Final Cut Pro Quick Tip #58 FxPlug Support
By Stephen Schleicher

One of the new additions to Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 is the support for FxPlug, an image-processing plug-in architecture developed by Apple. Even if you don?t know what an FxPlug is, that?s okay; what it means is you have a whole new world of effects that you can access natively in Final Cut Pro.

FxPlug makes it possible for any company who has developed hardware-based or processor-based effects to load automatically in the Effects menu of Final Cut Pro. These could be OpenGL, CoreGraphics, or CoreImage. Unfortunately, the plug-ins need to be Universal Binary, which means at this point Adobe After Effects plug-ins will not work.

When you launch Final Cut Pro 5.1.2, it scours the plug-in directories looking for FxPlug effects and folders. Most third party applications will install an FxPlug directory automatically, as does Motion. Yes, this means you can use Apple Motion effects natively, and often in real time in Final Cut Pro.

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This quick tip is nice. In layman’s terms you can grab all of your FX plug-ins that are loaded from other applications located on your computer. So now I can use the same filters from Motion in FCP. Although Adobe isn’t in the game just yet. I guess that’s something we as Apple users need to keep knocking on their door to let them know that yes we do still use your products with FCP production suite. Although to do this you must have the latest version of FCP. That means the version that is universal, working with both Intell MACs and Power PC MACs.

Here is all you have to do. From the Effects Menu select Effect Availability and All Effects.

Now go check out your Effects bin. Open the Video Filters Folder and open the Blur Folder, notice in the Effect Class column it says FxPlug. If you do that is the FX that was brought into FCP.

Pretty cool tip.

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