Editing and Removing Text Styles in Final Cut Pro and Motion

Over the last year I've been teaching myself to use Apple's incredibly powerful (and even more underrated) motion graphics tool Motion, and as a result found myself using it more and more. It's tight integration with Final Cut is just one of the many things I love about it, but perhaps the thing I'm using it most for is designing and animating text, or more specifically 3D text. 

However after about a year of playing with Motion and designing titles for various clients I’ve noticed that my “Style” dropdown had become cluttered. Really cluttered. I felt it was time to clean it up a bit, but for some reason there didn’t seem to be a way to delete these from within the apps themselves.

Like any good editor I did a quick search through the manual, but found nothing. Then I tried Google, but nothing came up. So I headed over to one of the most valuable resources I know, the Final Cut Pro X Editors group on Facebook. Within a few minutes I had my answer. In fact, it pointed me to an incredibly helpful article that Larry Jordan (the man, the legend) had written back in 2015 (thanks for nothing, Google).

I had figured it involved digging into my library files, but finding the right location was tricky. Thankfully the article walked me though the exact path to follow. To save you some time, from the Finder hit CMD+SHIFT+G which will bring up the “Go To Folder” dialogue. From there simply type (or copy and paste)

~/Library/Application Support/Motion/Library/Text Styles

In this folder you’ll find all the text styles you’ve saved over the years: a “.molo” file and 2 .png previews. 

However if you’re like me and want to keep things a little more organized you can actually create subfolders in here. This is how the folks over at Movie Pop were able to put all their text styles in their own call-out. This is a great way to store styles specific to certain clients, or certain styles of projects (like epic trailer titles).

It should be noted, this will not contain any of the default styles that ship with Motion. It is possible to remove those by digging into the actual package contents of Final Cut Pro and Motion, if you want to, but do so at your own risk! It’s never wise to mess with default settings in applications.

It’d be great if in future versions of Motion (or Final Cut) the ability to re-order/edit/delete these title styles was built into the application itself, but it’s nice to know that it’s pretty easy to do manually yourself.