The plug-in ecoverse has certainly expanded in the past several months with two major NLE upgrades from Adobe and Apple. According to Adobe, most of your existing CS5 and 5.5 plug-ins will work inside CS6 because not much was changed in the effects plug-in API. And while it is true that After Effects CS6 includes more ray-tracing and 3D tools, that doesn't mean your existing 3D AE plug-ins are now obsolete, either. Many plug-ins, like Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator Pro, will take you much further faster than the bundled 3D tools now inside AE. And if you don't have an NVIDIA card to make AE's newest 3D effects play back as they are meant to, you won't get the same speed that many plug-ins already have under the hood. If you do have a card, many plug-ins have options for OpenGL rendering and tend to be card agnostic.
FxPlug developers didn't have it as easy when Apple released Final Cut Pro X last year, but now that most have had plenty of time to understand Apple's rewritten API, plug-ins for Final Cut Pro X are popping up faster than Instagram photos in your Twitter and Facebook feed.
CrumplePop was vocal early on about its support for Final Cut Pro X (even before Apple officially released it, in fact) and continues to add FCPX plug-ins to its lineup. Offerings range from the newer TransiMatic ($75) and Lumineux, a light leaks generator that was released in April 2011. Editors Adam Tillman-Young & Peter Dean used CrumplePop's FCPX plug-in Lumineux in the music video from J*DaVeY, at top. "The original idea was to make a video that was reminiscent of the 60s or 70s combined with modern editing," Dean told CrumplePop on its blog. "The light leaks and transitions in Lumineux fit with that aesthetic perfectly."
CrumplePop's new Platinotype ($75), above, brings the look of vintage platinum processing to your video work and works inside FCPX and keeps all the details sharp in both shadows and highlights. It may be more than double the price, but the newly FCPX updated Digital Film Tools Film Stocks v1.0.2, which sells for $195, includes a total of 288 analog photographic film presets but also a pretty flexible interface that lets you create custom film stock presets as well as layer multiple stocks at once. Digital Film Tools other FCPX plug-ins include PhotoCopy, Rays, reFine and Tiffen Dfx, a $600 suite of plug-ins that digitally replicates more than 2,000 glass filters and optical lab processes and photographic effects from 70-year-old photographic filters and lens accessories maker Tiffen.
Digital Film Tools Film Stocks
A new source, FCPeffects.com, offers some basic effects for a decent price. In the $39 Organic Light Leaks you get 150 optically captured, 1080p ProRes files that work with After Effects, Premiere, Motion, FCP7, and Avid Media Composer. control & customization with the bonus companion plugin for FCPX. The company now offers 27 FCPX-only plug-ins including Screen Splitter, 3D Perspective, BG Advanced Masking Tools, Whip Pan & Tilt Transition Bundle and Miniaturize, for creating a tilt-shift look inside FCPX with a few easy clicks.
Noise Industries' FxFactory, the free software that lets you run trials and buy a range of effects, was recently updated to 3.0.3. The FxFactory engine taps the graphics card in your system to knock out hardware-accelerated previews and renders. Many of the effects are also free. Yesterday, Noise was offering an updated version of its FxFactory Pan and Zoom effect for free for FCP, Motion and AE.
The newest company to join the FxFactory family of effects is Luca Visual FX, which has a suite of effects, The Grunge Collection, that include filmic effects like Sprocket Slip and Film Leaders. Other new FxFactory plug-ins include Punchline ($49) and Rolling Credits from SUGARfx.
In terms of camera import support in FCPX, Sony has recently released its XDCAM PDZK-LT2 – Camera Import Plug-In v 1.0 for FCPX. You can use the plug-in to ingest video shot on Sony SxS cards in either XDCAM EX format (FAT/.MP4) or XDCAM HD422 memory format (UDF/.MXF), which you get out of the PMW-100 and PMW-500.
