Final Cut Pro gives you a suite of power tools for compositing, titling, and enhancing your clips with filters and motion effects.   Compositing — superimposing or layering multiple video or graphics clips over one another in a sequence to create visual effects — is where a lot of the magic happens. Final Cut Pro allows you to superimpose up to 99 layers of video together.   Final Cut Pro 2 is unique in that it seamlessly integrates — within the application itself — a suite of powerful tools for compositing, titling, and enhancing your video clips with filters and motion effects. And Final Cut Pro supports Adobe After Effects plug-ins. So whatever type of nifty effects you’re looking for, chances are you’ll find them among the hundreds of After Effects plug-ins out there.   Using motion effects and keyframing Every graphics and video clip has a set of corresponding motion settings. You can use these motion settings to resize, move, rotate and stretch your clips — and make them transparent. By fine-tuning a video clip’s motion settings, you can change its geometry to move, shrink, enlarge, rotate and distort the clip to achieve the effects you want. And nearly all your effects can be keyframed, allowing you to control their parameters. Using keyframes, you can animate the motion effects of clips in your sequence. You can also adjust the parameters of filters to create dynamic visual effects that change over time.   Think of being able to key the blue out of a blue screen clip to super your actors against a haunted moonscape. Or to add people to scenes — or whisk them out — on a whim. Or having everything you need to create a multilayered sequence of video and graphics clips at different levels of opacity to use as background for your title sequence (you can, for example, use Final Cut Pro’s ability to adjust the transparency of clips to blend a semi-transparent image of a hawk in the sky over the video image of a building for your opener).     In effect, what used to be one of the most expensive and labor-intensive aspects of movie-making back in the glory days of Hollywood can now be accomplished on your G4 with Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro 2 comes with Cinema 4D GO 3D modeling, animation and rendering software from Maxon Computer and Commotion DV painting and rotoscoping software from Pinnacle Systems. When you need serious Post Production, you can pair Final Cut Pro with with top-flight visual effects and animation applications like Hollywood FX, Knoll Light Factory and Commotion Pro 3.1 (that was used to make the mattes for those spectacular arena battle scenes in the blockbuster hit Gladiator). Dual Powered Check out Duality, an entirely bluescreened tribute to Star Wars that’s every bit as remarkable as a Jedi mind trick. Star Wars aficionados Mark Thomas and David Macomber made Duality on a shoestring budget — with no sets, no locations, and just two props. Director of photography Kevin Jones used two miniDV cameras — a Canon XL1 and a Canon GL1 — running in progressive (non-interlaced) Frame Movie mode. Thomas and Macomber transferred the footage to their Macs via FireWire, and the fun began.     Thomas and Macomber used an assortment of Mac hardware — some of it old — for the earlier stages of the project, but then harnessed the twin-engined firepower of dual-processor Power Mac G4s to finish the job in post-production. Naturally enough, they did their editing and sound effects editing in Final Cut Pro.