Some editors who have animation experience miss the ability to smoothly control the position, scale and rotation of clips in Final Cut Pro X.

In the natural world objects don’t move at a constant speed, they slowly get moving, speed up and then slow down before stopping. That slow speed up and slow down is called ‘easing in’ to the animation and ‘easing out.’

My Smooth Move effect animates a clip between two states with the option to choose the shape of the curve that is used to animate the parameters.

Dip to Background: A free Final Cut Pro X transition

31 July, 2011

FCP X plugin

8 Comments

This flexible transition can be used to momentarily produce a variety of effects by fading the outgoing clip while showing a background, and fading the incoming clip.

You can control the timing for the point at which the outgoing clip has faded out, the timing for the incoming clip, whether the background is a solid colour, a third clip of your choice or simply the storyline below.

The default settings produce the same effect as Final Cut Pro’s Dip to Color Dissolve:

Rigging Motion 5 Effects: Accurate Slider Snapshot Positions

29 July, 2011

Apple Motion

5 Comments

While creating my next Motion 5 template for use in Final Cut Pro X, I came across a small problem. I’d rigged various behaviours to a single slider. Sliders default to having two snapshot positions: at 0 and 100.

I wanted to add a snapshot to the slider at exactly 50. You add snapshots to sliders by double-clicking below the slider. You then can position the snapshots by dragging them left and right until they are at the slider position you want.

Unfortunately you can’t drag as precisely as you might like. It helps if you drag the edge of the inspector pane to make it much wider – you get more control that way. Here’s what I ended up with:
Screenshot of a rigged slider showing a snapshot not positioned at exactly 50

Make your own offline Final Cut Pro X help system

26 July, 2011

final cut pro x

12 Comments

Final Cut Pro X users can make their own PDF version of the online help, but the generated PDF doesn’t have any internal hyperlinks.

Here’s how to make your own copy of the help system that works when you don’t have an internet connection for your Mac, PC or phone.

The advantages of the html version over the PDF version are internal links between sections:

…pop-up boxes to explain terms:

and an operational search system:

Final Cut Pro X effect: Alex4D Widescreen Matte

22 July, 2011

FCP X plugin, final cut pro x

32 Comments

Alex4D Widescreen Matte is a Title Generator effect that produces a matte that can cover all the clips in your project:

Here are the controls…

…and the ratios available:

Motion 5 & Final Cut Pro X: 53 built-in fonts

20 July, 2011

final cut pro x, Motion

4 Comments

To showcase the template features of Motion 5 and Final Cut Pro X, Apple shipped them with a range of fonts to suit every mood.

There are 28 font families, as some families have more than one variant there are 53 fonts in total. They are built into each app so that they’re are always available if projects include any Motion templates.

Secret Final Cut Pro X 4: Windows, Tools & Audio

19 July, 2011

final cut pro x

4 Comments

User Interface

In the Final Cut Pro/Contents/Frameworks/LunaKit.framework there is evidence that the window layouts were or will be more flexible than they are in version 10.0:

(Name your current layout:)
_Pro Text Field Cell (Untitled)
_Pro Push Button (Cancel)
_mPro Text Field Cell (Different window layouts can be saved to suit different working environments or styles.)
_Array Controller^Manager Window
_KPro Static Text (Use the current layout as a basis to create a new layout.)

Secret Final Cut Pro X 3: XML & multi-user editing

18 July, 2011

final cut pro x

13 Comments

This is the third in a series of posts about what’s hidden inside Final Cut Pro 10.0.

Inside FCP X there hints of features that have yet to be fully implemented, or have been dropped and never to be made available. There’s no way of knowing which is which, but it’s interesting to get inside and have a look around.

Ever since the case of the first ever Macintosh in 1984 not having any text to describe connectors, Apple have tried to enable internationalisation of hardware and software a priority. That means that most Macintosh applications contain text in multiple foreign languages. This makes software simpler to distribute, but also easier for us to examine.

In bygone days we would have used ResEdit to take a look at application text, dialog boxes and menus. As MacOS X is based on Unix, applications are now stored as specialised directories which can be explored without needing a specialised tool.

Text from Final Cut Pro / Contents /Resources / en.lproj / PELocalizable.strings

More preference panels than we know how to display:

/* PreferenceTabs */
“PEEditingPreferenceName” = “Editing”;
“PEPlaybackPreferenceName” = “Playback”;
“PEImportPreferenceName” = “Import”;
“PEDebugPreferenceName” = “Debug”;
“PEVoiceoverPreferenceName” = “Voiceover”;
“PECacheFilePreferenceName” = “Render”;
“PEStoragePreferenceName” = “Storage”;

So there is a debug mode for Final Cut Pro X.