As compared to some of my plug-ins, the controllable options for LightKit are modest but appropriate. If you are an absolute settings tweaker, there may not be enough for you. But for 98% of the projects where you'd use LightKit, the controls are just perfect, with color, timing, luminance and intensity controls. Instead of making you choose from a completely wide array of digital inputs, some of the plug-ins opt for pull down presets within another preset. For example, the earlier mentioned Light pulse lets you simply choose between sine waves, noise etc.
Each of the seven effects come with between 11 to 19 presets as a starting point for customization. The presets are simply an extension of the options showing what can be done rather than simply adding more dials and letting you figure it out for yourself. Hey, we're all visual specialists but it sure is nice to have some visual helps to accelerate our refinement.
A welcome level of options come with the LightKit transition effects of Burn Wipe and Flash. Not only do you get a healthy dose of presets to choose from, but there is also and excellent collection of digital controls for animation, flicker/pulsing, direction, tints, clamps and more. In fact, there are more options for the transition effects than for the video effects.
Render time is fast for these effects. In fact, stacking some of these effects yielded almost no additional slow down in render time.
On a side note, for some users, myself included, there seems to be some new funky compatibility problem with the host application that LightKit is part of (FxFactory) and the FCP Studio set up. While any of the plug-ins you can use via FxFactory work equally well in Motion or Final Cut, using an FxFactory plug in Motion prevents importing the Motion file successfully into FCP with a "ProPlug Failed" message. Noise Industries, makers of FxFactory are aware of the issue but don't have an answer or a fix yet.
