Digital Heaven is a U.K company that offers a range of Plug-ins, software and even an Ebook for Final Cut Pro users. Set up and run by Ex-BBC resources editor Martin Baker, they offer no nonsense products that are simple, timesaving solutions to everyday problems and tasks.

Digital Heaven have a range of 12 plug-ins; that are reasonably priced at between $20 & $40 each. Looking through the list they all seem useful to a professional editor, there’s a combination of effects and repair tools that just about everyone has or will need at some point, whether its a quick way of adding fades or fixing a nasty bit of drop out. I’ve taken a look at their dead pixel fixer DH_Reincarnation ($40) and the boxed subtitling tool DH_Subtitle ($20).

Most editors have come across dead camera pixels at some stage, that nasty little spot of white that just seems to hover over the top of the picture. If you’ve got a lot of problem footage in your edit you could be looking at a time consuming, and possibly expensive fix to put it right. DH_Reincarnation is a video filter that will let you fix 2 areas of dead pixels on the same clip at once, and its pretty straight forward to use. Simply define the problem area and select the pixels you want to fix, there’s a mode menu that let’s you enable, by-pass or show the selected area, which saves on render time. Reincarnation works very smoothly over moving footage and as a dead pixel stays in the same spot you can copy and paste your attributes to other clips in the timeline, which is handy. As with most repair tools of this type you have to be careful to apply it to the smallest area possible in order to fix the problem, make the spot too big and you will get a bit of blurring, that is especially noticeable on HD material.

Next up is DH_Subtitle ($20), subtitling isn’t the most creative or exciting of tasks – be it a 1 hour doco or a few ADR lines in an offline it can be tricky to get the positioning and timing right, so anything that helps get it done is worth a look. DH subtitle is a Video generator the crates boxed subtitles – so slap it on a second video layer and tweak – enter the text, choose your font, text size, alignment etc and you can also adjust the opacity of the box surrounding the text to suit your pictures. If your adding a few lines of text Subtitle keeps the bottom line in the same place so your alignment is always spot on. And that’s it. It’s easy to keep your text in title safe, make changes and move text about and best of all it looks neat and professional.

So overall two great plugins that are simple to use and do a fine job, given the relatively low price they will pay for themselves even if its just a one off job. For more info, free downloads, FCP tips and video tutorials head to http://www.digitalheaven.co.uk.