Two new sets of plugins from MotionVFX. One click movie look colour grading with mLUT and many creative animation options with mCharacter 2.
LUTs or lookup tables seem to be the colour grading flavour du jour. MotionVFX has released mLUTS, a $49 pack of grades based on familiar movie colour palettes. The good news is that they work with many other NLEs and compositing software, not just FCPX.
Szymon from MotionVFX explains:
Look-up tables are widely used by professionals in biggest cinematic productions. These matrixes of data provide a way to grade your footage in a very precise way without loosing the fluency of the workflow at the same time.
We created this set of 30 LUTs inspired by the most famous movies to take your grading to a higher level. By using our mLUT you can now give a truly cinematic colorization to your shots and make them look just as awesome as the grandest motion pictures. We picked the films that were known for their perfect grading and created a product that will let you put some life in your flat shots within a few clicks.
Our mLUTs are very flexible and universal, they will work in any software supporting look-up tables. You can use them with footage from any camera, the gradings will still look amazing and you can customize and adjust them with ease. If you always wanted something more in grading of your footage, mLUT is the answer.
They have produced a tutorial on mLUTS.
The next new product is a second pack of cartoon people that can be animated on their own or in groups, with and without the supplied backgrounds. mCharacter 2 is priced at $49 and contains 20 different looking cartoon characters.
Szymon tells us about mCharacter 2:
You guys welcomed mCharacter plugin with excitement and appreciation, which made us really happy. It opened a whole new range of possibilities and facilitated the creative process of our clients.
But we wanted to give you even more, and we will not rest until you have it! That’s why we created a big extension for the mCharacter pack! It includes 20 new characters, 10 backgrounds and 10 emoticons to use in your projects.
You can now add a visualization of certain emotions and moods to your protagonists, mix characters and backgrounds from both packs and build even more complex scenes. As usual we did our best to make everything work even faster and error-free, to give you working comfort everyone deserves.
We hope this cool group of fully customizable, diverse, pre-animated, cartoon personages with a bunch of extra stuff will let you shape some marvellous projects, animations, ads, promos and anything you have in mind with ease. We present to you mCharacter 2!
Checkout the tutorial video, we didn't know that you could use a picture of a real person's head to go on top of a cartoon body.
Worth noting that the characters will also work in Motion too.
I am the Editor-in-Chief of FCP.co and have run the website since its inception ten years ago.
I have also worked as a broadcast and corporate editor for over 30 years, starting on one inch tape, working through many formats, right up to today's NLEs.
Under the name Idustrial Revolution, I have written and sold plugins for Final Cut Pro for 13 years.
I was made a Freeman of Lichfield through The Worshipful Company of Smiths (established 1601). Though I haven't yet tried to herd a flock of sheep through the city centre!
Current Editing
2020 has been busy, the beginning of the year was finishing off a new property series (cut on FCP) for Channel 4 called The Great House Giveaway. I also designed and built the majority of the graphics as Motion templates. It has been a great success and the shows grabbed more viewers in the 4pm weekday slot than any previous strand. It has been recommissioned by C4 for 60 episodes, including prime-time versions and five themed programmes. The shows have also been nominated for a 2021 BAFTA.
Although both were postponed to later in the year, I worked again on ITV's coverage of the Tour de France and La Vuelta. 2020 was my 25th year of editing the TdF and my 20th year as lead editor. The Tour was the first broadcast show to adopt FCPX working for multiple editors on shared storage.
BBC's Snooker has played a big part in my life, I've been editing tournament coverage since 1997. I'm proud to be part of a very creative team that has pioneered many new ideas and workflows that are now industry standard in sports' production. This is currently an Adobe Premiere edit.
Covid cancelled some of the regular corporate events that I edit such as trade shows & events. I was lucky however to edit, from home, on projects for Amazon Kindle, Amazon Black Friday, Mastercard and very proud to have helped local charitable trust Kendall & Wall secure lottery funding.
As for software, my weapon of choice is Final Cut Pro and Motion, but I also have a good knowledge and broadcast credits with Adobe Premiere Pro, MOGRT design and Photoshop.
Plugin Design & Development
I'm the creative force behind Idustrial Revolution, one of the oldest Final Cut Pro plugin developers. It hosts a range of commercial and free plugins on the site. One free plugin was downloaded over a thousand times within 24 hours of release.
I also take on custom work, whether it is adapting an existing plugin for a special use or designing new plugins for clients from scratch. Having a good knowledge of editing allows me to build-in flexibility and more importantly, usability.
FCP.co
Now in its 10th year and 4th redesign, running FCP.co has given me knowledge on how to run a large CMS- you are currently reading my bio from the database! Although it sounds corny, I am pretty well up on social media trends & techniques, especially in the video sector. The recent Covid restrictions has enabled live FCP.co shows online. This involves managing a Zoom Webinar through Restream.io to YouTube and Facebook.
The Future
I'm always open to new ideas and opportunities, so please get in touch at editor (at) fcp.co. I've judged film competitions, presented workflow techniques to international audiences and come up with ideas for TV shows and software programs!
