Curves for Final Cut

Curves for Final Cut brings powerful animation tools right into the Final Cut Pro timeline.

With Curves, you can easily create fluid animations, adjusting the position, rotation, and scale of a clip along one of seven parametric animation curve families.

Apply Curves from the Effects browser to any compound clip in the timeline. You can turn any clip into a compound clip by right clicking a clip and selecting "New Compound Clip". Compound clips are required to prevent clipping when animating a clip's position due to Final Cut Pro's plugin architecture. Apply Curves to an Adjustment Clip to animate several clips at once.

After applying Curves to a clip, you can adjust all of the animation properties in the inspector. Select one of seven animation curve families to control the shape of your animation. You can choose between Linear, Smooth (ease both), Accelerate (ease in), Decelerate (ease out), Overshoot, Bounce, and Custom. Use the configurable sliders or graph handles to adjust the parameters of your animation curve, and view the resulting curve in the graph viewer.

Use the on-screen controls to click and drag clips into place. Insert a keyframe by using the "Add Keyframe" button next to the Position, Rotation, or Scale parameters inside of the Curves Effect in the inspector. Move the timeline forward and click and drag the clip or adjust a parameter in the inspector to create a new keyframe. You can create as many keyframes as you'd like on a given clip.

Adjust motion blur by configuring the amount of blur and the number of blur samples. Note that increasing blur samples may impact performance.

Use different animation curves at different times by adding keyframes to the curve editor. Use the "Add Keyframe" button in the upper left of the graph editor to insert a curve shape keyframe. You can use curve editor keyframes to change what curve the animations in your timeline will use at a given point in time.

To get started, open the Curves app and follow the instructions to install or upgrade the effect template. This is required after installing or updating Curves. Next, restart Final Cut Pro. You should now see the Curves effect in the Effects Browser.

Note that Curves requires Final Cut Pro installed in order to function.