I’m currently working on a training video with a lot of text clips in the FCP7 sequence and I needed to change the color of all of them. After a quick Google search to make sure there wasn’t some elegant and quick way to do this since you can’t copy and paste text color attributes in FCP7 (at least with FCP7’s text, I didn’t test the others like Boris because I didn’t use them), I figured I’d write up a quick guide in case anyone is looking. This is pretty simple once you know what you’re looking for, but it can be intimidating because you have to use XML.

First, open the sequence with the text you need to replace. Then, go up to file, export, and XML. Save this file somewhere.

Now, open the XML file in a text editor like TextWrangler. I think TextEdit has gone to hell with Lion, but if you edit in there make sure it’s not in rich text mode.

Now you’ll need to find an instance of the old text color. I colored the first clip with the new color before the XML export so I’d be able to get the RGB values from that instead of looking them up in Photoshop or wherever. If you know the RGB values, you don’t really need to do that.

Look for something like this within a text element – fontcolor, specifically is the parameter.

Copy and paste it that little bit into another editor window. Then go to the next instance of this code, which should be the second clip and your old color. Copy and paste that too. So you’ll have code with the new color, and with the old color. You only really need this little bit with the RGB/Alpha values, to keep it simple.

Now, go to find and replace.

In the “find” field, paste the code for the old color.

in the “replace” field, paste the code for the new color.

Now hit replace or replace all.

Now save the XML file. Make sure it saves as a .xml file.

Go back to FCP7 and rename your sequence – maybe add “-old color” or something to distinguish from the new sequence.

Now to go Import > XML and go through the dialog box. A new sequence that’s named the same as your previous one is in your bin.

Open it up and it should be exactly the same as before, but with the text changed. TA DA.

Note that this only works to pretty much change all of one color to all of a different color. If you only need part of the sequence changed, you’ll have to make a judgement call as to if this will save you any time. Or copy/paste portions into a new sequence and use that, then paste it back?

You can do a lot of other things with this simple find/replace of code, like changing the font color en masse or something like that.

So there you go. That’s one way to change all the text color in FCP7. It might be the only way, I’m not 100% sure.