The Coen Brothers and DP Roger Deakins embarked on the first ever full feature film digital intermediate for O’Brother Where Art Thou, back in 2001. In this 10 minute behind the scenes featurette you get to see how they did it, plus insights into the photochemical process. It’s a great history lesson on how to push the envelope for what we now all take for granted. At the very end of the video Deakins also accurately predicts the demise of film and the rise of digital.

For more insights into feature film colour grading check out these posts:

Colour Grading A Fincher Film (Panic & Se7en)

Colour Grading Peter Jackson Movies (LoTR & King Kong)

For more great filmmaking DVD extras check out this round up of the best I’ve seen.

Apple’s sneak peak of the new Mac Pro 2013 has caused quite a stir among the post production community, with quite a lot of debate as to whether its a great new design or a complete waste of time. It’s probably all a bit too early to make any final judgements (given that it’s not shipping till ‘later this year’) but here is a round up of plenty of Mac Pro pontification from post production people – 17 opinions in fact.

The New Mac Pro Reviews

For a quick tour of the tech worlds general opinions on the new Mac Pro read these first:

Tech Crunch – Up Close & Personal with an Aluminum Beast

The top of the device is designed to double as a handle, and the whole external casing slides off when unlocked to give access to internal components for swapping parts out.

Redshark News – Apple refocuses on the Pro’s – includes analysis on the other announcements from WWDC 2013. Cnet also has a post questioning how upgradeable the new Mac Pro really is.

Gizmodo – The Brilliant Insanity behind the New Mac Pro:

It’s hard not to gush about the Mac Pro. The conceptual thinking behind the device is equalled by its design execution. If the final product Apple releases later this year matches the promise made yesterday, this is as close to perfect as you can make a pro desktop computer in 2013.

Arstechnica – A Critical Review of the New Mac Pro

As far as the other technologies go, it’s clear that Apple is pulling out all the stops to make the Mac Pro a serious professional’s tool that won’t get dated any time soon. Which is good, because the stuff inside it better last…

Post Production Questions & Concerns

In summary the post community is divided on the idea of external expandability, the cost of thunderbolt peripherals and the general expected price of the Mac Pro. The lack of Nvidia CUDA support is also a concern to some. Here are some thoughts from post production pros to help you decide whether the new Mac Pro is right for you.

Scott Simmons – The New Mac Pro Lives  The Love, The Hate, The Huh?

This AMD FirePro may be as good as any of us really need but it just feels like a step backward not having your own choice of GPU in a “pro” machine.

Alexis Van Hurkman – About those Mac Pros:
The only thing I lose is the illusion that I, personally, will someday buy a PCIe expander and fill it up with four highest end GPU cards in order to have a mega-processing behemoth. For those who actually would do such a thing, this is a true loss, but it’s a dream I can’t afford. Two GPUs will do me fine if the architecture is right.

Larry Jordan – Thoughts on The New Mac Pro - Larry offers a balanced review with some technical insights from his readers too.

We used to think of PCIe card performance in terms of the number of “lanes” they used to connect to the motherboard. There were four, eight, and sixteen lane cards. The more lanes, the faster the potential communication speed between card and bus. With Thunderbolt, Apple is moving away from the concept of lanes, to straight data transfer speeds.

Dylan Reeve – Why?!

All you do by creating an entirely custom form factor is make it practically impossible to upgrade, expand or improve the system. For what benefit? There’s no reason, as far as I can see, that Apple couldn’t have built a new system with the same high-end specs into a more traditional form factor that would still allow for regular expansion.

I Am A Film Guy - Indie filmaker Ryan Brown shares some initial thoughts on the new Mac Pro. His wish – Four GPUs not just two:

I feel that the bare minimum these days it’s 2. I’d love to see more like 4. So many apps, plugins, you name it is leaning on the GPUs. So why only one option. I feel like FCPX came on to change the game and it’s yet to really move users over to apple. In fact many have moved away from Apple to Avid or Adobe.

FX Guide Mac Pro Review – John Montegomery from FX Guide provides a really in-depth review of the new Mac Pro, if you only read one link, read this one.

