How to identify a font in a project?

Is it just a matter of placing all used fonts in a folder with the project, media, etc.?

No. Final Cut Pro uses the same fonts that the rest of your apps and operating system have access to.
They are placed in three locations:

*Hard Drive/System/Library/Fonts* -these are placed there by the operating system. It's not a good idea to remove or otherwise tamper with the contents of this folder.

*Hard Drive/Library/Fonts*. Some of this content is placed there by Mac OS X, some by third party apps that include fonts (MS Office is one example). You also can install fonts in this folder yourself and they will be available to all user accounts.

Users/username/Library/Fonts. Placed there by and only available to that user.

It sounds like you have installed third party fonts at some point. Unless you have a backup of the system, they are gone.

http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/osxfonts.html

Unless you have a backup of the system, they are gone.

Which is a perfect reason to always have a current clone of your system drive. I suggest you keep two. One on a second drive in the tower (if you have one) and one on a firewire drive that is stored off site. If you are using a machine that does not have a second internal drive, use a firewire drive for the on-site clone.

This solves ALL sorts of issues that come up.

x

http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

If you have exported video with the fonts in them, you just take a pic of a word in the relevant font, upload it to the above site and it identifies for you...

Obviously, that'll only work if you have exported video using those fonts before they were removed from the system, or find other examples.

http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

That is a great link. Thank you!

the missing font still displays the right font in the canvas...

You are looking at the *Render files*, not the original footage.

I don't think that my idea of saving any special non-standard font in a folder called "Project fonts" is so bad, and I may do this in the future, even though fonts can be stored in a few places when initially installed.

Sure, you should make a backup of those third party fonts, but they are only available to Final Cut Pro when placed in one of the locations listed in my previous reply.

Nice link (new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/) but no luck here. I have almost 3,000 fonts and moved them out of the folder since it hogs some memory. Most of them are redundant. It would be nice if FCP can specify which font I used so I could put one back instead of all of them.

Did you guys find a way to figure out your fonts??

If not, GridIron Flow will probably do it for you. My tests show it to work - with one caveat.

First off, Flow is pretty amazing project management software. But you can look into that on your own. (Link above.) I knew it would list AE fonts, but it does the same for FCP too. With one catch, that I've found.

If I create a "Text" element from the Viewer and insert it into the timeline, Flow will properly report to me the font that I used. Test project results:



IF, I create another text element, in the same way: going to the viewer and starting over. And then use a new font and save the FCP file, the Flow organization is maintained. It lists my fonts.



IF, on the contrary, I don't create my "next" text element from scratch, but I instead, copy/paste the "prior" text element, and then go into it and alter the font...Flow does NOT seem to keep up with these changes. So there's your caveat. It may or may not work, depending on how the titles in question were originally generated.

BTW, there's a demo of Flow that should function for you. Whether or not it will really tell you what the fonts used were is a up to the specifics of the FCP project involved.

FWIW, just found this review of Flow. Posted today, 6/14/10.

Too...I'm absolutely NOT involved with GridIron Software. I'm just a happy end-user.