Archive for the 'final cut pro' Category

Free Final Cut plugin: Inside-Outside Matte

8 September, 2009

This Matte filter gives you much more control over feathering. You set up two shapes – one is the inside of the matte, the other being the outside of the matte.
Here is the filter in Wireframe mode, where you can see the two shapes:

If you switch to Preview mode, you can see how the blend [...]

Final Cut: Mattes with differing horizontal and vertical feathering

2 September, 2009

Over at the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro users group forum, ‘debe’ asked for a differing horizontal and vertical controls for the feathering of mattes. Here are three free Matte filter plugins to do this.
This is the kind of effect that Eight-Point Garbage Matte-hv has if the feathering is vertical only:

Included in ‘Alex4D Mattes-hv‘ are [...]

QuickTime X vs. Final Cut Studio

1 September, 2009

Those of you starting to use Snow Leopard will notice the new QuickTime player.

Apple markets this as part of QuickTime X. However, it turns out that the new player is a small part of this new version of QuickTime.
As detailed as part of a 23 page technical review of Snow Leopard over at Ars [...]

Final Cut: My improved Crop plugin

24 August, 2009

This is an alternative to Final Cut’s crop section of the Motion tab.
This blog post used to host version 1 of my Crop plugin. I’ve updated it, so now you can download version 1.1.

When you blur the crop using the Edge Feather control, it only adds the feathering to the edges you crop. The built-in [...]

Final Cut: Modify the Print to Video slate and countdown clips

19 August, 2009

In which I list the location of the FxScript code that implements Final Cut Pro slates, countdowns and more.
Although many people have moved over to file-based content delivery, some still need to output to tape from Final Cut Pro 6 and 7. When you use Print to Video, you can choose to display a slate [...]

Assigning repetitive operations to a single keyboard shortcut

18 August, 2009

After writing about using Automator to perform repetitive tasks in Final Cut, I found a post in Andy Mees’ blog about a more flexible dedicated utility.

Spark can assign your own keyboard shortcuts to play Applescripts, menu commands, and series of keystrokes. Andy gives a few suggestions – including the Avid-like ‘Top’ and ‘Tail’ commands: [...]

Final Cut plugin: Text crawl

17 August, 2009

In which I provide an improved text crawl effect for Final Cut range of applications.
I created this plugin in response to a question in Larry Jordan’s monthly Final Cut Pro newsletter. Someone pointed out that the Text Crawl generator built into Final Cut Pro had a limit on how much text in can move across [...]

Final Cut plugin: Gradients with transparency

12 August, 2009

In which I provide a free Final Cut generator that adds opacity controls to the built-in Custom Gradient generator.
While working on my next plugin, I needed a reliable way of creating gradients with opacity controls on the start and finish colours. Here’s Custom Gradient – Alex4D:

I also added a radius control for the radial gradients:

To [...]

Final Cut: Using Automator to set many poster frames

10 August, 2009

Over at the CreativeCow.net Final Cut forum David Fu asked this question:
Is there a way to make the final cut thumbnail preview in the Browser preview a different frame other than the very first frame? The editing assistant was capturing the last frame of each previous take to the new take thus every thumbnail is [...]

Final Cut: Ideas for my improved Text Crawl generator

7 August, 2009

I hardly ever use text crawls to create on-screen ‘news ticker’ effects, so I’ve never came up against the limitation mentioned in the July edition of Larry Jordan’s Final Cut Studio newsletter:
crawls will only show 2 minutes worth of text, no matter how long you make them in the Viewer.
This is due to a limitation [...]