Let’s face it.
Apple Motion has a lot more, and honestly,
way better tools and effects than Final Cut Pro.
But, some of you may not have Motion,
and even if you do,
if you need a specific tool or effect for your project,
it’s kinda a pain in the a** to round trip your clips
from Final Cut Pro to Motion and back,
just for a specific effect.
Well now, you don’t have to.
My friend and a fellow YouTuber Dylan Bates
has brought over over 100 tools and effects
available in Motion to Final Cut Pro.
So today, we’re taking a look at Dylan’s extremely useful
Motion Tools plugin for Final Cut Pro.
When you first download this plugin,
the folder it comes with all the assets you need.
It also comes with some really useful extra information,
including a simple video showing you how to install this plugin,
as well as a troubleshooting guide, in case you have any issues.
Once installed, in Final Cut Pro,
you can find all the Motion Tools in the effects browser,
under the Motion Tools category.
This plugin comes with over 100 tools and effects,
nicely organized into categories,
making it super simple to find the effect you need.
Let’s go through a few of these,
and I’ll try and demo one or two from each category.
First up is the Basic category.
Here, you get some simple, but very useful effects.
For example, the fade in/out effect, does exactly what is says it does.
When you add it to your clip, you get a nice fade in at the start,
and a fade out at the end.
In the inspector, you get a few controls,
so you can adjust the speed of the fade,
and even offset the start and end times of your animation.
Another nice effect in this category is the motion path effect.
When you add this to your clip,
you get these handy on-screen controls for animating motion in your image.
For example, if you want to move this logo across the screen,
just use the on screen controls to set the start and end points,
and your logo follows the path you defined.
What makes this effect better than key framing,
which sucks in Final Cut Pro,
is you can adjust the speed of your movement.
You can Ease In, Ease Out, Accelerate, Decelerate and more,
for nice smooth motion in your animation.
The next category includes what is probably
one of my favourite effects in this pack.
The Overshoot effect.
I love using this for titles.
You just drag and drop it on a title clip,
and you get this cool bounce animation.
There’s a bunch of parameters you can adjust here
to make it look exactly the way you want.
It’s a simple effect, but an awesome way to animate your text.
In the Blur’s category,
you’ll notice some effects have a plus beside them,
like this Gaussian Blur effect.
This means this effect comes built into Final Cut Pro,
but Motion Tools gives you a few extra controls.
There’s also a few blur effect here you don’t get in Final Cut Pro.
The gradient blur effect blurs only a part of your image,
slowly fading out across your frame.
With the channel blur effect,
you can blur only specific color channels,
for a very unique look.
The borders category also contains a super useful effect
not included with Final Cut Pro.
While you can add a border around your image in Final Cut Pro,
you can only add it around the outside of your frame.
If you have a graphic with a transparent background,
there’s no way to add an outline or a border to it.
For that, in Motion Tools, we have the stroke effect.
Adding this to your graphic,
adds a border around your graphic, and not your video frame.
And there’s a lot of parameters you can adjust here
to make it look exactly the way you want.
In the color category,
there’s quite a few cool color effects you get with this pack,
and one of my favourites, is Color Reduce.
This let’s you take your video clip,
and reduce the image to a specified number of colors.
You add this to your video clip,
select the number of colors,
and choose the colors you want to use.
Not sure how practical this effect is,
but I sure love the way it looks.
The distortion category comes with the most effects in this pack.
One of my favourites here is the Black Hole effect.
If you add this effect to text and keyframe it,
you get a really cool text animation.
Add this effect to your title clip,
place your playhead close to the end of your title,
set the amount to zero and add a keyframe.
Move about 5 frames ahead,
and bring up the amount slider until your text is gone.
If you play back,
this effect makes it look like your text
is getting sucked into a black hole.
Really cool.
Let’s keep going.
The glow category also comes with quite a few effects.
My favourite are Glint,
which adds a nice cool glowing effect to your highlights,
and the Overdrive effect.
This is a pretty extreme look, but depending on your project,
might be exactly what you need.
Under this, we have a couple keying tools,
which are pretty self explanatory,
and in the Miscellaneous category,
we get Motion Blur!
We have three types, light, medium and heavy,
and I’’m still not sure why Apple doesn’t just add it to Final Cut Pro.
There’s no adjustments with these,
you just pick the amount of blur you want,
and drag that preset over your clip.
Render out your clip, and you get this nice,
subtle Motion Blur effect.
The sharpen and Unsharpen mask effects
are pretty self explanatory too,
so let’s jut move onto the looks category.
You get some really cool stuff here,
like this edges effect,
a posterize effect,
and I really like this wavy screen look.
I’ll skip over the tile category,
and go straight to another one of my favourite effects,
the Strobe effect.
What this does, is it gives you that choppy,
low frame rate look.
You just add this effect to your clip,
and up in the inspector, set your frame rate.
So if we set to to 5,
it makes it look as if our clip was shot at 5 frames per second.
It’s a bit of a novel effect,
but I love using this in my projects.
Super useful if you edit music videos.
As far as plugins go for Final Cut Pro,
this is one of the most useful plugins I’ve ever used.
Dylan did a great job here.
And, if you’re one of the three people here
who don’t know who Dylan Bates is,
I’ll link his channel in the description below.
Go check it out, some amazing Final Cut Pro and Motion Stuff there.
He even did a 2 hour livestream,
where he explains every single effect you get with this preset.
Trust me, this will be the best 25 dollars
you’ll ever spend on Final Cut Pro.
Thanks for watching.
Now go buy this plugin and check out Dylan’s channel.