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Flying Key
Hi Folks,
I’m using FCP 4.5 HD and I have been asked to create a ‘Flying Key’ for a sports match. I want to put together the two crests of the team and use them as the mix to and from replays. Does anyone know how to do this or know of any tutorials in FCP or AE that show you how it’s done? They want me to use Matte and Fill layers but I’m not sure how these work.
Thanks in Advance.
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3 Replies
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If you know how to keyframe, you can accomplish this task. I would suggest reading the manual and doing the tutorials that came with FCP. Ripple Training has tutorials on their website.
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Frogman
The kind of animated move you’re talking about is normally designed and rendered by a 3d artist or animator, working for the sports broadcaster in question.
Let’s assume for a moment that you have a couple of animations of the team logos in 3dsMax. You need to export these into FCP in a format that has the transparency information – the “key” or “matte” information in it. Various formats support this in photoshop. In my experience, animated sequences of this type are usually exported as .tga or targa type files, as these contain the embedded key information. I feel sure someone more familiar than me with these things can give you other types of files that do the same thing. If you import these targa sequences (which are just a list of stills, one per frame) into quicktime player (>file >open image sequence) and save them as quicktimes you can import them directly into FCP and the key information will be there automatically, just like a FCP generated text. All you do is drop this file into V2 and put a cut/dissolve in the layer below, et voila.
Now, this is not a lot of use if you don’t have a 3d artist or animator handy… You could generate both logos in photoshop as ‘cutouts’ with a nice soft border and open the PS file in FCP, aming sure you saved it with layers. If you just want to export from PS just as jpegs or similar, you can export the logo itself, then save the ‘alpha layer’ (aka the key or matte) as a jpeg, then import both to FCP and animate them within Final Cut. To make this work, put the matte (alpha layer export) on the timeline at V2 and set the attributes to “travel matte luma” or “travel matte alpha” depending on the type of photoshop export you try. Then put the logo (the fill) on the layer above (V3 in this example), then animate them identically using whatever motion effects/settings you wish. Putting a simple dissolve or even cut on the lower layer (if your logos go full frame at any point) to make the ‘flying transition” work.
Phew. Crucially, assuming you don’t have a handy animator (and I would find one if at all possible) you WILL need photoshop (or similar) to make this work. You need a good quality still of each team logo, and you need to spend plenty of time making a nice ‘cutout’ of each logo in PS.
Hope that helps – never had to try this from scratch on my own, so I’m not sure I envy you this one….
Ben
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No advice and nothing useful to add, sorry.
I was just wondering why you are planning on doing this via FCP and not After Effects or Motion2? I haven
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