Multiple Effects in One Fell Swoop

I have a friend named Tony, I won't use his last name but suffice it to say, those who know me will know who I'm talking about. Tony is a DP of impeccable standards and also has a history as an "old school" CMX Editor. Amazingly enough a lot of "editors" these days don't know what CMX is.

Tony has been intrigued by my interest in Final Cut Pro and in June 2002 came by my office to chat, catch up, and talk shop. Now remember, Tony is old school and in a classic way. He has a hard time seeing the future because he is so enamoured with the past. Sometimes that love of the old ways causes you to think thru things and eventually come up with a cool trick to work smarter. This story is just such an example of that.

I was showing Tony a piece that I had recently cut and showing him how I did some of the effects. His immediate response wasn't, "wow that's cool" but "Can you automate that?" I had grown complacent with the drag and drop nature of how I was doing things until Tony caused me to find a much faster way to do things. Let me show what I figured out.

1. The Look

First of all this is not a button for button click tutorial on how I achieved a look but how I was able to do it faster. The look is found in the sound bites of this piece. It is basically a feathered blurry edge that I had applied to several clips. I call it the "Britney Blur" because it was used extensively in the Britney Spears video "Baby One More Time"

Now luckily I had figured out that you could drag from the FILTER WINDOW to a bin to save your settings. Frankly it took me too long to figure that out. This allows you to save your GAUSSIAN BLUR settings and your MASK SHAPE settings and your MASK FEATHER settings, which in and of itself is really cool.

2. Can you do it Quicker?

So then Tony says, can you gang those three effects together? Hmmm... interesting thought. At this point what I did was created NEW BIN and dragged all the effects into the TONY BIN. At this point you can drag that whole bin full of effects onto one clip and wammo. All three effects can be applied simultaneously. Great time saver.

NOTE

It may be necessary to order your EFFECTS in the BIN into the order that they need to be applied. This is easily done but numbering your EFFECTS 01, 02, 03, etc.