At the user end, we’re seeing more and more reliance on the GPU for processing power in all of our applications. This is just starting to be tapped. From OpenGL shaders being used to do grading and effects in Autodesk Smoke and Adobe After Effects, to The Foundry using their blink technology to support identical processing on both the GPU and the CPU, to Adobe Premiere Pro and Blackmagic Design’s Resolve utilizing CUDA and OpenCL processing….it is certainly the trend in the industry. The fact is, much of the heavy lifting of image processing is being done by the GPU today and is likely to be more prominent with the shift to 4K. This doesn’t mean the CPU is irrelevant by any stretch, but the GPU may prove to be more important for overall performance in many applications.

Alex Golner – Turn your old Mac Pro into an expansion chassis.

I’ve come up with a product idea that might satisfy many people with this complaint: A PCI Express card that can be installed in an older Mac Pro that uses one or two Thunderbolt 2 cables to connect to a 2013 Mac Pro. This would turn the old Mac Pro into an expansion chassis for the new Mac Pro.

Alex also has some more thoughts on the Mac Pro and some stats on the AMD Firepro GPU. Lastly Streaming Media also have a 5 part review of the new Mac Pro.

Software Performance on the New Mac Pro

As mentioned in several of these links both Blackmagic Design and Adobe have come out with reports of how well their software will function on the new mac pro. The CUDA/OpenCL battle has begun and then sort of fizzled out. The ‘new’ OpenCL seems to be the answer.

Philip Hodgetts – Stop the CUDA Panic - The software you use will work.

It seems to me that the concerns over a lack of direct support for a proprietary hardware call, are misguided. It appears there is not only improved OpenCL in the OS, but improved support for it on NVIDIA hardware as well. Crisis averted, again.

Digital Arts online also has a run down of the state of CUDA/OpenCL support for all the major software packages. Apple insider also helpfully explains the benefits of ‘compressed memory’ inside the new OS X Mavericks.

The New Mac Pro In Action

As part of the WWDC Conference folks from Pixar and The Foundry demoed the new Mac port of Mari, the industry standard 3D painting tool, and revealed how they had secretly tested their software on the new Mac Pro.

“We were essentially doing a blind tasting of the machine,” said Jack Greasley, MARI product manager at The Foundry. “All we could see was the monitor, and the Mac Pro was encased in a giant metal filing cabinet on wheels. Experiencing the machine in this way was actually really cool, because I can tell you that the speed and power of this machine really stands up. Mari running on this machine out of the box is the fastest I have ever seen it run.”

You can also watch videos from the conference on the Apple site, although you will need to sign up for a free developer account to gain access to them. Just click on the ‘Videos’ tab after the jump.

Oscar nominated film editor Christopher Tellefsen is fast becoming one of my favourite editors having cut so many great films like Smoke, Blue in the Face, The People Vs Larry Flint, Man on the Moon, The Village, Capote and Moneyball (for which he got his Oscar nomination). Here is around up of interviews with Tellefsen on his approach to the craft.

Christopher Tellefsen in Conversation

This interview comes from the AOTG archives and comes from The Edit Fest NY discussion with Bobbie O’Steen focusing on his approach to cutting Metropolitan.

Here Tellefsen joins the crew of Moneyball on DP/30 to discuss the film. You can also read an interview/scene breakdown with Tellefsen on the NY Times blog page again on Moneyball. (Which by the way is based a really great book by Michael Lewis.)

EdiFestT NY

These gems come from Tellefsen’s EditFest NY workshop. If you live in/near NY you’d be crazy to miss these opportunities to hear from great editors on their craft!

In the aftermath of NAB 2013 I collected together everything I could find on DaVinci Resolve 10, including several demos and interviews so do check out that post when you get done with this one. (If you want more on NAB and colour grading check out this post)

This week Redshark News posted this five page article featuring an in-depth run through of all the new features in Resolve 10 with Richard Lim and Bob Caniglia from Blackmagic Design, including the new online editor and live grading functionality. A great read!

Free App To Collect Footage For Resolve

Editor and Colorist Nickolai Waldman has created a free app for use with DaVinci Resolve which allows your to selectively copy the just the footage you need from a RAID or NAS (Network Attached Storage) based on a EDL workflow through Resolve. Nickolai also provides a step by step guide on how to use it.

Round Tripping With Resolve

The latest Coloristo’s podcast features a great ‘insiders’ discussion of how to get your project into and out of Resolve from FCP7, Media Composer and Premiere Pro. They also discuss whether round tripping is really what you want to do in the first place.

I have previously blogged about how to do just this with a collection of tutorials on how to round trip with each of the aforementioned NLEs.

