May
Noise Industries, developers of VFX tools, and Ripple Training, known for their tutorials for Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Pro X (and lately also for DaVinci Resolve); have introduced a new collection of plugins called Callouts, exclusively for Final Cut Pro X.
This collection consists of 10 effects that can be used to highlight certain parts of the image. Some of them are arrows, with which you can point out certain elements; circles, as a “sandwich” to mark characters’ thoughts; magnifying glasses, to make a specific part bigger; or the typical arrows that go from one point to another on a map.
These types of effects may not be the ones we use the most in all our assemblies, but for certain projects they can be very useful, since they are easy to apply and can be modified. There are about 30 parameters to make these plugins more personal and not just use the default ones. You can change the color, the shape (making it bigger, smaller, wider or narrower), add shadows or smoothing, and even animate with keyframes. You can also mix and match several Callouts within the same clip or insert them into an exact frame with a duration thanks to the 3-point editing technique.
In this video you can see examples of all the effects.
Callouts for Final Cut Pro X is available through FxFactory (installing the latest version 3.0.3) for $49. You can also download the trial from here.
Tutorials
Here are two tutorials explaining how to apply the effects and how to modify their parameters to customize them. The first one briefly explains all the controls to change color, shape, keyframes, etc. The second one is more detailed and explains more in depth all the processes.
