Free Final Cut Pro plugin: Alex4D Freeze transition

This transition freezes the outgoing clip before showing an incoming clip or shows a freeze frame of an incoming clip or freezes the outgoing clip and then shows a freeze frame of an incoming clip. You can also choose to cross dissolve between the clips.

Here are the controls:

Freeze: Choose between Outgoing Clip, Incoming Clip or Both Clips

Cross Dissolve: 0 – no dissolve i.e. show freeze only, 50 – dissolve for half the duration, 100 – dissolve during the whole transition

Here’s a demo:

The duration of the transition controls which frames are frozen.

If you freeze the outgoing clip, the frame at A will be shown until C. If you freeze the incoming clip, the frame at C will be shown from A onwards. If you freeze both, the frame at A will be shown until B, then the frame at C will be shown.

You cannot freeze the last frame of an outgoing clip for any duration you want.

Final Cut Pro X does not allow transitions to last longer than the frames in a clip. This means that if the outgoing clip’s last frame is at C but has been trimmed so the clip finishes at B in the timeline and a Freeze transition is added so that its duration lasts from A to C, it isn’t possible to freeze any frame in the outgoing clip between A and C. This transition always freezes the frames at the beginning or end of its duration. Transition durations and positions are limited to what Final Cut Pro will allow.

Freeze as an effect

Freeze can be applied to single clips. If you want to momentarily pause a clip but jump forward in the clip afterwards for the duration of your pause, use the blade tool to create an edit in your clip and apply Alex4D Freeze.

Here’s the result of the earlier demo settings when applied to an edit in a clip:

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 effects for Final Cut Pro X in the correct folders, creating them if need be. You don’t need to have Motion 5 or MTT installed for these effects to work.

Once you have MTT installed on your computer, double-click the ‘Install Alex4D Freeze 1.0.mtt’ file.

If you don’t want to use MTT, install these effects in Home / Movies / Motion Templates / Transitions / Alex4D:

If you find this free plugin useful, you might like my Alex4D Animation Transitions plugin pack:

Find out more about Alex4D Animation Transitions.

There are many more free plugins on my Final Cut Pro X page