{ Monthly Archives }
Apple released Final Cut Pro 5.1.3 some few days ago. Unfortunately, this upgrade breaks many 3rd party plug-ins, including Conduit (but also Automatic Duck, Colorista…)
Any projects that use Conduit will continue to render as they should, but you’ll be unable to access the Conduit Editor because of what appears to be a bug in the FCP FxPlug GUI host.
Until the problem is resolved, please hold off on the 5.1.3 upgrade!
Do you often need to conceal the identity of a person appearing in a production? I don’t, but if I ever get the chance, I’ve now got the effect ready. The traditional tricks like mosaic masks or black bars have been seen too often already:
Maybe this guy is a witness who’s risking his life by speaking up, but the black bars just make him look criminal. We should instead make every effort to assert his innocence and purity of spirit — behold, the Angel Witness:
Like most of my previous posts, this look also relies heavily on Conduit’s HDR capabilities (view nodes). Using a Levels node, the image’s brightness is scaled up 10x and then blurred. We want to apply the blur only on the person’s face, so a suitable matte is constructed by applying further Max and Blur nodes to the image’s luminance.
A Levels node is applied to the matte, to scale and clip the values into the 0-1 range (a matte should never contain values outside that “standard range”). Below is the Level node’s settings and the result mask:
So, if you’ve got someone who needs protection, just download the .conduit file for this effect and let them bathe in the purifying white light.
