A free Final Cut Pro X effect that modifies the look of a clip area with different settings for the inside and outside.

Use this to emphasise part of a clip. This works very well for interviewees that have been filmed in a busy environment. Use focus, brightness and colour saturation to direct the audience’s view away from the context and towards your interviewee.

Uploaded Friday 6 September 2013

This free plugin is for Final Cut Pro X 10.0.6 and newer (if your version is older, visit this post at blog.alex4d.com).

Thanks to Y-Love and Matt Davis for the use of their interview footage.

Apply this effect to video clips, generators and titles and use the on-screen control to choose the position and size of the area you want to blur, sharpen and change the contrast of. There are two groups of settings – the first for the inside of your selected area, the second for the outside.

The effect defaults to settings useful for situations where interview footage is a little soft. It defaults to slightly sharpening the inside and blurring the outside. The outside blur makes the inside look sharper.

Controls

Blur ranging from 0 – no blur to 100 – very blurred.

Sharpen Radius/Amount/Threshold precise control of a sharpening effect. If you want to blur, set Sharpen Amount to 0.

Brightness changes the overall brightness: 1 – no change, less than 1 darkens, more than 1 brightens

Contrast increases or reduces the contrast: 1 – no change.

Saturation increases or reduces the saturation: 0 – no change.

Centre choose the location of the process area – drag on the on-screen control to set this more precisely (unless you apply this effect to a Title or other generator with on screen controls.

Width + Height controls the size of the process area – drag the handles in the centre of the edges of the on-screen control to set these more precisely.

Angle controls the angle of the process area – drag the corners of the on-screen control to set this more precisely. Note that if you keyframe this value you cannot animate smoothly from positive angles to negative angles. For example, if you animate from 5º to 355º the animation will do almost a full revolution via 180º. To get the same effect, animate from 185º to 175º.

Area Roundness controls how round the corners of the area to be processed: 0 – square, click and drag the number for larger roundess values, which changes the process area from rectangular to oval.

Area Feather values greater than 0 soften the edge of the process area.

Area Visible click this to see a white shape that shows the size, position and feather of the process area.

On Screen Control the position and size control changes the brightness of the clip when the clip (and the effect in the inspector) is selected. If this distracts, click this check box and then deselect the clip. When you next select the clip, the on screen control isn’t shown, but you can still set values for area position and size in the inspector.

Click to download the installer:

This plugin is free to download and use, but if you’d like to show your appreciation for my work, please donate here:

Once installed, you’ll find it the Alex4D section of the Effects browser:

It defaults to slightly sharpening the inside and blurring the outside. Choose the ‘inside’ area with the on screen control and change the values for inside and outside to see the effect in action.

If when you try to run the installer you get a message stating it can’t be opened “because it was not downloaded from the Mac App Store” – your Mac OS X security preferences are protecting you. To change them, or work around this, visit this post at blog.alex4d.com.

If when you apply this plugin, your Final Cut viewer turns blue, your version of Final Cut Pro X is older than 10.0.6, if you sign into the Mac App Store with the Apple ID that bought your copy, you can download the free update. If you can’t do this, there is a workaround at this post at blog.alex4d.com.