Create Karaoke Titles in Final Cut Pro X

I needed to make animated karaoke titles for "You Make Me Alive," the music video I directed for Portland-based dance rock band The Slants. Apparently there are several programs specifically for titling karaoke videos, but the Mac options aren't great, and I wanted a solution in Final Cut Pro X, but I couldn't find a tutorial. It turned out to be pretty simple.

1. Use the custom text preset to create a line of text with the color and position that you want.
2. In the video properties dialog for the text, add a shape mask, change the shape to a rectangle, and reduce the falloff.
3. Go to your beginning frame, add a keyframe, and position the center of the mask to the left of the text, and pull the right edge of the mask so it's on the left side of the text as well.
4. Go to the end frame, add a keyframe, and position the right edge of the mask so it covers the text.
5. Select a color for your mask. I made mine purple. 

Playback and you should have a simple color-changing title. This way is a bit tedious for a whole video, but I only had to do a few sections of, so it was worth it. You'll have to tweak the keyframes if you want the animation to speed up or slow down.