A Review of the Hawaiki Color and Analyzer for FCPX

The FCP X Desert Island Challenge Part 14

Hawaiki Color and Analyzer for FCPX: An Overview and Breakdown

If you work heavily in FCPX or Premiere Pro then you should know about FX Factory. And if you don’t, consider yourself ‘clued in’ from this moment on. To paraphrase the FX Factory website they are: “The Plug-in App store for post-production software.”

An App Store for filters is a good description of FX Factory

They have a free app that you download and it’ll manage all the plug-ins they deliver to you from a single interface. FX Factory works with FCPX, Motion, After Effects and Premiere Pro. They are a clearinghouse for over 20 different plug-in developers. The FX Factory app allows you to download Trials, buy filters, activate and deactivate filters and also ships with a set of free plugins.

Prices for FX Factory filters range from the ever-popular Free to $299. The vast majority sit between the $49 and $99 price-point, making them appropriately affordable as overall prices for NLE and motion graphics software has dropped significantly over the years.

FX Factory has a range of color-related filters for us to explore

Kindly, Niclas Bahn (FX Factory creator) gave me licenses for all the color correction filters I thought looked interesting for the Desert Island Challenge. Of those, I’ll be doing overviews of those filters I think are strong contenders to be ‘The One’ I select as the MVP for adding value to the base FCPX filter set.

We start by looking at the Hawaiki Color and Hawaiki Analyzer filters

The Hawaiki Color filter takes a completely different approach than the Color Finale and Colorista III filters we’ve previously looked at in this series. Its User Interface is very customizable and can be changed as you gain expertise in the filter to make it less obtrusive while putting the controls in the direct context of your image.

In truth, at first, I was hostile to Hawaiki Color’s User Interface

When seeing YouTube demos of this plug-in – I hated the UI. But once I personally loaded it up and saw the additional options for minimizing those controls, my opinion has softened considerably—to the point I consider this plug-in a viable contender in the FCPX Desert Island Challenge.

If you don’t like the UI overlays from the product shots, I say: Give it a shot and play with the customization options. As you’ll see in this Video Insight, the developers recognize this reaction and have given you options to minimize the UI’s impact on viewing your images as you color correct.

The Hawaiki Analyzer is also explored in this Video Insight

Hawaiki Analyzer is a separate purchase from Hawaiki Color and not in contention for the Desert Island Challenge – but it takes a very interesting approach to analyze the colors of our pixels… so I decided to take a few minutes at the end of this Insight and show it to you.

Enjoy!

– pat