More About Effects Presets in Final Cut Pro
Effects Presets are saved by Final Cut Pro in:
Your User/Home folder / Library / Application Support / ProApps / Effects Presets /
Effects Presets are not like most other Mac … “things” — they are hard-coded to find the Effects they use from specific Effects Categories. If those effects are moved from those locations, effects presets fail! In order to use our Highlighter Effects Presets in Final Cut Pro, you must either install the Highlighter effects in a Category named: FCPXTemplates (case sensitive) or use the following method to change its dependence on the Highlighter installation location to the category that you chose to install them into:
- Open the Highlighter – (name).effectsPreset file in TextWrangler or BBEdit (TextEdit is not suitable for this task!)
- Type Command-F to open the Find/Replace dialog
- In Find, type FCPXTemplates
- In Replace, type the name of the category you placed the Highlighter effects in (case sensitive)
- Click the Replace All button
- Save
TextWrangler has been abandoned, although it still works if you have it. BBEdit is available as a Free Download from BareBones.com (or the App Store) and you can use it for free forever as long as you don’t sign up for the in-app purchases. It’s good to have around, especially if you need to dig into FCPX/Motion files.
Effects Presets from others
The Effects Presets you get from here will be set up to point to FCPXTemplates (unless otherwise specified) as the Category. If you have not been given specific instructions the following instructions will guide you to customizing your installation:
Open the *.effectsPreset file in BBEdit/TextWrangler. A shortcut, if you’re using BBEdit/TextWrangler would be to right click on the *.effectsPreset file and in the contextual menu, go to the very bottom to Services. You should find: Open in BBEdit or Open in TextWrangler from that menu. If not, you can Open With either text editor.
Type Command-F to open the Find dialog. Search for Effects.localized. Since Effects Presets can be complex combinations of effects, you will need to pay attention to which effects are actually used and note how you have those effects installed on your System. For example, everybody has the built-in Stylize > Drop Shadow effect. This effect is internally installed in FCPX and you would not want to change the category for this particular effect. Only change the Categories of those effectsPreset effects that you know you have installed.
With that in mind, keep advancing the Find results until you find the Effect whose category you need to change. Once you find an Effect you have installed, double click on the Category name, making sure that it is completely selected (you may need to extend the selection over spaces and some other characters) and type Command – E (Use Selection for Find).
Then type in the name of the Category to be used by replacement.
Click the Replace All button and Save.
You only need to change the Category names in the effectsPreset for the Effects that are not installed in the same location as indicated in the effectsPreset file. Once you have the categories synchronized, the Effects Preset will work just as if you had created it yourself.
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A good place to see all of my effects as well as several tutorials and other demonstrations in use is on my YouTube channel.
