Looks like to coast is clear to hit the BUY button…

It looks like I can come out of my buyer’s remorse shelter and finally buy FCPX. I was waiting for NAB to conclude since my trial FCPX expired 2 weeks ago. I thought I might miss out on something if I bought FCPX just before NAB.

So anyway I have a clean slate. I own exactly ZERO video editing, finishing, effects, plugins or ANYTHING related to producing video. I think I’m going with FCPX, and the Mocha-Powered SliceX to take advantage of the NAB discount.

After seeing how far that takes me I’ll probably purchase Motion 5 next. If I’m not able to stabilize and remove fisheye (I have a GoPro mounted to a quadcopter) with FCPX and Motion, I’ll probably look into getting specialized plugins for these two functions.

Any thoughts or suggestions on my planned purchases?

Not sure what NAB had to do with purchasing FCP X.
But yes, there is a plugin for correcting the GoPro fisheye. I recently read on another thread here someone stating the FCPEffects plugin was nice.
www.fcpeffects.com/products/fisheye-removal-plugin

CrumplePop also makes a Go Pro fisheye corrector, as well as an HDR Go Pro plugin.
www.crumplepop.com/fisheyefixer/

I got to play with SliceX With Mocha at NAB, and it is very sweet.

I tried using to remove the fisheye from my footage using the FCPX native fisheye effect (using negative values). The results were awful. I’m hopeful that using a negative value in Motion 5 will give me better results. If not I’ll have to purchase one of the plugins.

I did see the GoPro HDR plugin from Crumplepop when I was researching plugins a few weeks ago. Of all the plugins I’ve seen, this was the one I truly did not understand. I must have bad taste because IMHO applying this effect makes the footage look decidedly worse. I never downloaded the trail, but looking at their “promo” video I found the footage to be worse when the plugin was applied. It makes the footage look artificially sharp and saturated. Which is how all GoPro footage looks when you shoot without the Protune option. The Crumplepop website recommends you shoot in Protune to use the HDR plugin. I say shoot with Protune turned off and save yourself $50 and some rendering time. But then I’m a newbie so what do I know.

Plug-In's should only be bought on a case-by-case basis; when you need a specific effect you buy the plug-in and pay for it from the budget for that project.

There might be sometime in the future when you need a specifically sharpened HDR look, and that will be the time when you buy it. Up until that point it will be useless to you, of course.

There are a lot of effects these days that purposely make your footage worse (glitches, static, light leaks, flares etc) - you only need them when you need them though - all of that stuff is junk until you do.

Agree with folks here. Get only what you need. I have paid more than I want for plug ins & effects, and found out I only use very few of them.

At least these stuff aren't that expensive therefore my wallet wasn't hurt too bad

I can vouch for the FCPEffects Fisheye Removal Plugin for my GoPro footage. Works great!

Steve

Check out "Template Master" on the app store (shameless plug alert) there's some free stuff. Everything on it, free apps and all, are currently HD but it's all going through a massively painstaking 4k/5k compatible upgrade at the moment.