When Apple introduced Color as part of the Studio, the feature I found most fun to explore was creating great looking vignettes that allowed me to focus the viewers attention however I pleased. However, since most projects don’t allow the time to grade in Color and FCP’s Vignette filter is pretty much just awful, I’ve had to learn to live without using vignettes. That is until I came up with this method of combining gradients with blend modes.

So lets first start with FCP’s Vignette filter and why not to use it. This filter was ported over from Motion with FXPlug but frankly it was useless even in Motion and does no better here in FCP. 

FCP’s generators are actually quite useful and I encourage those of you who are unfamiliar to take a look and see what tools you have at your disposal. The same FXPlug architecture that ported over the un-useful Vignetter filter from Motion also ported over many very useful new generators. Let’s take a look at how I used the Custom Gradient generator to get some creative control over my vignette.

This is what i ended up with. A nice smooth edged gradient that goes from white to grey gracefully. I choose grey because I don’t want to kill the edges, just take the edge off luminance-wise. And most importantly, I centered the white left and above the center of the picture, right where our guest is centered and where I’d like to draw their attention.

Here are the Contols settings that I used. 100% white down to about 50% grey on the edges. This is a good starting point and if it goes too overboard, you can tweak in the timeline with the opacity control. I selected a radial gradient with gaussian blur selected. I left Dither as selected but I could tell no significant differences visually either way. And again, that positioning field is crucial and what makes this technique so powerful. The gradient width field is what determines the transition from white to grey and i kept it as slow as possible but is really up to you.

Now obviously our work here isn’t done but we’re on getting there. I take this new gradient and drop it on top of the video track of my choise, set it’s blend mode to Multiply, and then look at the results.

Here’s the original shot to compare.

Very subtle changes, no dark corners or edges, the face retains the same levels but everything slowly dissipates from there which helps keep your eye focused on the face, where it should be. Now i certainly don’t get all the controls of Color with this method, not even close, but i do get the ability to place the focus where its needed and control the luminance levels in a graceful way.

In fact, you can get get quite creative with this technique, slam the grey levels to black and you can create a spotlight effect, switch to linear gradient to lower/brighten part of a landscape shot. It’s really up to you and its all right inside Final Cut Pro, no round-tripping required.

Ok, well hope you can get some use of this method. Obviously I only use this at the end while color correcting but its a great little method to make your footage look like the pros.