Final Cut Pro X effect: Alex4D Widescreen Matte

Alex4D Widescreen Matte is a Title Generator effect that produces a matte that can cover all the clips in your project:

Here are the controls…

…and the ratios available:

There are options to reduce the strength, the position of the matte. You can also choose whether it is generated in landscape or portrait format:

Here are the controls that produced that result:

This isn’t an effect, you’ll find it in the titles browser:

Drag onto the timeline so that it is above all the content you’d like to matte:

As the matte is on its own layer you can reposition clips under the matte using the transform control, or by changing the scale and position parameters in the inspector.

For more about how to use title generators as mattes, check out the instructions in my ‘Alex4D Dimensions’ post. In that post there are instructions for how to use Compressor and other free tools to crop off the matte from your outputted movies.

Installation instructions

Download the effect archive for Final Cut Pro here.

If you have Motion installed, or if you have already installed Final Cut Pro plugins, create an Alex4D folder in the Titles sub-folder of the Motion Templates folder in the Movies folder of your home directory.  :

Expand the ZIP archive and add the four folders to the Alex4D folder.

If you don’t have Motion installed, or if you haven’t installed any Final Cut Pro X plugins 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 – then follow the previous instructions.

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

If you find this free plugin useful, you might like my Alex4D Animation Transitions plugin pack:

Find out more about Alex4D Animation Transitions.

There are many more free plugins on my Final Cut Pro X page