Curves: Six free Final Cut Pro X effects for better animation control

These six effects give you more control over the way transform and trim effects work in Final Cut Pro X.

You can choose how values change between keyframes – effect the shape of the value curves for x position, y position, rotation, scale and edge trim amount:

You can also control the order of these effects. You can trim before scaling, then scale before rotating and rotate before setting x and y position. You do this by choosing the order you apply the effects the clip. If you change your mind about the order, you can drag effects up and down within Video panel of the clip inspector.

In the scale and rotation effects you can also set the centre around which the clip is scaled and rotated:

Here are the controls for all six effects:

Choosing the order you apply the effects

Note that these are straightforward effects that are added to a clip. That means if you rotate a clip, the effect can only apply to the original area of the clip that is visible before you applied the clip.

You can rotate a clip:

You can scale a clip:

If you rotate a clip and then scale it using two effects in this order:

…you’ll see the rotated clip has now been scaled down. As the scale effect is only sent the result of the rotate effect it scales down the clip but does not restore the edges:

However, if you scale the clip first and then rotate it by changing the order in which the effects are applied:

…the scaled down image is then rotated:

Showing a keyframe curve

To display the value curve for an effect parameter, click the control in the top-left corner of the clip:

Choose ‘Show Video Animation’ from the pop-up:

From the parameter menu pop-up:

Choose one of the parameters in one of the Alex4D Curve effects:

Click the show curve control:

To see the graph of the value changing over the time of the clip:

Changing the keyframe curve

To add a keyframe, option-click the curve. To delete a keyframe, select it by clicking it and then pressing the delete key. Drag up and down to increase and decrease the value, drag left and right to move the keyframe backwards and forwards in time.

If you click to select a keyframe, you can use the keyboard to perform the same adjustments option-up arrow and option-down arrow to change the keyframe value, ‘,’ and ‘.’ to move the keyframe back and forward in time (the amount moved depends on the zoom level you are using in the timeline).

Note that in versions of Final Cut up to 10.0.2, the numeric value shown while you change a parameter value can be incorrect.

If there is no keyframe at the play head and you change the value in the video panel of the clip inspector (by dragging a slider), all keyframes change by the same amount.

To change the ‘curviness’ of the way a parameter changes between keyframes, drag horizontally on a curve:

A more curvy line will make a parameter gradually change at the start and finish of the line – which is a more natural for some changes.

You can choose whether a curve starts or finishes gradually by choosing alternative curve shapes. Control- or right-click a curve and choose a new shape from the pop-up menu:

Motion note

If you create effects for Final Cut Pro X using Motion, you can have a parameter have graphs like this simply by rigging it. Only first parameter published can have its graph displayed in Final Cut. That’s why I needed to make separate effects for X and Y position.

Installing

If you have Motion installed, or you have already installed third-party effects, download the effect archive from here.

Expand the ZIP archive and add the folder to Movies : Motion Templates : Effects :

If you don’t have Motion installed on your Mac and you’ve never installed any third-party effects, download the archive of the Motion Templates folder with the Alex4D Curve effects in the correct sub-folder. Expand the ZIP and put the resulting Motion Templates folder in the Movies folder of your home folder.

Check out my other free effects and articles on my Final Cut Pro X home page.

Magic Lantern HDR Compose: Free Final Cut Pro X generator

This is an unpolished effect that I’m releasing early so that the few people who need it can give me some feedback.

Magic Lantern is a system for adding features to Canon DSLRs, Unified is a recent ML package enables some cameras to shoot footage that can processed to produce content with a larger exposure range – i.e. High Dynamic Range.

The files produced are made up of alternate frames of under- and over-exposed footage. My new generators take these frames and give you the control to define how the overexposed frames are overlayed on top of the underexposed frames.

For more information on Unified and Magic Lantern and the software to for your Canon DSLR, visit the Wiki

Note that you must shoot footage at twice the framerate you need, as 25 fps footage results in 12.5 fps HDR footage. These generators don’t do any interpolation.

Workflow

1. If you have Motion installed, or you have already installed third-party effects, download the effect archive from here.

Expand the ZIP archive and add the folder to Movies : Motion Templates : Generators :

If you don’t have Motion installed on your Mac and you’ve never installed any third-party effects, download the archive of the Motion Templates folder with the Alex4D ML HDR Compose generators in the correct sub-folder. Expand the ZIP and put the resulting Motion Templates folder in the Movies folder of your home folder.