Colour Grading Techniques

Larry Jordan recently delivered this 25 minute presentation on colour grading within FCPX with a focus on how to read the scopes inside FCPX to grade accurately.

Copying a Look With Keyframes

Warren Eagles from the International Colorist Academy, shares a quick tip on how to copy a grade with 2 keyframed shapes from one clip to another using the Auto Keyframer.

3 Strip Technicolour Look

John Burkhart has written up a fairly detailed step by step guide on how to create a classic 3 strip Technicolor look within DaVinci Resolve using some free Cinema DNG footage from a BMDCC. He also includes a free download of the project file. A great lesson in replicating a vintage film stock look.

Colorist Questions & Answers

Alexis Van Hurkman provides a detailed technical answer to what (if any) differences exist between the common grading controls and what they all mean. There is also an answer to the question about orders of operations for luma curves. Interesting geek fodder, that people like me love to read. In another post Alexis tackles how to manage an entire grade and whether you should balance all your shots in the first pass and then apply your ‘look’ later, or do it all at once. If you have questions, email them to Alexis.

When considering clipping and compression in a linear series of image adjustment operations, you should get used to thinking about individual adjustments in terms of whether they preserve or discard image detail. Then, choosing whether you want to apply an adjustment to the pre-clipped data or the post-clipped data is a creative choice, as there could be completely valid reasons for doing one or the other. This is true for contrast operations, color operations, and operations for sharpening or blurring the image.

Although its relatively easy to find a wealth of technical and how-to information about colour grading online, finding articles on the art and craft of creating a look for a feature or TV show is a bit harder. Here are few that I’ve stumbled across lately.

Colour Grading Oblivion - The Technicolor blog has this interview with Colorist Mike Sowa about his work on the film, and collaborating with director Joseph Kosinski:

The Look of Oblivion started with the trailer. I sat with the director (Joe Kosinski) and the DP ( Claudio Miranda), who just won an Oscar for his work on Life of Pi, to set the Looks for the whole movie. It was a great way to set the different Looks we used right at the beginning. Of course, trailers tend to be a bit more saturated and higher in contrast than the movie, but those Looks set the tone.

 Colour Grading The Great Gatsby - Phil Sandberg posted this short write up about Colorist Adrian Hauser’s work on the film. It’s a great read with plenty of technical and artistic detail about the 5 months of work Cutting Edge spent on the project.

“Baz has an amazingly sensitive eye for color detail, so a large part of the process was to set styles that retained these color nuances in low 3D cinema light levels, which can tend to bleach color from the screen and make things appear dingy. Baz’s Great Gatsby is a modern retelling of a classic tale and I believe the graded result is a hybrid between the look of classic cinema with its gorgeous color reproduction processes and recently matured digital cinema technology.”

The last part of this grading craft stories comes from The Mixing Light blog, courtesy of Robbie Carman, which offers some sage advice about how best to work collaboratively with clients and directors. Its important to be able to strike a delicate balance of creative input and customer service.

My role, and I would argue your role as a colorist, is to not convince clients that your way is better than their way, but rather to interpret their vision and combine it with your own.

In this 5th round up of online resources for DIT’s (Digital Image Technicians) editors and colourists who need to understand more about colour science, workflows and data wrangling apps.

DIT’s are supposed to be able to bridge the gap between production and post, understanding the entire pipeline that a digital image might flow through right from the sensor to the silver screen. Getting to grips with some of the science that affects those images is a crucial skill. Hopefully these resources will aide you in that endeavour.

Understanding ACES

Andrew McKee has a good introduction to the ACES colour space and a simple workflow involving DaVinci Resolve and a piece of ARRIRAW footage that you could test out for yourself.

The main point of ACES is that, as colour space, it contains the entire visible spectrum with plenty of leeway to push brightness and colours back and forth without ever clipping values.

Understanding Display Gamma & Gamma Correction

Wolfcrow has a great summary of the differences between display gamma and gamma correction and although its quite technically detailed its worth getting to grips with. Click through to see some images with different gamma applied to see what this is all about.

When you increase gamma (pull the curve down) you are mapping more values into the dark regions, and the image goes darker. When you reduce gamma (pushing the curve up) you are mapping more values into the lighter regions, and the image looks lighter. Whether or not the image will have anything to display depends on its dynamic range and ‘strength of data’. You can’t go overboard with this.

