FCP World announces its first product for video makers, "FCP World Blu-ray Templates for Final Cut Studio" today. This is a new collection of 60 Blu-ray Templates for Final Cut Studio 2009, designed by Kevin Monahan, owner of FCP World and competitively priced at $49.95. 

Monahan explains, "Final Cut Studio 2009 ships with a total of 5 templates. That's not nearly enough! I've designed 60 new templates that give video makers a lot more options for creating a Blu-ray or AVCHD disc. These are fully animated, high-quality looping backgrounds, not just stills. Also, I've designed many of the templates with Motion content, so that users could create, say, a title sequence or lower-third, that could match a particular template."

The templates work with FCP 7 and Motion 4 through the "Share" protocol, while Compressor 3.5 accesses them via "Job Actions". The templates are localized for Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. This product is currently available by download only, although a hard copy will be shipping in the coming days.

FCP World plans to release more products in the near future. "I'm really excited about releasing these templates," said Monahan, "I can't wait to roll out more products and editing tools."

Click here for more information >>>

Want to give your piece the look of a Hollywood feature? Then check out Red Giant Software's latest addition to the Magic Bullet Suite, Mojo, designed by director and technologist Stu Maschwitz. Mojo's tools help you create a color correction style which preserves skin tones then sets them off against a warmer or cooler backdrop. This is is a popular look in Hollywood, especially in action films.

Mojo has some unique features to give you that look quickly. The trick is that it provides you with, say, warm or cool tones but has the added effect of keeping the talent in focus. Couple this power with simple and customizable controls and you've got cool looks with any kind of footage. It also works with other primary color correction tools like Magic Bullet Colorista or Color.

If you've already got Magic Bullet Looks, Mojo is still useful for fast and easy looks without having to drill down to Looks' many presets.

The tools found in Mojo help maintain contrast and dynamic range while adjusting colors at the same time. Move the main Mojo slider to cool the shadows down and warm the highlights up simultaneously. Immediately, you'll see your talent begin to pop from the background. Pushing the sliders towards maximum, you'll get much more aggressive looks. Other controls include Warm It and Cool It sliders to control color temperature and Bleach It allows you to desaturate or super-saturate every color in the shot.

 You've also got control over skin tones within the overall Mojo effect. Skin Color will eliminate color casts in skin tones. Skin Squeeze flattens the range of skin tones, which helps actors stand out against any background. Skin Solo desaturates everything in the scene except the actor. Very cool!

Mojo renders like a demon, and has been specially tuned to render quickly, no matter the host application. Rendering is precise, with floating-point support for high-quality precision output.

One little caveat, is that you should go easy with the sliders for the most part. Unlike After Effects, FCP's architecture allows the maximum output for each effect to be accessed, so you can venture beyond the designed sweet spot if you get too wild with the sliders. 

This "cool tool" is supported in all major editing hosts, including Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Avid systems. One license is all you need for all these hosts.

Overall, I find Mojo to be a lightweight, yet powerful little tool to help complement footage quickly and easily. For some inside details about Mojo, check out a blog post by Stu Maschwitz here >>>.

To purchase or get a free trial of Mojo, head over to Red Giant Software here >>>.

Boris Calligraphy text generators are installed, free, inside your copy of Apple Final Cut Pro 7. An updated version of Boris Calligraphy, Version 2.2, is now available for free download from the Boris FX web site. Boris Calligraphy Version 2.2 includes improved compatibility with Mac OS X Snow Leopard and support for ClearType fonts that are bundled with the latest version of Microsoft Office for Mac OS X, including the popular Calibri font.

Go here to download it >>>

Kevin Monahan spent 6 months inside the walls of Apple testing and helping refine the tools of Final Cut Studio 2009. At this month's SF Cutters meeting, he will be demonstrating some cool tips in Final Cut Pro not shown anywhere else in the world, including how to create your own custom Alpha Transitions. Don't miss this special presentation!

To attend, sign up here >>>

Do you use the EX-1 or EX-3 camera by Sony? If so, you'll most likely be using the Sony SxS express cards to record your images to. It turns out that once you mount a card, a kernel panic will occur to your Mac. This might cause workflow issues for Sony EX users, so beware.

Check out the following video for a full demonstration.

It turns out that if you use the Sony SxS card reader (USB reader), it works fine.