If you haven’t checked out the plug-ins from FX Factory, published by Noise Industries, in a while, you are missing some treats.
Noise Industries is headquartered in Boston, Mass, and provides both a development platform and marketing engine for a variety of 3rd-party plug-in developers. FX Factory has been around since FXPlug was added to Final Cut Pro – somewhere around version 5 of Final Cut Pro.
From an editors point-of-view, FX Factory simplifies buying, adding or removing plug-ins (enabling or disabling) with a simple button/checkbox system built into the FX Factory application. Even better, every plug-in comes with a free trial and 30-day money back guarantee.
WHAT IS LUCA VISUAL EFFECTS?
“Our team of creatives specializes in film and animation delivering unique visual FX, which are sure to dazzle. With clients ranging from the film, music, sports and advertising industries the world over, as well as film and audio visual passionate users of various level of experience, Luca Visual FX delivers a great variety of both pre-designed and On-Demand visual FX. Our Final Cut Pro X (and 7), Motion, Premiere Pro and After Effects plug-ins as well as our unique cross-platform Alpha Transitions packs, bundles, and individual downloads offer easy to use effects, mo-graphs and transitions for adding a stylish touch to your project.” (Luca Visual FX website)
Title: Luca Visual FX Spectrum
MSRP: $79 (US)
Requires: FX Factory, supports Final Cut Pro X, Motion, After Effects, Premiere Pro
Website: www.lucavisualfx.com
WHAT IS SPECTRUM?
“Spectrum is a bundle of two very customizable generators for all hosts supported by FxFactory designed to create stylized light and color effects. Light Effect Generator can be used either to create unusual backgrounds or subtle overlays. Light Transition Generator allows the user to create freely interpreted quick light and color transitions over a given cut point.” (Luca Visual FX website)
NOTE: The image above is the default look for this plug-in.
Every Spectrum effect is animated, and contains a variety of presets to choose from. Here, for example, is “Pencil Glass.”
Each image is built from three elements:
Here is the Electric source, with Morphing Light and Soft Color Shading effects applied.
In addition to choosing the look of the effect, you can modify and keyframe (animate) a host of other useful controls.
EXTRA CREDIT
In addition to the full-screen Light Effects Generator, Luca also include the Light Transition Generator, which creates stunning visual transitions from one full-screen clip to another. For best results, keep these short – around 20 frames and don’t use blend modes. Each generator has multiple variations of each light effect contained in each clip.
NOTE: These effects all need to render before they will play smoothly.
SUMMARY
Built on the solid FX Factory platform, Spectrum, from Luca Visual FX, provides endlessly fascinating visual backgrounds and transitions for Final Cut Pro X. For those looking for a variety of motion backgrounds to use behind images or info-graphics, Spectrum makes the process fun and flexible with a great number of aesthetic choices providing a wide variety of looks.
Both the FX Factory download and the 30-day trial of Spectrum are free. If you like it, great. If not, uninstalling one or both of these downloads is also easy. Treat yourself to something different and give Spectrum a try.
