Best Final Cut Pro Plugins (Free and Paid)

Some Final Cut plugins on the market can do an essential job in saving your time - from color grading tasks to object removal and tracking.

Dehancer

With this plugin, you can apply the most realistic film emulations, replicate the color, contrast and texture of analog photographic and motion picture film stocks.

Apart from the wide choice of emulation templates, you can customize film grain, halation, bloom, vignette, film breath and other features. Additionally, you can use the LUT generator to create your own custom LUTs.

The last update of the plugin includes film compression, which you can enable at the start of your color grading. Film compression is a great tool that adds compression to the highlights and brings down the white point of your shot to give a more analog look.

Also, you’ll get a complete guide to learn how Dehancer works and what each control is doing.

This plugin is truly amazing, its only disadvantage - it’s more expensive than most plugins for Final Cut.

Price: from $199

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro 10.5.4 and above, Apple Motion 5.5.3 and above, MacOS 10.15 or later

Titles Pro

Best title pack on the market with 1500+ animated and customizable templates, including Cinematic, Kinetic, Digital, Liquid, Minimal titles and more. Additionally, this pack includes animated backgrounds, viewfinders and details to mix&math elements and complete your content creation.

The titles are auto-resizable and compatible with 4K, so will look sharp in any resolution. Apart from animated titles, inside you’ll find 753 .ai vector files, that can be used for branding.

Finally, the project is continuously updating and after the purchase, you’ll get all future templates for free.

Price: $34

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro 10.3.4 and above, Apple Motion 5.3.1 and above

Color Finale 2 Pro

A powerful color grading plugin, which makes color correction much easier for beginners.

Here you can adjust exposure, contrast, pivot, white balance, and sharpness; preview the false color and set the correct balance for your video. You can create a film emulation by adjusting multiple grain settings.

The customization options also allow you to click on Edit Layers button and access color wheels and color masks, for advanced color correction like in DaVinci Resolve.

Additionally, the pack includes 40 detailed guides to make your work with the project easier.

Price: from $99

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro, MacOS 12 or later

Keyper

The best plugin to replace any background with the best result possible - no green screen needed!

Keyper can isolate your shot and cut out everything except for the person within the frame.

The plugin allows you some additional customization, so you can choose the image quality, soften, mix, erode or do other minor changes to the result. You can also set the keyframes on the mix parameter, so your background will show up/disappear within the animation.

Though you should know that the result can be worse if the person actively moves around - apart from that isolation is very impressive.

Price: $99

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro, MacOS 12 or later

mLightDiffuse

A free plugin from MotionVFX comes with 6 different lighting looks that add anamorphic light streaks and flares over the brightest areas of your shot.

Easy to use - you can just drag and drop the effect, so the plugin will automatically find the brightest area. Additionally, no keyframes or tracking is needed. You can separately customize diffuse amount, brightness, smoothness, angle, blur, color, etc.

Apart from diffusion, you can customize the noise type and amount, reflection and other parameters.

Price: Free!

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro 10.4.8 and above, Apple Motion 5.4.5 and above, MacOS 10.14.6 or later

Noise Removal

A great plugin made by Neat Video will reduce digital noise, flicker and other clip imperfections. If your footage was shot in low light and has a visible amount of grain, Noise Removal can be a great solution.

It can clean up video from any source including video cameras, digitized film, TV tuners and more.

Among the settings, you can select the part of your image to display the noise level and auto-tune it; or go to noise filter settings and apply additional sharpening, artifact removal, select the quality mode and more.

Price: Free version or $74.90

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro 10.5.2 and above, Apple Motion 5.5.1 and above, MacOS 10.15.6 or later

mTransition Noise

Great transition pack that would perfectly suit your edits! With this plugin, you can create your own custom transitions or select among ready templates. To apply one of 69 filmic transitions, you should just drag and drop it to your clip.

Inside the settings panel, you can customize the smear, blur, distortion, and shake levels; add light rays, leaks, film dirt and many more cinematic details. Also, you can customize audio cross-fade to match video and audio transitions.

Price: $89

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro 10.5.4 and above, Apple Motion 5.5.3 and above, MacOS 12.6 or later

YouTube Essential Library

An easy-to-use pack of animated templates for YouTube, which includes 450+ Intros, Typography, Lower Thirds, Infobars, Calendars, Transitions, Sound FX and 25 more versatile categories.

In the advanced customization settings, you can change the colors, duration and type of animation; for the animation part you can change the speed, position, scale, or rotation of any element.

Apart from great animated designs, in YouTube Essential Library you can combine templates together and use .ai layouts for branding.

Price: $39

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro 10.4.3 and above, Apple Motion 5. and above

Final Cut Bro Adjustment Layer

A free plugin to speed up your editing - Adjustment Layer by Final Cut Bro will allow you to apply 3 different adjustment layers of 10, 30 and 60 seconds duration.

To apply it, just drag the adjustment layer to your footage and make adjustments to the layer to affect all media underneath it. You can also extend the adjustment layer. This plugin will come in handy for color grading, applying ready LUTs, effects or changing the size of the media.

Price: Free!

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro 10.4 and above

Quick In-Out Animation

A free plugin by Tap5a will help to quickly create In and Out animation for anything - text, image or any kind of media.

To apply the effect, you can just drag and drop it to your layer and select among several types of animations, such as fade, blur, fly, wipe, float, zoom, scale and others. This tool would be useful for beginners or anyone who doesn’t want to spend extra time adding keyframes and motion blur manually.

Additionally, you can adjust the animation time, the amount of motion blur, move center point and more.

Price: Free!

Compatibility: Final Cut Pro 10.3 and above

To Sum Up

Plugins could be great timesavers - whether you’re a beginner or an advanced editor. You can find the plugin for your exact needs, whether it’s noise reduction, film emulation or pre-animated templates.

To learn more about Final Cut, check our Educational Blog - here you can find a lot of guides for motion designers, animators, editors or bloggers.