Reviews, tutorials and news on photo & video technology
Word Pop is one of FxFactory’s latest addition. It’s a set of Final Cut Pro X titles. They allow you to create anything from lower thirds to a full explanation in the centre of the frame. I first thought it was pretty much limited in what you can do with it, but it turned out to be more than meets the eye.
To create composites, you need mattes. In Final Cut Pro X, you can create simple mattes out-of-the-box, but for anything more complex than a box or ball shape you really need a bit more power. Lots of power and controls come with Hawaiki Keyer. I reviewed version 3 a while ago and although I’m late in the process – version 4 has been out for some time now – I found version 4 worth the trouble of going through this must-have plug-in all over again.
FxFactory sells Crumplepop’s SplitScreen Pro, a Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro plug-in that enables split screen effects without the headaches. After having installed SplitScreen Pro in my Final Cut Pro X effects collection, it became clear Crumplepop’s split screen generator makes complex effects really simple.
OWC’s portable drive, the Envoy Pro, originally came in a USB 3 version, but with the push for ever higher throughput speeds required for 4K, HDR and 8K video shooting and streaming, the company has introduced another, new 300g lightweight Envoy Pro EX that’s been equipped with a captive Thunderbolt 3 cable. The Thunderbolt 3 Envoy Pro EX actually is a series of devices, all equipped with Thunderbolt 3, but split up in the Envoy Pro EX series and the Envoy Pro EX (VE) series, which is even faster and has bigger capacities.
To create flares in Final Cut Pro X, you can buy a collection of “titles” and by positioning these get more or less what looks like a lens flare. But titles don’t move with the subject causing the flare unless you move them with it, using keyframes. That’s tedious and often not very accurate. In addition, most lens flare offerings don't even come close to the real thing. MotionVFX created mFlare 2, a plugin that uses the Mocha tracker to bind your lens flare to the subject that you want it to move together with. It's also pretty close to a real lens flare if you create an "Organic" one.
Turning Final Cut Pro X into a grading application a la Da Vinci Resolve is what Chromatic, CoreMelt's latest plugin sets out to do. It succeeds pretty well by cramming a lot of functionality into this full-blown colour grading solution. It's the only plugin that delivers the ability to select colour ranges right in the clip viewer, but to appreciate its power to the fullest, a lowly iMac such as mine won’t do.
FxFactory released yet another great plug-in, 3D Video Walls. This plug-in contains a whole bunch of titles that you can create illusory 3D video walls with, based on the videoclip underneath it. If you want to have a dynamic backdrop to show these video walls against as well, you can create a compound clip out of the 3D wall and place that clip on top of another one in the Timeline. The effect is brilliant and the controls allow for virtually endless variations.
If you need a clock counting up or down, or you would like to add a graphic to a video that gives some sense of timing or progress, look no further than Time Pop, distributed by FxFactory. It’s a title generator with some free clocks, but when you pay you’ll get a bunch of designs that offer more possibilities and more nicely designed progress “meters”.
Telestream just upgraded its Switch QC app and added a range of new features in the process. Switch Pro 4 adds support for DPP AS-11 MXF metadata, decoding and playback of Teletext captions and more.
Ever wondered how you create the illusion of traveling through a cloud of stars in less than 10 minutes? All you need is a couple of FxFactory plug-ins — Zoetrope’s Flow is one them.
