Lacq’ing in Depth

I enjoy playing around with nodes and exploring abstract image processing concepts with the freedom granted by a nodal interface, but I realize that not everyone has a passion for tinkering. I’d like to be able to convince those people that Conduit can also be used to solve everyday practical problems in Final Cut Pro and other host applications.

To that aim, I’m starting a series of posts about “layer styles”. The name comes from the set of effects available through Photoshop’s Layer Styles dialog, which looks like this in my ancient copy of Photoshop 7.0 (the first version of Photoshop that ran on OS X, not so long ago!)…

If I recall correctly, this dialog was added in Photoshop 6. Before that, designers had to manually build and update these effects for each layer — a time-consuming process, considering how common it is to have something like a drop shadow or translucent gradient fill applied to a bunch of layers.

Layer styles would be just as useful in Final Cut Pro, but the only thing we get by default is the “Drop Shadow” settings in the Motion tab for a clip. Luckily, armed with Conduit we can easily build “layer style” effects. Applying a Conduit-created custom effect to multiple clips is as easy as copy&pasting the Conduit effect from one clip’s filter properties into another.

Here’s an image from the brand-new exciting soap opera created by the Anteeksi design collective:

The Finnish-language subtitling is created with Final Cut Pro’s standard tools as a text clip on the topmost track. The problem is that the white text goes unreadable on a light background. A plain black border would be a nice solution, but FCP’s text tool doesn’t offer the possibility.

We’ll apply Conduit to the text clip. In Conduit, we’ll: 1) pull the alpha of the text to get its outlines, 2) use a “2D Max” node to expand the text outlines, 3) fill the expanded outlines with black, 4) composite the original white text on top of the expanded black text.

Here’s how this task is accomplished using nodes in the Conduit Editor:

Basically there’s a node for each of the four steps I described above, and one additional node for the black color. (Instead of a Color node we could alternatively use a Color Picker node, which would allow us to easily change the border color in the Conduit filter’s properties in FCP without opening the Conduit Editor itself.)

Here’s what the black outlines look like. Much improved on-screen readability!