spiralofhope

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RESULT – giving up. I have no idea what .mclt files are, how to customize them, how to make them, or where to get them.

I was using ManyCam and wanted to edit a lower third to fix the font and otherwise tweak it.

There is the ability to select a new one, but I found no replacement .mclt file on ManyCam.

Trying to figure this out took such a long time I needed to spin off a new page.

• 2017-06-22 – I see they have some sort of “create effect” feature on their website, but that creates a .mcv file. Perhaps this is a new feature of a newer version of ManyCam.
• 2016-02-08 – Giving up.
• 2015-10-10 – They never replied.

• 2015-08-07 – I emailed the ManyCam help desk for information.

Places I checked:

• Searching The ManyCam user guide

  • The Windows guide doesn’t even mention the Lower Third feature. The Mac guide does.

• Searching ManyCam effects — What I found were .mcv files which show up in the Effects tab and are not customizable.

  • mclt
  • lower third
• Searching The ManyCam FAQ

• Searching The ManyCam blog

  • mclt
  • lower third

• Googling with site:manycam.com

  • site:manycam.com mclt
  • site:manycam.com lower third

• Searching C:\Program Files (x86)\ManyCam for a .mclt file.

• Searching C:\Users for a .mclt file.

• .. I found some files in C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\ManyCam\LowerThirds.

  • theme_trapezoid.mclt was the smallest item.
  • I opened that in ManyCam and confirmed it’s the white one with the green left edge.
  • I opened that file in a text editor (Geany). It didn’t open because it’s a binary file.

• Searching YouTube

  • I found How to make a lower third which suggests it’s some standard file format outside of ManyCam.
• Wikipedia talks about the lower third, but not about a file format.

• Googling some more

  • open source lower third
  • .. I found a reference to GIMP, so I tried googling gimp lower third
  • I found How to create a lower third! | Speedart | Gimp 2.8
  • .. however, it occurs to me that making an image in some art program probably won’t give a file which ManyCam can properly use. This is because ManyCam has a feature to let me replace text.
  • mclt lower third leads me to believe that this is an Adobe After Effects template.
  • Adobe After Effects lower third templates was giving me for-pay templates.
  • free Adobe After Effects lower third templates
  • .. I can’t find anything immediately useful. I don’t even know if I’m on the right track.

RESULT – giving up. I have no idea what .mclt files are, how to customize them, how to make them, or where to get them.