As part of 685,000 blog views, visitors downloaded my Final Cut Pro plug-ins many thousands of times.

If you follow my blog via email using the control on the top left of the blog page, you’ll get advance notice of new posts and plug-ins and more.

Thanks to my many visitors in 2012. I plan to make many more Final Cut Pro X effects, transitions, titles and generators in 2013!

Final Cut Pro X Top 10

1. Blurs

Six blurs and one sharpen effect

2. Mask+

Define 4, 8 or 16 points of a mask with animation control over scale, rotate and perspective distortion

3. Colour effects

11 colour control effects

4. Magic Lantern HDR

Composition controls for resolving HDR clips generated by Magic Lantern on Canon SLRs

5. Bad TV

More controls than the standard version

6. 4 Up

Display four clips on the same screen, or switch between them

7. Aged Film

More controls and ‘Bad TV’-style rolling

8. Distorts

Four distort effects

9. Adjustment Layer

Any effects or transformations you apply to this title will be applied to all timeline clips below

10. Smooth Move

Defines a start and finish position, scale and rotation for clip content with controls for how the clip moves from start to finish

Final Cut Pro 6 & 7 Top 5

1. Closing Credits

This plugin gives you typographic controls over all names or credits or section titles at the same time. You can also set the credits to scroll at specific speeds.

2. Access to all your fonts

Apple’s plugins don’t give you access to all your fonts. Use these replacement versions to use any installed font.

3. Lower Third

This generator provides extra text and positioning options for labelling people and places.

4. Vignette filter

A vignetting plugin giving control over position and aspect ratio.

5. Improved text Crawl

This generator removes the limit on the amount of text you can use in a crawl, and adds extra features.

There are 423 commands available in the Command Set editor in Final Cut Pro X. 279 have default keyboard shortcuts.

I’ve designed a PDF listing all 423 commands with a short description of what they do and their default shortcuts if available.

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This Final Cut Pro X effect is for combining HDR footage produced using the Magic Lantern tool for Canon DSLRs. Magic Lantern is open-source firmware that adds many useful features to cameras.

This effect is for HDR clips recorded with Magic Lantern. High Dynamic Range imagery relies on taking two pictures of a scene using different exposure settings: the first underexposed, the second overexposed. Combining these pictures results in more detail in the brightest and darkest areas. Magic Lantern does this for video by modifying exposure settings for alternate frames. Alex4D Magic Lantern HDR gives you control on how these frames are combined.

Visit the Magic Lantern site to find out more about the many features it adds to Canon cameras.

Here are the controls:

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This Final Cut Pro X title template is similar to the built-in Basic Title title template with the addition of keyframable parameters

Here is initial part of the controls:

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Over at the fcp.co forum, a user named ‘parchabg’ was trying to get better results when exporting interlaced PAL from Final Cut Pro X. I suggested using Apple Compressor’s ‘DV Stream’ setting. It allows control over interlace field order.

If you use a Compressor preset very often, you can use that preset as a Share Destination from within Final Cut Pro X.

Compressor keeps presets in .setting files.

If these .setting files are in

Your user name/Library/Application Support/Compressor/Settings/

…you can use them within Final Cut Pro X.

I haven’t bought Compressor 4, I still use Compressor 3.5.3. It stores its .setting files in a place that Final Cut Pro X cannot see: Your user name/Library/Application Support/Compressor/

That means if there’s a .setting file I want to use in Final Cut Pro X, I need to move it into a sub-folder named ‘Settings’:

To add a Compressor setting as a destination, go to the Share submenu of the File menu. Choose ‘Add Destination’. Double-click the Compressor Settings icon:

The dialogue box that appears shows the Compressor presets stored in .setting files:

Choose the preset you want as a new Share destination and click OK. Once you close the Preferences dialogue, a new item appears in the Share menu: your new Share Destination:

No Compressor 4 needed

If you need a custom destination but don’t have Compressor, you can copy custom .setting files from people with Compressor and this technique still works. This is because Final Cut Pro X includes all the code required to run these presets.

If you’d like to try this PAL DV Stream preset, you can download it from here.

This Final Cut Pro X title template displays a series of four texts, zooming from one to the next:

Here are the controls:

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The 10.0.6 update added some text editing features for modifying title text. Here they are in action using the Zoom title (from the ‘Build In/Out’ section of the Titles browser) as an example.

If you select the title in the timeline, or if the playhead is over the title, there are two new ways to select multiple text items:

You can drag in the viewer or Command-click boxes to select more than one text box.

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