Free Effect Friday – Final Cut Pro: Random Tile a4d plugin

It’s Friday, it’s time for another free Final Cut Pro X plugin. This one makes the ‘Random Tile’ Apple Motion 5 filter available to editors in Final Cut.

Use the Random Tile a4d effect to select a part of a clip using the on screen control. The plugin  replaces the source clip with many copies of that part of the clip and positioned randomly.

Using this source clip…

…with the centre moved over Matt Davis’ face produces:

Here are the controls:

The chosen area is circular, so if you reduce the feathering to 0, the edges of the circle are sharp:

If you increase the feathering of the circle and reduce the radius, you get more textured effects:

To create random effects, computers use algorithms that turn a single number into many other seemingly random numbers. This number is known as the seed. This means that when you change the value of the seed parameter, the positions of the tiles change.

This plugin cannot animate the positions of the tiles over time.

As well as applying the effect to clips, you can apply it to generators. Here is the Counting generator connected to a clip:

Here is the Random Tile effect applied to the generator. The number of tiles is set by the radius control. In this case the Radius is 512 – as it is a large area of the generator, the Random Tile effect randomly tiles less copies:

With more feathering and with the centre slightly offset using a smaller radius, the plugin uses many more tiles:

Download the installer

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

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

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