Final Cut tip: Green night vision

In which I show how to use a combination of three of Final Cut’s filters to produce a green-tinged night-vision effect.

Neil writes in:

Do you know a quick and easy way to apply a night vision look to something shot during the day? I am trying to imitate some green night vision material that was shot with an infra red light off the camera.

Take your original clip:

Use the Channel Swap filter to make it display only the red channel:

Add the Bloom filter (from the Glow section):

And shift the colour to green and reduce the contrast using the Color Corrector 3-way filter:

The settings for the filters depends on your source footage. Spend most of your time changing the Brightness and Threshold of the Bloom filter. Then reduce the contrast using the Level control for Blacks, Midrange and Highlight.

Here are the settings I used for the example above:

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