Pop Out is a 3d and camera tool that allows you much of the functionality of the camera tools in Motion or After Effects. The great thing about Pop Out is that you can use it right in Final Cut Pro X and you don’t have to round-trip your footage through a separate program. You can use Pop Out with any video or graphic, it’s easily applied, and you can add a total of 5 layers of various elements. Quickly set in and out animation points and the camera takes care of correct motion and perspective.
There are 8 different camera tools in Pop Out. Some have full range functionality and some are limited. They all have the same basic components and parameters.
Under the Camera Controls you have beginning and ending positions of each direction of horizontal, vertical, and back and forth direction. You can quickly set the beginning and ending position of a camera parameter and Pop Out automatically animates between the two. The DOF controls allow you to select the DOF amount, near and far focus, and the focus offset which is the Z position of the focal point. The DOF tool works well with one or two layers, but if you are animating with more than that, I would suggest not using the DOF controls unless you have a fast processor as it can be very taxing on the CPU.
The next controls involve control over the scaling, x y and z positions, blend mode and opacity of a possibility of 5 layers of elements. There are controls for CLOSE UP, FOREGROUND, MAIN IMAGE, BACKGROUND, and INFINITY images. All levels are drop zones that you can drop your own images or media into except for the MAIN IMAGE. This area is automatically taken by the element on the timeline that you apply the Pop Out camera to. There are several reasons why we didn’t make the MAIN IMAGE a drop zone…one of them being so that you can apply the effect to a title and still allow it to retail it’s own image parameter settings. I’ll get into that in another tutorial.
The PAUSE cameras have varying quick in and out ranges that have a pausing effect after an initial quick in and out effect.
The two custom cameras do not have beginning and ending animation presets. They allow the user to key-frame their own motion points as they wish.
Pop Out comes with over 60 presets AND a help category that you can use to see how many options you have with Pop Out and the many things you can accomplish with this tool. The real-life applications of Pop Out include: 3D living environments, logo animations, screen capture animations, and title animations.