The Final Cut Ecosystem

I work with many different editing systems, but for the past few years the majority of time has been with Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Although I enjoy working with Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro and others, in that time I’ve seen plenty of useful utilities and plug-ins grow up around Final Cut Pro and the Final Cut Studio applications. Like Pro Tools, After Effects and Photoshop, FCP lends itself to expandability in a way that enables you to trick out your edit bay far beyond a stock system.

This page is intended to provide links to many of these resources in one, easy-to-find compilation. It is by no means a complete list. Some of these tools are free, some are shareware – many are low cost. Of course, a few are expensive and only apply to facility and enterprise customers, but I’ve tried to cover a lot of bases. I routinely use or have tested many of the items on the list. There are many that I haven’t, so don’t interpret this list as any sort of endorsement on my part. It’s simply a place to start your search in making your NLE more powerful and productive.

This compilation is primarily FCP-centric and Mac-centric, but don’t assume that’s a given for every product here. Many of these developers also offer tools that are designed for other NLE environments. If you’re on Windows or Linux and/or don’t use FCP, just look around and see if there’s something for you.

I will try to keep this list current and accurate, so feel free to drop me a line if there is something particularly cool that I should add or if links change, are broken or become inactive. Thank you.

Plug-in Filters and Application Content for Final Cut Studio

Apple downloads for FCP
Apple downloads for video (general)1 z 1 FCP Tools
Alex Gollner
Andy Mees
Boris FX
CGM / Eiperle CGM
CHV Electronics
Coloruser forum grades for Apple Color
CoreMelt
Digital Film Tools
Digital Heaven
Digital Zoo / Simon Kirby’s Lunchtime Pro – FCP filters and resources
DV Garage / DV Matte Pro
GenArts / Sapphire Filters
Imagineer Systems / Mocha
Joe Maller / Joe’s Filters
Luca’s Plugins
LiveType Expansion Packs
Lyric Media
Marcus Herrick
Nattress
Neat video noise reduction
Noise Industries / Fx Factory / Factory Tools
Noise Industries partners
- DVShade
- idustrial revolution
- Yanobox
- Boinx
- SUGARfx
- Futurismo
nVeil
Peter Wiggins
Phyx Bundle for Shake
Pistolera Post / Patrick Sheffield
Pure and Applied / Stib’s Filters
Red Giant Software / Magic Bullet / Trapcode / Knoll / Primatte
River Rock Studios
Sheffield Softworks / Patrick Sheffield
Synthetic Aperture
The Foundry / Keylight / Furnace
Tiffen Dfx
Tom Henderson’s Mattes
Too Much Too Soon Filters
Ultimatte