fcp experts(help?)

Ok so I've been using FCPX for roughly 7-8 months now and I still don't quite have it all figured out.

I'm looking at this video and I really can't determine what effects were used.


( What effect was used at 0.01 blur or some type of lighting effect? and at 0.04 was that a light leak or transition or yet another blur effect?) and is that gaussian blur? and was that a speed ramp effect at 0.19 seconds?)

In my defense I did try to figure it out on my own just quite couldn't figure it out.

Simply add a Gaussian blur and keyframe it. Could be easily rigged as an effect in Motion. Looks like some light leak/flash (ugh, like we've not seen those enough, I feel ill) added on top of it.

BenB ever the fcpx and motion guru Yes I assumed that it was a gaussian blur I just couldn't figure out where the light was coming into playing so I guess I was pretty spot on with what I thought it was which was blur and light leak. And yes the light leaks are overused and very cliche but I can't help but to love them .

In terms of keyframing though how high would you have the blur and what would you set it to, to achieve a similar effect to the ones in the video. I've tried it and brought it down to like 30 and fastforwarded the clip a little and made the outpoint 0. My effect didn't look like that though.

At second glance, they're also using some sort of glow effect, also. This is something I'd build in Motion, where it'd be easier. But you could do it in FCP, too. Resolve would do this very quickly.

Davinci resolve? And yeah I know motion is like the best thing to use but after linda tutorials and ripple training its still a foreign concept to me. However, I must admit I kind of skimmed through the tutorials. I would love to master motion it just seems like its so hard and everytime I try to do the tutorials they seem so long .

Though we're seemingly inundated with light leaks & lens flares these days, I think it works well in this piece, upping the romantic aspect with the blurs & glows. Seemed like their audio was peaking at points though, maybe it's just the surround plugin on my MacBook. For a second though, I was almost sure that was a young Rob Lowe. It also looks like they're keyframing another effect with flash transitions of saturated color going to desaturated or almost black & white. Add a glow to that final desaturated look as you flash into the next scene. Some of the flash transitions are with colors instead of white. So it looks like the beginning of a saturated clip comes in with a colored flash, rapidly desaturates to almost black & white then keyframed glow & blur as we flash out with white, repeat, juggle, add titles & audio, fade to black. It's all happening pretty quick as those clips are only a few seconds each. It works for me though.

I shyed away from Motion for a long time. But when I did start to learn it, I found you pick it up pretty quickly. Once you learn to "think Motion". Just like AE or Smoke or anything complex, the initial hump of learning to think like the app is the toughest part. After that, it all flows. One step at a time.

What tutorials are you looking at, btw? Because I teach Motion and I always do it in small segments.