the halo), blur (how soft it is), and a color with alpha. Defaults are 10, 5, and yellow.
One thing about Glow when you're going to FCP. The toggle doesn't survive FCPXML. Color, radius, and blur all transfer cleanly, but the toggle reads as off when FCP imports. You have to click each glow caption once in FCP's inspector to re-enable. We show a toast on export to remind you. Annoying, but it's an FCP-side limitation we can't reach across.
Screenshot placeholder
The Style tab with outline and glow both enabled, previewing on a white background.
1280 × 800px · Single ReelChest window
Position
A 3×3 anchor grid plus two margins.
The 9-zone anchor. Click any of the nine cells: top-left, top-center, top-right, middle-left, middle-center, middle-right, bottom-left, bottom-center, bottom-right. Default is middle-center.
The horizontal anchor also drives text alignment. Left anchors give you left-aligned text, center gives centered, right gives right-aligned. You don't pick alignment separately, it follows the anchor. Cleaner that way; one setting can't fight another.
Margins. Vertical margin is the distance from the top edge for top anchors and from the bottom edge for bottom anchors. Disabled for the middle row. Side margin runs 5% to 30%, default 5%.
Animation
Pick a preset, tune the duration scale.
| Preset | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Hard Cut | No animation. Snaps on, snaps off. Default |
| Fade | Soft fade in and out. Slider is inverted: right means slower in, longer dwell |
| Pop | Bouncy scale-in, overshoots to 1.15× then settles. Fades out |
| Subtle | Fast minimal fade. Slider is frozen at 0.15s regardless of scale |
| Slide Up | Slides in from below. Fades out |
| Slide Down | Slides in from above. Fades out |
| Type-on | Characters reveal one by one. Slider scales reveal speed |
| Word Reveal | Words pop in one at a time. Slider scales reveal speed |
Duration scale runs 0.5× to 4.0×, default 1.0×. Subtle ignores the slider on purpose so it always reads as a news ticker. Fade inverts the slider. Type-on and Word Reveal scale per-character or per-word reveal speed and adapt to the segment length so the reveal stays visible.
Reset on the Animation tab snaps you back to Hard Cut at 1.0×. There's no per-segment override on animation yet; it's global only. Style and Position both have overrides, which is the next article.