Final Cut: Mattes with differing horizontal and vertical feathering

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 Four-Point Garbage Matte-hv, Eight-Point Garbage Matte-hv and Mask Feather-hv.

Plugins are implemented using FxScript code. These can be stored as text files in the Final Cut plugins folder. If you take a look at the code you’ll see that I changed very little of the code compared with the filters supplied by Apple.

To use these plugins, download the ZIP document, copy ‘4-pt Garbage Matte-hv.txt’, ‘8-pt Garbage Matte-hv.txt’ and ‘Mask Feather-hv.txt’ to

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins

(Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support/Plugins for Final Cut Express users)

These filters appear in the ‘Matte’ filter category.

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