Callouts 3 for Final Cut Pro

FXFactory recently released the third iteration of their Callouts graphics as professionally demoed here:

[youtube]https://youtu.be/kkYc7Ln7Vj8[/youtube]

And as personally demoed here (cheesy bgs are built-in to FCP):

Of the various features, it’s probably about 50/50 stuff we in the Media Production team might actually use. The most valuable elements I found are the Compound Callouts which use arrows, boxes, and text to diagram information. They have a clean animation style and would work well for an instructor who didn’t have Keynote slides. It has a bunch of built-in shapes, similar to Camtasia, that can be helpful in creating quick pop-up graphics and annotations.

There’s also a couple of magnify filters which would work well with displaying a high-res photo or graphic and wanted to focus in on a small section.

One proposed use case was working with the lightboard. In one video, the instructor drew on the glass but her pen did not leave a mark. Our producer Brandon did an incredible job of making it look like she really drew what he added in post (jump to 13:40):

I didn’t even realize that clip had been animated. These callouts are better suited for something that’s not as subtle. Something similar could be achieved with a little creative editing, but there’s not much control for timing the animation or shaping the line to match something that specific. You could theoretically modify them in Motion, but that seems contradictory to using them for their convenience. Maybe they’re still worth getting as animations to build upon. 

All in all, there’s a ton of options for customizing style and you can keyframe just about any attribute you can imagine. Personally, it seems a little light for $60 but I think one could make good use of them in the right contexts.