Main Problem is Poor Quality of Third Party Plugins.

Have spent hundreds lately on plugins and the quality is not dependable. Someone needs to put up a place where they can be reviewed. A few weeks ago I got a $99. package of titles and find that they don't provide for using outline which matches most of my other work. Email several times and they person who developed package doesn't work for outfit selling it and they will only pass the comments on. No response to fix it.
Another package, no provision for build-in and build-out. Some of this stuff seems obvious. Another transition that takes over 10 minutes to render and others that are slow and not using much of computer ability. Transitions by Apple render in seconds. Someone needs some quality control. Can Apple be expected to police this or offer plugins. Places where you expect the option of altering color is missing and the list continues. Don't really have time to download trial versions, but I guess this is what some would suggest. I know I am raining on someone's parade, but something should be said about this. Comments, please.

What plugins are you talking about?

Doing your research- reading reviews and looking at examples. And emailing the developer to make sure that functionality you need is there; this is all the responsibility of you as the consumer.

The rush of plug-ins available for FCPX was made them tempting at first- but quickly you realize what plugins meet your needs and abilities.

That said, I'd be all for a FCPX plugin review website. It's a growing business- and it can be a crowded and confusing marketplace.

Would love to see a review website that takes user's review.

I too have spent more than necessary on effects that are either not very useful or with poor quality

Thank you. That would be welcomed. Wasn't sure if I should name them because this is so widespread, but the one lacking outline is MoType. One of the long rendering is Light Grid where the transition that rotates takes forever. Could make a long list of those that lack basic things that one would expect, such as build-in and out and lacking color change. The sliders to set position are most welcome too, but unpredictable where you find them. I feel that some of these outfits are pushing out new products too fast with little attention to detail. Just think it is useful if everyone talks about it.

I've removed a reply and user from here as he was from a competing website that has content very very similar to ours.

I'll let you do the brainwork

Another point of concern is support. As with Tony's trouble in receiving a satisfactory response. I tried a trial plug, found their instructions almost incomprehensible. Unfortunately some technical people have difficulty communicating plain instructions in straightforward "layman's terms," choosing rather to complicate matters into a cryptic convoluted conundrum. Therefore after considerable time wasted, I was still unable to perform the desired effect. Frustrated, I trashed the plug.

Why don't we add a forum here where plugins are reviewed? Or is that already here with the 3rd Party Products forum? Or perhaps it might lead to a conflict of interest where someone who's an advertiser here is getting bad reviews. Not generally thought to be good for business...

Yes I am very wary of plugins. I tend to only install them if I'm sure I'll use them.
The good news is that at least with FCP X it's pretty easy to manage them.

As they can only live in two places AFAIK. Motion Templates/Effects and Library/Application Support

Could be better though. Would be a great feature if you could assign plugins to projects wouldn't it?

I, too, have the issue with a lack of review sites for FCP X and Motion plugins. My issue is from the other side of the fence though! I have plugins, which I think work very well, but no place to really show them off! I was lucky enough to have some face time at this site, but it still wasn't a review as much as an announcement that they exist.

If you find a resource, I would also be very interested in it!

If I am allowed to I would like to make a list of stuff I have and tell people which work and which not base on my experience.

Because anyone can make plugins trough Motion now, it's to be expected that quality Will be so and so.
You Also get MUCH more plugins than for any other NLE, but with more variable quality.

I get what you are saying, and a review site would be great. It's hard to Find real-world reviews of NLE plugins (this is the case for a lot of specialized software).

I had one plugin that I couldn't Really get but I had Really AWESOME support with Pipinator from Simon. I have mailed him a couple of times with bugs, and they always got fixed within hours, a maximum of a few days.
That's not all. Simon asked us how we used his plugin and what we wanted different as he said: you seem to Be one of the few powerusers of my plugin. We had some email doscussions and long story short: he made a version of his plugin completely for us. Designed it like we wanted, left out features that got in our way of working faster and added features (within the possibilities of what he could do within Motion) that we asked for.
It's service like I've never seen before and it's a positive story about the small developers making FCPX plugins.

I'm a FCPX editor and totally agree, i don't think it's just confined to FCPX though, i think it's the same sometimes for other creative apps too, i've had varying quality for things downloaded for after effects etc... (and as soon as someone like adobe add a marketplace to the Creative Cloud i'm sure it'll happen then for all their applications). I guess places like envato don't suffer this as much as they're regulated by someone who looks at the files.