2. Start Final Cut Pro X, add your HDR footage to an event, create a new project at the native frame rate of your footage.

3. Add your ML footage to the project.

4. Go to the ‘Alex4D’ section of the Generators panel:

The Magic Lantern HDR Compose generators default to a duration of 10 minutes, so to set the correct length, drag the generator you need on top of the ML footage:

When you release the mouse button, a pop-up menu will appear. Choose ‘Replace from Start’.

5. The ML footage isn’t automatically added to the generator, so you need to click it, click the clip well and choose your ML footage.

The generator defaults to simply showing the overexposed frames.

There are many settings, but I suggest you try changing the following in this order:

The Opacity Out setting defines how much of the brightest parts of the overexposed frames are overlaid onto the underexposed frames. Start by reducing this value, so less of the most blown out parts are shown.

The Opacity Gamma setting defines how smoothly the overlaid image fades out the brighter parts, gradually increase this value.

The Gamma setting defines the contrast of the overexposed frames, increase this a little.

This may result in a desaturated image, so use the Overall Saturation setting to increase the saturation.

The Black In, Black Out, White In and White Out controls give more control over the contrast of the overexposed frames.

Here’s a demo showing the results of these settings of some night-time footage (which you can download from http://vimeo.com/34028226 )

Check out my other free effects and articles on my Final Cut Pro X home page.

Sparks: Free Final Cut Pro X effect

This effect can overlay patterned sparks to any Final Cut Pro X clip:

Here are the controls:

You have the choice of three different particle shapes, and can animate the location, size, number of sparks, speed and the strength of gravity acting on the sparks.

If you have Motion installed, or you have already installed third-party effects, download the effect archive from here.

Expand the ZIP archive and add the folder to Movies : Motion Templates : Effects : Alex4D :

If you don’t have Motion installed on your Mac and you’ve never installed any third-party effects, download the archive of the Motion Templates folder with the Sparks effect in the correct sub-folder. Expand the ZIP and put the resulting Motion Templates folder in the Movies folder of your home folder.

Check out my other free effects and articles on my Final Cut Pro X home page.

Who is thinking beyond the flat screen touch UI?

Last week, Bret Victor posted A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, a must-read essay for those who think that the future of technology interaction will be primarily spent stroking flat panes of glass:

[T]ake out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.

What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?

I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

[...]

With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?

Perhaps he is right. Minority Report‘s computer interactions have been very distracting for many OS user interface designers.

Why should we listen to Mr. Victor? He worked at Apple for a while where his job was “to play with experimental hardware platforms and input technologies, and come up with new user-interface and application concepts.” He was there from August 2007 to last November.

Perhaps when Apple’s competitors seem to have caught up (or produced a ‘good enough’ version of iOS) is the point when Apple will unveil the next UI target.

That means advancing the input technology. A start would be a touch surface with a ‘dimple resolution’ of at least 72 dpi – a trackpad whose surface texture can be manipulated by software. You would then be able to feel window boundaries, get a quick idea of how many windows there hidden under the window you can see, and even have keyboards that reconfigure themselves based on the input task (from typewriter to piano).

This could evolve into a transparent surface that can be overlaid onto screens and elsewhere, allowing the combination of visual and tactile feedback. One day technology might be able to induce complex texture and weight effects that we’ll be able to sense in 3D space. One step nearer that holographic interface.

As well as telling us that ‘Pictures Under Glass’ isn’t all the future should be made up of, Bret includes a rallying cry too:

Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people.

And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don’t just extrapolate yesterday’s technology and then cram people into it.

In the last few months I’ve been posting about Final Cut Pro, but I’ve also written about future UI too.

Alex4D Trim: Free Final Cut Pro X effects

Alex4D Trim works in the same way as the trim mode of the crop effect, with an extra. You can blur all the edges using the ‘Overall Feather’ parammeter, and have additional individual feather values for each edge of the trim.

I’ve also included versions of this effect that trim a single edge.

Download the effect archive from here.

Expand the ZIP archive and add the folders to Movies : Motion Templates : Effects : Alex4D :

If you don’t have Motion installed on your Mac and you’ve never installed any third-party effects, download the archive of the Motion Templates folder with the Trim effects in the correct sub-folder. Expand the ZIP and put the resulting Motion Templates folder in the Movies folder of your home folder.

