The Worst Final Cut Pro Plugin That I Use Every Day

If you've watched the video above, you know it's a roast. Dylan Bates (The Final Cut Bro) sponsored that video, so naturally I spent the whole thing calling his plugin dog water. The truth, and the reason the joke works: Pro Zooms is my most used and most recommended plugin, and the recent update made it even better. Here's the straight version of everything it does.

Zooming in, minus the keyframes

Pro Zooms lets you zoom into parts of your shot you want to highlight, way too easily. You drag the preset over your clip, adjust the amount and position of the zoom using a box on your viewer, and you're basically done. Sliders at the top control the speed of the in and out animation.

Compare that to doing it manually in Final Cut Pro: setting keyframes and adjusting scale to build the same move ends up looking rough, and it takes forever. That's the whole pitch.

The update also added a bunch of realism options: motion blur on the presets so the movement looks natural, a prism effect for RGB split, a defocus section that mimics your camera racking focus, and built-in sharpening that kicks in when zoomed, in a way that honestly looks better than FCP's standard sharpen effect. There's also onion skin, which shows your original framing and your zoom target at the same time so you can line up your eyeline and make the zoom look natural.

The Infinite presets fix FCP's trimming problem

Here's a real Final Cut Pro problem: title presets like these are designed with fixed-length intros and outros, something like two seconds in and two seconds out. Trim the preset short because you only want a quick zoom, and you chop off the exit animation entirely. You get that ugly jump where the animation never plays out.

The update adds Infinite Zoom, Infinite Pan, Zoom Rig Infinite, and Ultra Pan Infinite: versions of the presets that are percentage-based instead of duration-based. The in and out animations scale to whatever length your title is, so you can make the zoom as short as you want and still get a clean animation. Make it really short and you've got a great screen pump effect.

Pro Pan

Throw Pro Pan underneath a Pro Zooms preset (make sure it's under it) and you can smoothly pan from one part of your shot to another. Adjust where the pan ends, use the circle control to add a zoom in or out along with the pan, tweak the motion blur, and you get an animation that's genuinely not possible to build smoothly with FCP's built-in tools.

Slow cinematic push-ins and pullbacks

People have claimed I use these in my intros and video portraits to add dynamic motion. No comment. For a slow Ken Burns style pullback, use Infinite Zoom, turn off the in animation, and set the out animation to 100% so the entire clip is one long move. Add a little rotation and a static drone shot suddenly looks like you're a much more skilled pilot than you are.

Pro Focus: the highlight pop-up

This one's for pointing things out: real estate videos, corporate work, tutorials, YouTube. A transparent box appears on your clip; move it over whatever you want to feature and the preset creates a pop-up of that area. Position it with on-screen controls, then hit the inspector for shape, zoom, size, outline colors (including gradients), glow, drop shadow, sharpening inside the pop-up, and background blur or brightness adjustments so your callout really stands out.

Ultra Pans and transition titles

Ultra Pans simulates a camera operator panning, tilting, and zooming to different spots in your shot, one motion after another. Great for guided sequences. There's also a set of title presets that act as transitions: put one over multiple pieces of media and everything underneath transitions together.

Zoom Rig

You know the screen tilt effect YouTubers use, with the pixel-popping computer screen look? Zoom Rig builds that. You can tilt, zoom, and move your shot in 3D space, and set rate parameters so footage keeps drifting after it animates in. Then stack on depth of field, sharpening, chromatic aberration (that color fringing people claim I really like), lens warp, and a grid plus pixelate option that makes the shot look like a camera filming a screen. There are tons of background options too, and none of them are complicated.

Everything's also in the effects browser

Every preset also exists as an effect you apply directly to clips instead of on top of them. Two reasons to care: your transitions stay clean, because the zoom or pan lives at the clip level and gets carried through the transition. And if you're working with higher resolution footage on a lower resolution timeline, the effect versions preserve that extra resolution when zooming. Though really, edit on a timeline that matches your clips and export lower if you need to.

The verdict (dropping the bit)

Pro Zooms is the plugin I reach for more than any other, and it's affordably priced. Grab it here, and use the code DYLANSUCKS for a discount. Dylan Bates and I have an ongoing arrangement about that code name. Good luck and Godspeed.