If you’re still looking for that perfect April Fool’s Day joke, this may be just the thing you are looking for.
Imagine this- your hapless assistant editor is editing away, la-de-da, when all of a sudden they come across an offline clip.
To do this- go to your Applications folder. Right click on Final Cut Pro.app, and choose “Show Package Contents”. A new window will appear, with the guts of Final Cut.
Navigate to Contents/Resources/English.lproj/, and find Localized.plist. Make a copy of this file somewhere- you will want to restore this to the original after the joke is over, and have a backup in case something goes wrong.
Find the line “DrawString(“Media Offline”, 0, -r[2].v/10, r[2].h/320*4, dest, kWhite, 1)”. You can change the “Media Offline” to anything you want.
You may also want to change the text size in the line above, “SetTextSize(48*r[2].h/320)”. Only change the “48”- the rest scales it so it looks the same across all formats.
Disclaimer- you are messing with the inner coding of your livelihood. Be careful. Keep a backup, and restore after the joke is done. Remember this may show up while a client is in the edit bay. Please don’t blame me if this all goes horribly wrong. Also, I know this works on FCP6, haven’t tried it out on 7. Let me know.
And yes, I realize this would be much cooler if it was for the unrendered effect. However, that code is apparently stored in “Localized.rsrc”. I attempted to change that file, and Final Cut refused to launch, and then launched without any labels on any of the windows. Below is the save dialog I was presented with. I was able to fix everything because I had a backup.
Let me know how it goes for you!
James this is a really funny hack! I gotta try this.