Stop Ignoring These Amazing Final Cut Pro Effects

You guys really enjoyed my last video on cool built-in effects you already own, so here's a whole bunch more. Everything here is already in Final Cut, no plugins required.

Gaussian Blur (and a skin-smoothing trick)

Most of you know Gaussian Blur can blur a shot so you can lay text or pop-ups over it. Set the blur to 0, hit the keyframe button, move over a few frames, and bring the blur up. Do the reverse when you want it to fade back out. Pro tip: press Control V (or right-click and hit Show Video Animation), go to Gaussian Blur, and set your keyframes with Option K (K as in keyframe). Seeing the animation makes it way easier to control the fade in and out, and you can drag the points out for a more gradual fade.

Here's a fun one: Gaussian Blur can also smooth skin. Add the effect, hit the mask button, and create a color mask. Drag over your subject's skin, then hit view mask so you can see what's selected. White is what gets blurred, so play with the HSL parameters (usually just the luma) until the skin is selected but the eyes, eyebrows, and lips are not. Bring the blur way down to just a couple of points, because subtlety is key, and their pores and blemishes soften while the eyes stay sharp. Want something more professional? The plugin Beauty Box looks infinitely better, but it's expensive, so don't impulse buy it unless you'll really use it.

Prism (and a fake shallow depth of field)

Prism adds a color-fringing effect along the edges in your shot. Apply it, hit the mask button, add a shape mask, then click the little arrow and hit invert so everything outside the circle gets the effect. That outer circle is your feathering, so the more space between the inner and outer circles, the more gradual it looks. Drop an oval over your subject, feather it a lot, and dial the amount to taste.

The same idea makes a fake shallow depth of field: add Gaussian Blur, add a shape mask, invert it, oval it over your subject, and crank the feathering. I like to lower the vertical amount because it looks closer to real in-camera depth of field. Then hit the keyframe button so any mask movement saves, move the mask to follow your subject at the start and end of the clip, and Final Cut fills in the movement between.

Flipped, Bad TV, and Dazzle

Flipped flips your shot with one click, I use this one quite often. Bad TV gives you a security-cam / VHS look, and if you pair it with the Crop and Feather effect (swing the height all the way up) you can fake a VHS letterbox without buying a plugin. Dazzle adds sparkle and stars to the brightest parts of your image. If it does nothing at first, raise the threshold, which is basically how bright something has to be before the effect kicks in. It'll grab stuff you don't want, so isolate it with a shape mask over just the bright object, and keyframe the mask if that object moves.

Censor with tracking

Censor is great paired with Final Cut's built-in tracking. Drag the effect right onto your viewer over whatever you want to censor, set the tracking size, and hit analyze. Once it's tracked, move the on-screen control over your subject and dial in how much censoring you want.

Film Grain and Drop Shadow

When you add Film Grain, immediately switch off the god-awful iMovie grain and use the realistic grain, then adjust to taste. If you want free grain that looks even better, I've got some film grain overlays you can grab. And Drop Shadow, this one I'm using constantly in my tutorials. Every pop-up I add has a drop shadow on it. The on-screen control is the shadow itself, so move and angle it however you like, or just nudge it off to the side and add some blur to separate a logo, text, or pop-up from the background.

Handheld, Letterbox, and Draw Mask

Handheld adds handheld shake to a locked-off tripod shot, just keep it subtle. Letterbox bakes in black bars for a cinematic look, but don't slap it on every clip, add it to an adjustment layer over the top instead. And Draw Mask is basically scissors for your clips. I use it to cut out tape overlays in my tutorials, but it's also how you build those slick masking transitions: add the effect, make points around the object you want to cut out, feather it, then keyframe your control points so the mask follows the movement. Drop the clip over the first one, switch it to composite, and that's the basic premise of a masking transition.