I am not a Video professional. I do not make a living in Final Cut Pro, but I do use it for part-time post production work and personal projects. Therefore, I was excited to look at the new FCPX plugin from Ripple Training, Callouts.
From the general description and video that was supplied to me, it appeared to be the perfect plugin for almost any FCPX user, professional or personal. I was right, Callouts is a highly functional and fun plugin.
Let’s start by looking at the basics of Callouts. Callouts from Ripple Training is priced at $49, and is available exclusively for FCP X. It is a plugin that finds it use for sports videos, instructional videos and other fun projects. With Callouts, you can highlight or emphasize specific parts of your footage by using arrows, circles, magnifiers, text highlights, animated paths and more. Callouts is only one of the plugins that are part of the 10 effects on the FxFactory platform.
With Ripple Training Callouts, editors can:
- Control over 30 different parameters to easily customize the look of any Callout
- Move, rotate and shape Callouts using flexible on-screen controls
- Mix and match multiple Callouts on a clip
- Connect Callouts to hold frames using 3-point editing techniques
- Animate Callouts on and off screen, plus create more animation by keyframing parameters
You can apply the Callouts effects to either video or stills in FCPX by simply dragging and dropping the effect you want in the timeline and it creates a new track that you can easily work with in FCPX. Once applied, you can adjust everything about that effect. I was able to change the size, color and font face of the test used, I was able to change the location of the text and the other aspects of the effect with the many anchor points available in the effect. Not only was I able to grab the anchor point and physically move them in FCPX, but I was able to fine tune them using exact pixel locations in the inspector when I needed an exact alignment. I cannot emphasize how easy it was to take a supplied template effect and make it look exactly the way I wanted it to look, including 3D and even magnification effects. You can also add blurs to the foreground or background of the effect and much more.
As you would expect, the fine and talented folks at Ripple Training have tutorial videos made that can show you what Callouts can achieve with much more artistic results then I ever could hope to produce. Take a look yourself at: http://www.rippletraining.com/categories/templates-and-transitions/c/callouts-for-final-cut-pro-x.html.
I am certain you’ll wonder how you ever worked in FCPX without it.
