I could have stopped here and been happy, but what’s the use of having plug-ins if you don’t use them? I then added a Blue Tiffen Color-Grad filter, and adjusted it so the sky was blue. The problem was that even the clouds were blue, which just isn’t natural.
By simply adjusting the “Preserve Highlights” slider, I was able to keep the sky a beautiful blue, and have my clouds a nice clean white. Since this test went so well, I plan to use all 6000 of my old Digital Juice SD 4x3 480i footage in my 16x9 HD projects until I can get HD replacement clips.  I should have quit, but I had to know if I could make a realistic sunset. Sure enough, With the Tiffen Sunset/Grad I set three different colors and used the opacity control to fade them into believability.

The Nattress plug-ins can create awesome flash effects. I played with the flash transitions in a commercial I was making using a Digital Juice film clip of a barefoot girl on the beach throwing rose petals in the wind while spinning.  With the girl clip slowed down, and using a long transition, the sun on her face seemed to just slowly get brighter until the whole scene went completely white. It was a very organic and beautiful transition.

FCP is becoming the editing software of choice. It’s good to see so many companies offering Plug-in support for this product. I tested all of the software on my new MacPro dual quad core, with an AJA card and breakout box, and the ATTO controller card hooked up to a Enhanced Technologies RAID case with 8 Seagate 15K RPM SAS drives. All of the Plug-ins downloaded and installed perfectly, and nothing locked up during the testing. Multiple filters require rendering in DVCproHD, but the results are awesome and worth the wait.
 
 
CONTACTS:

Panasonic
www.panasonic.com

Tiffen
www.tiffen.com