Free Effect Friday – Final Cut Pro: CMYK Halftone a4d plugin

Here’s another in my ‘a4d’ plugin series. This series is about making Apple Motion 5 features available in Final Cut Pro X.

The CMYK Halftone a4d effect makes video clips, stills and generators look like they were printed in a magazine or newspaper. In order to simulate a wide range of colours, printing usually uses a combination of four grids of colour – cyan, magenta, yellow and black. This is known as CMYK printing (K denotes black to avoid confusion with the blue of the red, green and blue combinations that are used in screen displays).

Here are four source clips:

Using the following settings…

…you get this result:

Here are some more results using different settings:

Once installed, you’ll find it the Stylize section of the Effects browser:

As well as applying the effect to clips, you can apply it to generators.

On the left you can see a semi-transparent grey solid that has been cropped to make a background for a lower-third. The right shows how the CMYK Halftone effect applied to the solid.

Download the installer