Whether Apple has got something like a FCPX marketplace with approval like the app stores remains to be seen (it wouldn't surprise me if they did at some point).

I'm also the owner of the FCPX plugin review site peter removed the post for on this thread, if i can go on record as saying that i'm not trying to compete with this site (infact i am going to be linking to this site when we start adding links to free effects) all i started trying to do is gather links to all the effects/transitions/training that i could, in the hope that people would be able to rate or review them so the better ones would come out on top. I'm obviously not allowed to post the link to my site so i won't do, but it is out there as a work in progress. Hopefully this won't get removed either, just trying to be a community member and give something back.

As I have a good number of people following my blog I've had many requests to review plug-ins. I'm not sure about whether this is a good idea as I create plug-ins myself, so might not be as even-handed as might be needed ("This plug-in would have taken me 40 minutes to make myself... why is it so expensive!").

There a few sites that are creating Final Cut Pro web content, such as industry news and forums, that are run by people who rely on selling Final Cut Pro plug-ins. It would be honourable for these sites to make any links to commercial operations clear.

I'm hoping for an independent and relatively complete buyers guide site. It is a matter of whether a such a site can be supported by advertising from Final Cut Pro third parties.

Once there was someone we could trust, it would be up to us to submit reviews and comments to add to our combined knowledge (I would have to disclose that I create plug-ins so that other users would bear my position in mind when considering my views).


@Alex4D

PS: Peter, I hope you don't mind proposing a competitor for Final Cut Pro advertising on your site!

I agree Alex, whether it's me creating the review site or someone else, it has to to be independent or at least any conflicts of interest made clear. I don't sell any final cut pro plugins at the moment so would like to think i'm fairly independent. One of the problems i think is keeping up with all the new ones that get released, it'd be almost a full time job making sure everythings added in! I think something like this certainly needs a few people to work on it to make sure that it's kept up to date as much as possible.

Reviews of plugins is a great idea, I think the follow on posts from where free effects posted here is the ideal place for anyone to add opinions and comments on how they perform on specific systems. But that only really works for the templates posted here.

Personally I don't consider render times to be what constitutes poor quality. Apple's choice to only include fast render effects, transitions etc. as standard was an obvious one. There are things that can be done to optimise even some heavier Motion created templates, such as replacing effect heavy elements with exported/re-imported still images and/or video's. Baking them in so to speak.

It has some advantages but when you optimise templates in this way the media files then need to be stored on your system drive for FCPX to access.

For me the obvious problem still lies within FCPX, or perhaps Motion. Motion 5, After Effects etc. are for creating different types of work than an NLE. As such they come with the ability to do RAM previews, or even better, display at lower resolution/frame rates for heavy work.

Adding the ability to publish Motion Templates for playback inside FCPX has this missing. I think it's great to be able to create/work with effects heavy graphics stuff directly inside the NLE by the way of publishing.

But FCPX needs to be able handle what the Motion Template is throwing at it, just as Motion does. I think being able to publish the Render Settings menu from Motion would be ideal but I have a feeling Apple would rather FCPX could handle it automatically, just better than it does.

When it comes time to render it wouldn't speed anything up, but would mean less rendering and easier setting up of heavy templates.

Long rendering times alone is not the problem when one can see an expiation like something is very complicated such as a generator using multiple drop ins. What does not seem right is when you have very long rendering and you look at the Activity Monitor and very little is happening. Also notice when rendering most transitions from Apple, usually all the bars come up and it gets done fast. It seems that some of the people creating this stuff don't know how to do it efficiently like Apple. Should also say that I don't know how to do it ether or I would probably make my own transitions and generators.

Long rendering times alone is not the problem when one can see an expiation like something is very complicated such as a generator using multiple drop ins. What does not seem right is when you have very long rendering and you look at the Activity Monitor and very little is happening. Also notice when rendering most transitions from Apple, usually all the bars come up and it gets done fast. It seems that some of the people creating this stuff don't know how to do it efficiently like Apple. Should also say that I don't know how to do it ether or I would probably make my own transitions and generators.

Sorry Tony, I never meant to imply that. It was just the bit I was addressing, that's all.

Something to be aware of is that Apple put very simple working effects etc. in FCPX. There's stuff they couldn't do that would render fast either. It's not necessarily that they're better at it, more that they are strict on what they included.