Check out my other free effects and articles on my Final Cut Pro X home page.

Premonition: Free Final Cut Pro X transition

This transition first shows a few frames of the incoming clip, then some of the outgoing clip, then the incoming clip and continues in varying patterns.

It re-creates the ‘cuts only’ scene transitions used in the early 70s in films such as ‘Easy Rider.’ By showing a few frames of the next scene a little while before it starts, the clip acts as a ‘premonition’ of what will happen next. It was also used with a musical cue in ‘Captain Scarlet’ – a kids TV series.

As well as using the incoming clip, there is also the option to use a frame from elsewhere in your primary storyline instead. You choose it by dragging a ‘Timeline Pin’ which appears when you select the transition:

Here are the controls:

There are six flicker patterns to choose from. They currently aren’t described in the pop-up menu. If you can suggest useful names, I’ll add them. Also, if you have ideas for patterns you’d find useful, comment below.

Pattern 1 shows the same small number of frames from the incoming clip at increasingly frenetic rate:

Pattern 2 shows an increasing number of frames:

Pattern 3 shows the same larger number of frames from the incoming clip more often:

Pattern 4 first shows a small number of frames from the incoming clip twice, then cuts to the incoming clip apart from showing a small number of frames from the outgoing clip a couple of times:

Pattern 5 is the same as pattern 4, but with a larger number of frames:

Pattern 6 is a straightforward premonition, it shows a few frames from the incoming clip, then stays showing the outgoing clip until the end of the transition:

Download the effect archive from here.

Expand the ZIP archive and add the folder to Movies : Motion Templates : Transitions : Alex4D :

If you don’t have Motion installed on your Mac and you’ve never installed any third-party effects, download the archive of the Motion Templates folder with the Premonition effect in the correct sub-folder. Expand the ZIP and put the resulting Motion Templates folder in the Movies folder of your home folder.

Check out my other free effects and articles on my Final Cut Pro X home page.

Alex4D Ticker: Free Final Cut Pro X effect

Final Cut Pro version 10.0.1 includes an updated version of the Ticker title effect. I’ve come up with some additional improvements. The most useful one is that I’ve linked the size of the background of the ticker to the font size of the text (note that the font size control in the Text tab of the inspector is disabled – use the text size control in the Title tab instead).

The default text position is within the title safe area. You can control the vertical position of the ticker, the transparency, border and shadow of the text and the background. You can also keyframe the ticker speed – which is useful if you want to delay the start).

(To get the dot “·” used in the sample text, press shift-option 9)

Here are the main controls of the effect (the rest modify text and background settings):

Download the effect archive from here.

Expand the ZIP archive and add the folder to Movies : Motion Templates : Titles : Alex4D :

If you don’t have Motion installed on your Mac and you’ve never installed any third-party effects, download the archive of the Motion Templates folder with the Ticker effect in the correct sub-folder. Expand the ZIP and put the resulting Motion Templates folder in the Movies folder of your home folder.

Check out my other free effects and articles on my Final Cut Pro X home page.

Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1 update – Internal changes

This is a quick post listing a few of the internal differences between version 10.0 and 10.0.1 of Final Cut Pro X.

Updates in Final Cut Pro / Contents /Resources / en.lproj / PELocalizable.strings

A few extra messages associated with importing XML.

There are also some messages supporting those attempting to run 10.0.1 on systems with unsupported graphics cards:

To ensure optimal performance, use a graphics card that meets minimum system requirements. For more information on minimum system requirements, visit the Tech Specs page on the Final Cut Pro website.
This system does not meet the minimum system requirements for graphics cards. For more information on minimum system requirements, visit the Tech Specs page on the Final Cut Pro website.
This graphics configuration does not support hardware acceleration, which is required to run Final Cut Pro X.
Safe mode does not support OpenGL hardware acceleration, which is required to run Final Cut Pro X. Please reboot normally and try again.

There is also support for running in trial mode.

