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Filed under: Editing •Motion Graphics •

Composite Modes in Final Cut Pro

The job of an editor is usually to spin straw into gold: Take hours of raw footage, edit it into a cohesive story, and - depending on the skill of the camera and lighting crews that were employed - color correct to enhance or unify the original footage. The biggest problem comes when you’re stuck with inherently boring footage: You need to come up with ways to add excitement or drama to grab and keep the viewer’s attention.

A great (but relatively little-known) trick is to take an additional shot - usually one that is abstract, with interesting lights - and composite it on top of the normal footage to add color, movement, and mystery using a method other than normal opacity blending. Fortunately, Final Cut Pro offers that method: the seldom-used Composite Modes.

Composite Modes (also known as Blend Modes, Blending Modes, or Transfer Modes) provide alternate ways to blend together the pixels in two overlapping clips. They take some properties of the clip on top (such as its color or contrast) and combine it with some properties of the underlying clip, creating a new composite that is often far more interesting than a simple opacity blend or fade. The results can range from subtle to psychedelic.

Even those who are aware of Composite Modes seldom understand how they actually work, often employing the “happy accident” approach to see which one works on a particular set of clips. In this article, we’ll give you several examples of each mode in action, plus explain what’s going on under the hood.

Let’s go through the basics of how to apply a Composite Mode, look at the footage we will be using for our examples, and then show what normal opacity blending looks like:

Applying Modes

Applying Composite Modes in Final Cut Pro is easy: Place your normal clip in its normal video track (i.e. V1), create a second video track (i.e. V2), and then place your accent clip in that. Then either right-click on the accent clip (the one on top) or select it and choose the Modify menu. Near the bottom of the list will be an entry called Composite Modes. Select it, and to the right a sub-menu of various modes will appear. Choose one, and your accent clip will be “moded” on top of your normal clip underneath. There is no need to set a Composite Mode for the normal clip.

The bad news is that applying a Composite Mode will most likely result in a red render bar appearing over your timeline, as most are based on RGB color channel treatments (as opposed to YUV). The good news is that Composite Modes render quickly.

The Example Footage

This clip to the left (FT133 from the Artbeats Fitness collection) will be our “normal” clip that is placed in V1. Note that it was already shot through a gold-tone filter with nice lighting, but we can make it even more interesting by using Composite Modes.

The accent clip can come from B-roll from when the cameraperson was just playing around with focus and filters; it can also come from a personal library of a few well-chosen stock footage clips.

Below are four different clips which we will use as accent clips in the V2 track in our examples: a soft, light abstract background which is in a similar color as our main clip; a soft, slightly darker abstract background which is in a contrasting color; a relatively sharp and constrasty abstract black and white background, and a second “normal” footage clip. These should give you a good idea of the range of possibilities.

These four “accent” clips are from various Artbeats stock footage collections: LAB128 from Liquid Abstracts, NAB107 from Nature Abstracts, LA230 from Liquid Ambience 2, and BW102 from Business World.

Opacity Blending

Final Cut Pro is rare in that it has offered Composite Modes from the start. Most other non-linear editing packages either added them only recently, or do not support them even to this day. As a result, most editors have been forced to use alpha channels, track (travel) mattes, or simple opacity blends to composite multiple images. Below we’ve taken each of our accent clips, set their Composite Mode to Normal (the default), opened them in their Viewer, clicked on their Motion tab, and set Opacity to 50 to demonstrate what a typical opacity blend would look like:

The result of a simple opacity blend between our normal and accent clips.

The results are okay, but a bit washed-out looking. In the examples starting on the next page, we will set the accent clip’s Opacity back to 100%, and use Composite Modes to get more interesting results. Rather than go through the modes in the order presented in the menu, we will group them by similar function, starting with the ones that add or subtract light from a scene.

next page: Multiply, Add, and Screen modes

(Page 1 of 5 pages for this article  1 2 3 >  Last »)

There are lots of articles showing me the outcome of the composite modes, but this is the first one that tells me what’s actually happening mathematically, which makes their operation a lot more predictable and comprehensible. Thanks, this one’s a keeper!

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  02/14  at  01:10 PM

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