Joe’s Drop Shadow offers more creative options for creating drop shadows in Final Cut Pro. The basic effect is similar to the layer effect in past versions of Photoshop. In addition to standard offset, distance and soften controls, Joe’s Drop Shadow also includes knockout controls, options to shrink or grow the shadow and shadow-only controls. Backgrounds can be added from the filter controls for faster compositing with a variety of modes.
Example Images
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
Controls
- Color
- The color of the drop shadow effect
- Angle (-360 - 360)
- The angle of offset.
- Distance (0 - 1000)
- The amount the shadow effect is offset from the original towards the direction specified in ‘Angle’.
- Soften (0 - 250)
- Blur amount of the shadow effect.
- Shrink/Grow (-100 - 100)
- Expands or contracts the shadow effect. Limited by the current ‘Soften’ value.
- Opaque Edges
- Determines whether or not the frame edge casts a shadow.
- Opacity (0 - 100)
- Sets the opacity of the shadow effect.
- Effect Only
- Toggles the visibility of the original image.
- Knockout Source
- Determines whether or not to subtract the original alpha channel from the result alpha channel. When combined with ‘Effect Only’ the result is a drop shadow with no original image.
- Background
- The clip to composite behind the drop shadow effect
- Mode
- Composite mode for the shadow effect when a background clip is used.
Hey Joe!
Thanks for making so many of your plugins freely available. I hope one day to learn how to make plugins; I am just so busy right now making (magic) television programming ;).
One key niggle with the Shadow effect: when it is applied to an alpha-keyed graphic, the shadow will only extend to the edge of the frame of the original picture. With the 3D filter one can get around unwanted cropping by zooming out, could the same not apply here? The alternative would be to edit the graphic and add some extra border, but that is time-consuming. I have explored all the settings but I can’t seem to come up with a solution. I bet I’m missing something obvious!
Kind regards
Posted by Jonathan H Pienaar at 11:51 am on November 25th, 2008