REDLogFilm & REDGamma

With RED, the gamma setting may also be comprised of other tonal curves. To give images the more pleasing and familiar toe and shoulder characteristics of film tones, REDgamma3 and similar settings are the net result of both a standard log curve and a contrast curve:

The RED learning site has a useful and easy to understand introduction to the differences between REDLogFilm and REDGamma and how to apply them in RED CINE-X Pro.

DIT Tools – BulletProof

Software developer Red Giant’s latest product is a brand new tool aimed at covering ‘the other half’ of your camera, by offering you a seamless way to back up, ingest, transcode and colour your tapeless media. You can currently download the free Mac OS X beta to give it a try for yourself.  Stu Maschwitz gave this 20 minute demo of the product at NAB 2013 Supermeet. Red Giant has a huge amount of support for using BulletProof on their site and you can also watch a 30 minute walkthrough with Simon Walker (also below).

DIT Tools – Shotput Pro Tutorials

If you’ve got Shotput Pro 5 to offload your camera footage files to multiple harddrives at the same time you’ll notice that the interface is quite different to V4. Here are some handy short tutorials to make sure you’re getting the most out of your software. You can currently upgrade from v4 to v5 for $29.99.

LightIron – Carts & Software

These videos will get you up to speed on Light Iron Digital’s hardware and software, which if you’re serious about becoming a DIT, you’d be wise to get to know. No Film School has an excellent round up of Light Iron related resources and you can also check out any and every mention of them on my blog, here.

H.264 vs H.265

Lastly if you’re wondering what the deal is with the new H.265 that will be coming along shortly then Larry Jordan has a great summary of it in this webinar excerpt. Tech Crunch also had this post on it when it was approved by the International Telecom Union in January.

If you enjoyed JJ Abrams fun filled Star Trek sequel and wanted a closer look at some of the post production that went into the film then this round up should have all the bases covered, from editorial to sound design. If you’ve not seen the film yet, you probably want to bookmark this post for later to avoid any spoilers!

Editing Star Trek: Into Darkness

If you haven’t yet seen the Avid Rough Cut webinar held at Bad Robot then you’ve been missing out. The video above played before the webinar which you can watch now on this link. It’s a great opportunity to get an inside detailed look at Bad Robot’s facility and hear some of the challenges the team faced in finishing the film.

Studio Daily also have a great interview with the films two co-editors Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey (who also cut the first Star Trek, Mission Impossible 3 and Alias) in which they share plenty of great details about the film and working with JJ.

How do you collaborate? Do you work on the same scenes alternately or simultaneously?

MM: Neither. We divide up the movie and Maryann has her section and I have mine. When the film is all cut together we do make comments on the overall film, and that involves us both commenting on the other’s work. This is the stage when we try to figure out where the film is working and where it’s slow or where characters aren’t coming across as they need to. But we never cut on each other’s sequences. We maintain ownership all the way through of our sections.

Update: Studio Daily has another follow up article on the post production work on the film, this time focusing on the constantly updated 5.1 surround sound temp mixes and the 3D work.

“J.J. has been wanting to do more of a finished 5.1 temp mix on his last few movies and the technology just hasn’t been there. Now that they have the ability to edit 5.1 directly in the software, we used it so much and it was so extremely helpful.”

For a overview of how you can edit 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound tracks in Media Composer check out this 10 minute Avid tutorial.

Visual Effects on Star Trek: Into Darkness

FX Guide has a brilliantly in-depth article on the visual effects work that went into the film including details on the opening planet Nibiru sequence, the attack on the star fleet headquarters, Kronos and all the space ships flying around in space and much more. It’s well worth a read and a watch of all the embedded behind the scenes clips. There’s also plenty of links to other great Star Trek content.

Creating lens flares, in stereo: Established in Abrams’ first Star Trek as part of that film’s visual style, lens flares are again a feature of Into Darkness. ILM had to ensure this time around they also worked in stereo. To do that, explains co-visual effects supervisor Pat Tubach, they would break the flares into different components “and try to separate out what seems like a piece of the light. For instance, if you have a light on a ship that’s pretty far away, you want to be able to tell the difference between what you would expect to be attached to the light and what is attached to the volume.”

