Plug-Ins for Final Cut Pro 7

On this page you will find two plug-ins available for free download on this page. Both plug-ins are for Final Cut Pro 7 only, and were written in the FCP Effects Builder. One is for 3perf footage burn-ins, the other one wiggles the picture.

3perf Footage Burn-In

The purpose of this plug-in is to burn the keycode into the frame throughout the source clips. (For an explanation of 35mm 3perf go here, and follow the link '35mm 3 perf'.)

Here are the default parameters the plug-in wakes up with:

The result on the first frame of the clip looks like this:

The " °1 " part tells us the current frame is in the first of the two short feet. The short feet have 21 frames each, and the third foot, marked " ° 3" has 22 frames. In window-burns done with evertz gear, the first short foot is indicated by the the little bar being in the top position, the second short foot is indicated by the middle position, and the the third, long foot is indicated by the bar at the bottom. See this page at evertz.com for more information.

The above default would simply act as a footage burn for 3perf, starting with 0 at the first frame of the clip.

Important: This plug-in counts each video frame as one film frame. If your telecine was not done at the same frame rate as the video, you need to use Cinema Tools to reverse-telecine first.

To set the plug in up for extrapolating 3 perf keycodes, you need to set it up somewhat like this:

And this results in this burn (on the first frame of the clip):

You can enter whatever you like as Label and Prefix, the text is going to be added to the burn window without any processing. The footage offset needs to be a number between 0 and 9999 to work properly. The frame offset needs to be a number between 0 and 21. Note that a frame offset of 21 only makes sense in feet with designation "°3", because it only exists in the long, third foot, not in the two first two, short feet.

The rest of the controls should be familiar from the standard Time Code Generator plug in.

A couple of hints: For 35mm 4 perf, the regular 35mm, you can achieve the same thing using the standard Time Code Generator plug in. The Frame Offset and the Perf Offset values can be manipulated nicely with the mousewheel, if you have one. Lastly, when you have found a set of parameters that you would like to use over and over, save the effect by dragging it into a bin.

The 3perf Footage plug-in is available for free download here.

Rainer's Wiggle

This was written for a no-budget short film that had some film transfered to HD video; and the film was supposed to be old footage from the 40's and 50's. But it looked very clean, and very steady.

To help with the look of aged film this plug-in wiggles the picture up and down, and/or sideways. Here are the controls in the viewer:

The Vertical Range, in percent of picture height, controls how far the picture is moved up and down. Likewise, the Horizontal Range, in percent of picture width, controls the displacement sideways. Both the V and H Volatilities control the maximum frame-to-frame movement of the picture, in percent of the respective Ranges.

The default values give a light vertical wiggle, very much like a gate weave. The default for the Horizontal Range is 0, no horizontal movement at all.

This plugin works on full frames only, which means that the same movement is applied to both video fields.

Rainer's Wiggle plug-in is available for free download here.

If you are interested in the source code, you can open this plug-in in your favorite text editor.

More About FCP Plug-Ins

To install the plug-ins decompress the downloaded files and copy the results to /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins. Then re-launch Final Cut Pro.