Blurs: Seven free Final Cut Pro X effects

These seven blur and sharpen effects have been available to Motion 5 users for a while, you can now download versions that work in Final Cut Pro.

Gradient Blur

This effect applies a blur gradually between two points:

Circle Blur

This effect applies a blur inside a circle. Use the on-screen controls to define the position and size of the circle:

Five more effects after the jump…

Soft Focus

This overlays the clip on top of a blurred copy, producing a ‘fogged lens’ effect:

Compound Blur

This blurs the clip based on the values of another clip. Here is the mapping image:

If the image is applied using the settings above, areas of the clip are blurred based on the brightness of the mapping clip:

The following settings show the mapping image repositioned and at a different scale. The blur is now applied to the clip based on the transparency of the mapping clip, with no vertical blurring, just horizontal:

Unsharp Mask

This effect sharpens the clip with more fine-tuning than the standard Final Cut Pro sharpen effect.

Defocus

Produces a more visually accurate blur that simulates the way clips go out of focus when using a physical camera:

Compare that with the mathematics-based ‘Gaussian Blur’ effect:

Here is a close-up of using defocus with a circle shape on another clip:

The Gaussian Blur version:

The camera simulation is based on the shape of the lens aperture, which is ideally circular. Most actual lenses have aperture shapes which are polygons where the number of sides is greater than 7. To see the effect of a lower number of sides, these settings:

…produce this result:

Channel Blur

This provides the option to blur one or more specific channels:

Installation

Download this disk image:

It includes an installation script for Spherico’s Motion Template Tool application, if you don’t have it on your Mac, download it. It is a freeware/donationware tool that simplifies effects installation for Final Cut Pro X users. MTT installs the effects in the correct folders, creating them if need be. You don’t need to have Motion 5 installed for MTT or these effects to work.

Once you have MTT installed on your computer, double-click the ‘Install Alex4D Blur effects v1.0.mtt’ file.

If you don’t want to use MTT, install these effects in Home / Movies / Motion Templates / Effects / Blur (if you have a Motion Templates folder in your Movies folder, you will still probably have to create a Blur folder in the effects sub-folder):

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

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