Composing Star Trek: Into Darkness

Tim Simonec is a Music Conductor and Orchestrator who has worked with composer Michael Giacchino on projects including “video games such as Medal of Honor, Call of Duty; TV series like Alias, LOST, Fringe; and feature films, The Incredibles, Mission Impossible 3, Star Trek, UP, and most recently, Super 8, MI4: Ghost Protocol, and John Carter. For his arrangement of the end-titles of UP, Tim was nominated for a Grammy.”

Its a really interesting look at a role that doesn’t traditionally get covered in behind the scenes featurettes.

Graphic Design on Star Trek Into Darkness

If you’re a geek for all the UI design seen through out the film then you’ll love this post from Inventing Interactive which features an interview with Jorge Almeida on his work on the film. It is a fascinating interview, packed with plenty of concept drawings, early versions and technical production details.

My goal with the HUD was to minimize the interface as much as possible. I wanted to frame it around the actors face in a way that didn’t feel too tech. I was trying to make it feel soothing, with a steady pulse- that way the animation had somewhere to go when things get dangerous.

So in practice for the anticipated installation of Avid Media Composer 7 I’ve decided to actually update my Avid installation to MC 6.5.2.1. As always with Avid nothing is as simple as it could be, so here is a quick guide on how to upgrade your Avid Media Composer installation.

The general workflow is:

0. Write down your system ID

1. Deactivate your licence

2. Uninstall Avid

3. Re-install Avid

4. Reactivate your license

To find your system ID load up Media Composer then go to: Avid Media Composer > About Avid Media Composer. You’ll see your System ID on the right handside of the branded Avid launch image. Scribble it down.

To deactivate your current installation of Media Composer from within the program go to Special > Deactivate Software License. You will need to be online to be able to do this.

Next head to Applications > Avid Uninstallers and run the uninstaller. You will want to have all the boxes checked for a straight forward update.

Download the update you’re upgrading to from the Avid site and run the installation.  Once installed the next time you launch AMC it will ask you to reactivate your license, do that and then you’re done. Phew!

Avid’s official docs for this can be found here. Direct download to the installation guide. Oh and one final thing – thanks to Scott Simmons for point this out – you should, of course back up your custom settings before uninstalling. Here is a handy settings guide. On a mac your User settings are located here. (Along with your Avid Attic)

MacHD> Users> Shared > AvidMediaComposer > Avid Users

Speaking of Scott he recently posted this great collection of tips on his Pro Video Coalition blog sourced from editor David Michael Maurer but helpfully expounded upon. Definitely worth a read by Avid editors of any calibre.

AVID MC Pro Tip: Want your VO to sound awesome?Add an AudioSuite Compressor/Limiter to it. Set Ratio to 8.0:1 and boost the Gain to taste.

— David Michael Maurer (@1982films) May 22, 2013

Media Composer & Boris FX

So when you get Media Composer it comes with Avid FX a slightly lite version of Boris RED (as far as I can tell?). This was recently updated to version 6.3 and can be downloaded from here. So what do you do with this ‘in app’ titles and effects tool?

Well for some paid for training (looks a bit old?) you can hit the Boris FX site or for a searchable solution visit its user forum. For some freebies check out this free webinar presented by Steve Holyhead on creating ‘Everyday VFX’ in Media Composer which will take you through some Pan & Zoom techniques, creating a ‘beauty pass’ and a selection of effects from BCC 8.2. Although Steve is using Boris Continuum Complete 8.2 you can still learn plenty.

Pan And Zoom – Creating Ken Burns Effects

Title Tips and Effects

Ashley Kennedy from PremiumBeat demonstrates how to insert video inside some title text in this short tutorial, and below walks through how to create lower thirds with AutoTitler in Avid Marquee.

Motion Tracking in Avid Media Composer

No instalment of an Avid Diary would be complete without a tutorial from Kevin P McAuliffe and in this Creative Cow tutorial Kevin demonstrates how to do basic motion tracking inside Media Composer to composite some text behind a passing car.

Colour Correction Inside Avid Media Composer

I’ve previously blogged about the basics of colour correction in MC, or you might be better off round-tripping to Resolve. If you’re going to stay in Media Composer to get things done quickly this tutorial from Ashley Kennedy on PremiumBeat will show you how to use the Auto Correction tools.

Audio Tips and Tricks

 To round up this collection of tutorials here is a third one from Ashley Kennedy on some useful tips and tricks involving audio keyframes (which have recently been updated too) I wish I had found this post earlier!

