FXFactory Pro: A Great Set of Plug-Ins for Final Cut Pro

FxFactory is an incredibly useful and exciting bundle of plugin’s that fits into the Final Cut workspace extremely well. Over the last few days I’ve had the time to look over each plugin. This is what I thought of the plugin bundle.

 

Final Cut Pro has evolved since it’s creation from a small, generic way of editing film to a full blown editing suite that is used by major film companies as well as small independent creatives. The suite has plug in’s to suit most people’s basic needs from simple effects like colour correction to psychedelic distortion effects that will make your film look like it’s been sent through a paper shredder. The built in plug-ins can accomplish basic tasks but for some people, they just don’t do enough. This is where FxFactory Pro comes in. As stated on their website:

“FxFactory is a revolutionary visual effects architecture powering hundreds of plug-ins for Final Cut Pro, Motion, Final Cut Express and Adobe After Effects.”

And they’re not wrong there.

FxFactory is a free plugin management system that will allow you to store hundreds upon hundreds of plugins that integrate seamlessly into the Final Cut workflow. Each plugin that is installed into the software is synced into your Final Cut effect browser, an extremely useful feature if you’ve ever had the pain of installing plugins on their own.  Although the FxFactory software is free and it comes with free plug-ins, we won’t go into detail about those today as it is the ‘pro’ bundle that we’ll be reviewing today.

The FxFactory Pro bundle comes with a wide range of exclusive effects. Rather than having to design your own effects from scratch with the built in plugins, FxFactory has taken another approach. Each effect has a short list of available presets that you can apply to your footage whilst retaining the design your own style that most Final Cut users are familiar with. FxFactory Pro is priced at a reasonable $399. 170 plugins for $399 is not bad at all seeming as most professional plugin suites will charge the same amount for 4 or 5 different effects.

FxFactory offers the user hundreds of plug ins and each one is beautiful, memory efficient and easy to tweak and mould. It would be impossible to write about each plugin in this particular blog post, so instead I have found the FxFactory Pro Demo Reel so you will be able to see some of the wonderful plug ins the suite has to offer.

As you can see there is a wide variety of things that the plug in bundle can do. Tedious, boring tasks such as colour correction is now a thing of the past with the built in presets and the results speak for themselves. FxFactory Pro also gives the user the option of designing their own plug-ins! This is an incredible feature if some of the plug-ins are close but not exactly what you want. It does however take a little bit of technical ‘know-how’. If you think your plug-in is good enough for other people to use, you have the option of sharing it with the world for other creative individuals to try out.

On top of the effects you also have world class transitions for a swish, easy way of travelling between two different clips. Like the plugins each one of the transitions can be tweaked to your own liking in an easy slider-based fashion.

Verdict:

Overall FxFactory is an incredibly well thought out piece of software for the creative individual and major film companies. It speeds up the workflow well with it’s use of preset effects and each plug in can be tweaked to however you would like it. The $399 price tag is also very reasonable for what you get. It’s going to be very interesting to see how the bundle evolves with Final Cut X which is scheduled to be released later this month.

Rating: 4.5/5

You can buy or try out FxFactory Pro from their website.

Pros:

• 170+ extremly well thought out plug ins.
• The plugin’s presets are a fantastic starting point for designing complex effects.
• Each effect is seamlessly integrated into your Final Cut workspace
• FxFactory Pro is also cross platform. It works with Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, Motion and Adobe After Effects.
• Extremely fast rendering times.
• Option to create your own plugins and share them with the world.
• World class transitions as well as effects.

Cons:

• $399 price tag may be a little bit too high for some independent film makers.
• Some effects seam a little bit pointless and would struggle to fit in to a film properly.