Over at the LAFCPUG forum, Casey Petersen asked if it was possible to change the default colour of the ‘color’ matte generator. Not directly, but you can create a new generator plugin with a different default colour:

1. Open FXBuilder from the tools menu.
2. Paste the following text into the Text Entry window:

scriptid "Color";
generator "Color - white", 120;
group "Matte";
input fillcolor, "Color", color, 255, 255, 255, 255;
InformationFlag("dontEraseDest");
InformationFlag("bypassCache");
code;
channelfill(dest, fillcolor.a, fillcolor.r, fillcolor.g, fillcolor.b);

3. Choose ‘Create Plugin…” from the FXBuilder menu
4. Enter “Color – White” as the name
5. Save it in
Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins
6. Restart Final Cut and you’ll have a new generator which produces a white matte by default.

Note that this won’t be broadcast safe. It might be better to use a different value in the script such as

input fillcolor, "Color", color, 255, 230, 230, 230

instead.

Here is my next plugin: A generator that takes a clip and animates it from one place to another. It defaults to moving the clip from off the bottom of the canvas to off the top.

I came up with this when creating closing credits for a film partially funded by the Arts Council of England (using another of my plugins: Closing Credits). One of the conditions of funding was that their logo appears during the end credits scroll. Oddly enough, it is not straightforward to animate objects in Final Cut to move at specific speeds.

Download: Alex4D Move.

Copy the ‘Alex4D Move 1.01.fcfcc’ file into one of two places on your computer:

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins
or
Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Plugins/

(Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support/Plugins for Final Cut Express users)

Restart Final Cut, and you’ll see the generator in the ‘Animate’ section of ‘Video Generators’

Here’s a long (20 minute) video showing how it works:

Here are some magic numbers for entering into the dimensions values for video clips:

NTSC: 640 wide by 480 high
NTSC widescreen: 853 wide by 480 high (?)
PAL: 768 wide by 576 high
PAL widescreen: 1024 by 576
720p: 1280 by 720
1080p: 1920 by 1080

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

If you want a clip to move smoothly and then stop, use the ‘Keyframe % Complete’ animation method. You can then set a value of 0 at the start of the generator, and 50 when you want the image to stop moving (if you want the clip to end up halfway across the screen). Control-click the second keyframe in the graph to smooth it so that the image smoothly slows down to a stop:

Getting the clip to move at the same speed as something else will take some trial and error. You could add some keyframes between 0 and 50 that produces a straight line segment of the animation graph which makes the clip move at a constant speed. The angle of the straight line defines the speed.

You could duplicate a copy of the generator and use the fixed speed method to animate, and use the position of the copy to help set the keyframes.

To go with my closing credits plugin, I’m working on a filter that animates objects across the screen. It defaults to animating them from off the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen. This will be useful if you need to include logos or moving video in your end credit scrolls.

To make it more useful, it’ll also animate from the other edges of the screen or an arbitrary point in an arbitrary direction until the clip is off the edge of the screen.