New UI elements added to the Final Cut Pro/ Contents / Frameworks / Flexo.framework / Versions / A / Resources / en.lproj / directory:

FFAXELExport.nib
FFAXELImport.nib

FFAudioMatchWindow.nib

FFColorBoardContentView.nib
FFColorMatchWindow.nib

FFDataListClipsView.nib
FFDataListRoleSetTile.nib
FFDataListRolesView.nib
FFDataListRoleTile.nib
FFDataListTagsView.nib

FFMatchAccessory.nib
FFMatchFooter.nib

So there is more internal support for AXEL – ‘Apple eXchange Editing Language’ flavour of XML (which is distinct from Final Cut Pro XML v1.0). Here are two consecutive lines of Final Cut Pro / Contents / Frameworks / Flexo.framework / Versions / A / Resources / en.lproj / FFLocalizable.strings:

“FFXMLFORMAT” = “Final Cut Pro X XML, %@”;
“FFAXELFORMAT” = “Apple eXchange Editing Language (axel), %@”;

In the same file there is some additional text to support roles, including a concept I haven’t heard of yet:

“FFSetRole” = “Set Role”;
“FFFocusRole” = “Focus Role”;
“FFUnfocusRole” = “Unfocus Role”;

I wonder what ‘focus’ing a role means…

Motion 5 Tip: Using any Motion 4 project preset

If you have Motion 4, you might miss all the project presets you are used to.

The internal format of these presets is the same for Motion 5. That means you can copy the presets you’d like to use from inside Motion 4 to Motion 5.

To see the wide variety of project templates in Motion 4, view its contents (by right- or control-clicking the Motion 4 app and choosing ‘Show Package Contents’ from the context menu), and navigate to

Motion 4.app / Contents / Resources / English.lproj / Presets / Project

If you’d like some of these presets in Motion 5, use the following method.

It might be a good idea to try this tip on a duplicate copy of the Motion 5 application, but it seemed to work on the original installed version with no problems on my installation.

In a new window, view Motion 5′s contents and navigate to

Motion.app / Contents / Resources / English.lproj / Presets / Project

Option-drag the presets you want to copy from Motion 4 to Motion 5.

When you next run Motion 5, you’ll have the option to choose from a wider range of project presets.

If you don’t have Motion 4, you can open up the presets inside 5 and use them as the basis of new presets.

They can be opened and edited in TextEdit. Here’s the one for ‘PAL DV’:

If change the Description, FieldDominance, FrameRate, Height, PixelAspect and Width to match the specification of the format you are creating the preset for.

The value above for FieldDominance is 2, which sets the preset to interlaced, lower field first. A value of 1 indicates interlaced, upper field first. 0 means progressive.

Values for FrameRate include 23.98, 25, 29.969999999999999, 50 and 59.939999999999998

Values for PixelAspect include: 0.909090909090909, 1, 1.3333330154418945, 1.5

Once you have made your changes, save them with the name you want your preset to have with the ‘.preset’ suffix, you’ll have a new preset to put inside Motion 5. Save it in

Motion.app / Contents / Resources / English.lproj / Presets / Project

Check out my free effects and articles on my Final Cut Pro X home page.

Smooth Move: A free Final Cut Pro X effect

Some editors who have animation experience miss the ability to smoothly control the position, scale and rotation of clips in Final Cut Pro X.

In the natural world objects don’t move at a constant speed, they slowly get moving, speed up and then slow down before stopping. That slow speed up and slow down is called ‘easing in’ to the animation and ‘easing out.’

My Smooth Move effect animates a clip between two states with the option to choose the shape of the curve that is used to animate the parameters.

There are three curve shapes available: Constant, Ease Both and Logarithmic. Logarithmic is available for the scale parameter, which makes scaling clips down look more realistic.

You can also control when during the clip the animation starts and finishes. If the controls look like this:

Then the animation will wait for 45% of the duration before animating from Start to End, ending at 85% of the duration:

Control Points

When you apply the effect, both on-screen controls will be centred. If you drag a point, you’ll be choosing the end position and angle for your clip.

Download the effect archive from here.

Expand the ZIP archive and add the folder to the Motion Templates folder in the Movies folder of your home directory:

If you don’t have Motion installed, you won’t have a Motion Templates folder in your Movies folder. Download this set of empty folders and add them to the Movies folder of your home directory.

Although the folder is called Motion Templates, you don’t need to have Motion installed on your computer for this effect to work.

Check out my other free effects and articles on my Final Cut Pro X home page.