Rack It

Tuesday, December 18, 2007 Filed in: Weekly Tip

Rack Focus effects are often used by camera ops to add a feeling of movement in the image without actually moving the camera. Typically, these effects happen at the head of a clip to act as a transition. From time to time we’ve found the need to simulate a rack focus. Fortunately, this is really easy using a Gaussian Blur filter.

Load the clip you’d like to effect into the Viewer and choose Effects > Video Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
Position the playhead at the head of the clip and set a keyframe for the Radius parameter with a pretty high value; something like 50 works well.
Move about one second forward into the clip (further for a slower rack) and change the Radius parameter to 0 (a new keyframe is automatically inserted).

Play back the clip. Now that’s Racking! Oh sorry, Rocking!

Like this tip? It comes from the book
Final Cut Studio On the Spot from Focal Press.