Assistant Editor on Star Trek Into Darkness, Evan Schiff shares some great insights into his process for dialogue clean up using RTAS (Real Time Audio Suite) plugins. Evan shares a quick tip (and a free preset download) for the EQ, Compressor and De-Esser tools. A quick way to get cleaner sounding dialogue.

Tip from Evan: To quickly copy RTAS effects from one track to another, hold down Option and drag the effects you want to copy from one track’s RTAS chain to another.

For a more in-depth understanding of the EQ tool check out this guest post on the Avid blog from Ben Hershleder (who has written a really great book on Avid editing). Ben’s post gives you a ton of detail about the inner workings of the EQ tool and an overview of audio frequency basics.

My final link, and unrelated to audio, is this one to the Avid AMA Master Guide thanks to a tweet from Michael Kammes. Very helpful reading.

Whatever stage of your film editing career you’re in, be it just beginning or sitting on decades of experience, this collection of editing wisdom should hopefully inspire you to continue to grow, learn and edit better.

Anne V Coates – Editing Legend

Anne V Coates is an incredible editor having cut films such as Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Sight, Erin Brokovich, In The Line of Fire and many more greats. If you want to meet her in the flesh she will be the key note speak at Edit Fest London 2013. If you can’t make that event, Gordon Burkell from AOTG has a brilliant two part interview with Anne in the run up to Edit Fest London. It’s worth clicking through to the AOTG site for a full list of other interviews Anne has done – great stuff!

The Changing Role of The Assistant Editor

The Canadian Cinema Editors presents a great question and answer session over on AOTG, with several assistant editors from feature and TV productions discussing how their role has changed with the demise of film and the advent of all digital productions. Towards the end of the video they also share some insights on how you can break into being an assistant film editor and then progress up the chain within editorial.

Editing The Hobbit – Jabbez Olssen

Oliver Peters has an excellent behind the scenes look at the editorial process for Peter Jackson’s epic The Hobbit trilogy. The article is full of tons of technical details about how Olssen used Avid to cut the film including handling millions of feet of R3D stereoscopic files (to mix metaphors) and incorporating all of the visual effects shots. Well worth a read.

The editorial team – headed up by first assistant editor Dan Best – consisted of eight assistant editors, including three visual effects editors. According to Olssen, “We mimicked a similar pipeline to a film project. Think of the RED camera .r3d media files as a digital negative. Peter’s facility, Park Road Post Production, functioned as the digital lab. They took the RED media from the set and generated one-light, color-corrected dailies for the editors.

Editing Barton Fink in 4 Parts

These 4 videos come from the Manhattan Edit Workshop with assistant editor Michael Berenbaum discussing what it was like working on the Coen brothers Barton Fink.

Tim Squyres – Ang Lee’s Editor

The Manhattan Edit Workshop recently posted these clips from Tim Squyres discussing several different films from his career the editing techniques he used. Insightful stuff.

In this last video Tom O Neil interviews Tim on his work on Life of Pi, including working with Ang Lee, 3D and a CG main character. It’s a great 15 minute conversation.

If you’re on the look out for some free generators, effects, and such for use in FCPX, then this round up of some of the best free downloads available on the net, should satisfy that search.

Free Generators For FCPX

Ripple Training has a set of 12 free generators – things like bars and tone, lens flares, noise and shapes, which you can now use in FCPX.

Free Effects for FCPX

Alex Golner has a fantastic archive of 50+ effects, transitions and titles that you can download for free from his site. Its amazing how generous he is with the things he has painstakingly created including an aged film look, bad tv effect, animated curve controls, blurs and colour effects, masks and titles. It is a valuable resource for any FCPX editor.

Andy Mees has also released 3 great free plugins for FCPX including one that called Elastic Aspect which lets you stretch non 16:9 aspect ratio footage to fit. The other two free effects are a region tool to apply an effect only to a specific area and the last are a set of safe guides for on screen checking.

PremiumBeat has a link to a great free re-lighting tool from ProduceNewMedia.com which lets you relight your shots with variable spot and point lights.

Motion Array has a set of free light streak transitions that you can download in exchange for a tweet or a like.  They’re a handy addition to any editors tool box.

CineFlare’s Free FCPX Downloads

Cineflare has a large collection of freebies for use in FCPX including light transitions, quick look grades, adjustment layers and split screen effects. If you’re editing in FCPX there’s no reason not to grab these great treats.