This was pretty much the first of my home-made (home-hacked) plugins that I thought other FCP users may want to have!   Based on Apple’s own Basic 3D filter, it adds an extra gnat’s whisker of control over Apples original version, that being Anchor and Perspective controls.

At the time when I did this I was working as an editor for Star TV in Hong Kong, and they were transitioning to FCP as their primary NLE, replacing the older Lightworks suites and augmenting the offline Avid suites. Online editing was still being handled for the most part in the multi-machine linear edit suites, but FCP looked set to bring a bit of that online goodness to the NLE suites.  Many of the editors that worked in the linear tape suites were of course complete dinosaurs, used to far more complex but yet comfortingly familiar equipment.  To help ease the transition I started writing plugins that would emulate some of the controls of the equipment that they (we) were more used to, such as the Abekas A57.  It was certainly a worthwhile exercise in coding for me as I hadn’t done any for some time, and my A57 Emulator plug-in actually worked quite well even though it never really saw the light of day ... Why?  Well because much of the functionality is/was already available, either through FCP’s motion controls and/or through the built-in plugins already provided.  Big behemoth DVE plugins are unnecessarily cumbersome, forcing your effect to follow a predefined pipeline which goes directly against the much more flexible modular approach, where effects can be combined as needed and  in whatever order.  So, as the primary functionality was already available I consigned the A57 plugin to the scrap heap ... but I still dip back in every now and again to repurpose some of the code.  (See Andy’s Simple Crop)

So what about Andy’s Better 3D ... is it actually any good? Well it’s pretty useful for a quick and easy 3D effect, but of course, these days, who wouldn’t prefer bouncing their clip out to Motion 3, or using Peter Wiggins’ excellent MultiSpace? Very cool.