Tuesday, January 15, 2008

FREE FINAL CUT PLUGINS FROM TOO MUCH TOO SOON.


e Too Much Too Soon Free FXScrips

Copyright 2002-2007 Mattias Sandström/Too Much Too Soon

These scripts are freeware, meaning you may copy and distribute them free of charge as long as they're kept intact, including the copyright message. Feel free to use the code as inspiration for your own scripts, but don't steal.

Install by copying this folder to your FCP or FCE plugins directory (Usually /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins). Have fun.

The Scripts

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Slow Motion (New July 2007)
Change the speed of interlaced video to 50% then apply this. It will alternate between the fields creating the smoothest slow motion possible.

Regrain (New July 2007)
When working with film footage it's either often necessary to remove the grain before performing things like sharpening and keying, or some filters you add like diffusion and time remapping will remove grain that you wanted to keep. Drop the origina clip on this filter, and it will lift the grain from it and add it back. If you regrain something that was previously "noise reduced" make sure you use the same settings and you will get near lossless performance.

Smart Anamorphic (Updated July 2007)
Stretches 4:3 footage to 16:9 without cropping. Make sure you remove any automatically added distortions in the motion tab before you apply this. Currently in beta so please send all the feedback you got. This update stretches in a more subtle way, more like the panorama setting on many widescreen tv's.

Noise Reduction (Updated July 2007)
New Heavy Blur method may remove more noise, but may also create an artificial look. Mainly meant for web video and for footage that will be Regrained, see the new filter. You can also chose to show edges, to fine tune what's considered detail in the image and what is noise. Removes video noise and grain by averaging pixels where there's no detail. Aside from giving you a cleaner image, this can really improve the results you'd get from most compression schemes.

Smart Noise Reduction
Reduces noise considerably by averaging frames where there's no motion. Needs to be first in the filter chain to work properly.

Smart Deinterlace
Deinterlaces motion areas only, maintaining maximum sharpness and minimizing artifacts. Needs to be first in the filter chain to work properly.

Custom Diffusion
Add diffusion with more control than the old one, but otherwise the same effect.

Hair Removal
Just razor on each side of the frame with the hair or dust speck, draw a line over it, select whether to replace it with the previous or next image, add an optional offset, and it magically disappears. You'll find that simply drawing the line is sufficient in most situations.

Clock
Generates a digital clock, for countdowns or whatever. The update adds the option to select which figures are shown, plus you can now count hours too. The clock doesn't animate on its own, so you have to keyframe the "milliseconds" slider. I thought that would be the most flexible way of handling this...

Flashframe
A flashframe transition. Now with optional gradual pre and (!) post blur and luma clamping for legal levels.

Color Balance
Adjusts color balance without changing the luminance. Works a little like the built in color balance filter as well as the Quicktime RGB filter, but much better and more intuitive than both.

Color Balance 3-way
As above but with separate controls for shadows, midtones and highlights. Similar to the color balance tool found in many image manipulation tools for stills.

Clock
Generates a digital clock, for countdowns or whatever. The update adds milliseconds to the display. I suggest you crop the frame to select the number of decimals you need. The clock doesn't animate on its own, so you have to keyframe the "seconds" slider. I thought that would be the most flexible way of handling this...

Scratch Removal
Removes vertical scratches from old and damaged film. Move the sliders (you can enter fractions by hand for fine tuning) until the guide covers the scratch and then uncheck the guide box. Scratches like these are often stationary but otherwise the filter is completely keyframeable.

Anamorphic Squeeze
The benefit of doing this using a filter is that the letterbox area becomes usable for other filters applied to the same clip, such as Timecode Reader. This is not the case when you use the anamorphic checkbox or the motion settings. Make sure you undo any other squeeze before applying this.

Shadow/Highlight Gamma
Applies gamma correction to the highlights and shadows independently. Originally designed to correct the excessive contrast often found in film material transfered on a film chain, but feel free to use it whichever way you want.

Black & White
Offers more control over the conversion to black & white than simple desaturation. Use it to emulate different b&w filmstocks as well as camera filters. I like to use 50% red and 50% green and lose the blue altogether for that orange filter look.

Chroma Resample
Resamples the chroma channel using FCP's bicubic interpolation instead of Quicktime's built in nearest neighbor algorithm. Makes keying a lot easier and generally improves the image, especially if used with the Black & White or Fast Deinterlace filters.

Diffusion
Silk stocking, Soft Filter, ProMist, LoCon, Diffusion and so on -- this filter does it. Just experiment with the settings. Normal, Overlay and Screen seems to be the most useful transfer modes, but don't let that stop you.

Speeder III
Speed ramping tool. Ramps by keyframing the frame number or progress percentage. Works on the clip it's applied to, but if you want to change the duration you can apply it to a scrap clip and drop the clip to ramp in the source clip box.

Fast Deinterlace
Same as the built in, but it renders more than twice as fast. And now it shouldn't destroy the last line of video as it sometimes did before.

Black Restore
If you've lost the blacks for some reason, like video noise, bad telecine or dirty VHS heads, or even because of some filter you applied, this one's for you. It gives the image its punch back, with deeper blacks and better saturation in dark colors, without changing the brightness of the rest of the image.

Blend Fields
This does the exact same thing as the famous "double deinterlace filmlook method," but it renders *a lot* faster.

Mosaic
Well, mosaic.

Reduce Flicker
Same as Blend Fields, but only blends where there's interlace artifacts. Useful for removing flicker in text and still images while preserving as much sharpness as possible.

RGB Gamma
A simple but effective color corrector.

Typewriter
Types the letters one at a time. Uses keyframes to control the speed, which allows for a more "real" and "natural" typing look. Try it with the Harting font.

http://www.mattias.nu/plugins/


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