• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Help with smooth keyframed zoom and more

  Posted by Rob Mclain on February 11, 2010 at 5:45 am

  Sorry if this is a elementary question, but I have just made the switch from Avid over to Final Cut and I am not sure I am doing this correctly.

  My goal is to have a smooth 8 second pull out of a graphic over video. Think Star Wars intro where the Star Wars logo starts big and zooms out to a very small graphic. I want it to be a steady zoom over the 8 second duration.

  My project is 1080 29.97 apple pro res HQ. On video track one I have my video. I made the graphic I want to zoom out into a 1920×1080 psd file, with a transparent background. Brought the psd (layered file) into FCP and dropped that on video track 2 and made the clip 8 seconds. I double clicked on the graphic in the timeline and that opened up the psd layer in the preview window. I then went into the motion tab where I set my keyframes on how I wanted the graphic to move. I adjusted the scale to 200 on the first frame and 0 for the last. The result kind of worked, but not to well. I wanted the graphic to smoothly move from 200 to 0 over the course of the 8 seconds, however it moved slow at first, then fast at the end. How do I get it to move equal distance over the entire time? I tried adding more keyframes but that made it jerky. Am I going about this correct?

  Also, I keep getting dropped frames when playing back the psd file in the canvas and preview window. Seems to play fine once I render, but cannot play unless I do. I am running a MAC PRO quad core 2.66 with 6 gigs of ram, and internal raid. My read write speed is 325/315.

  Tony Brittan replied 16 years, 5 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Rafael Amador

  February 11, 2010 at 12:23 pm

  Hi Rob,
  The capabilities of the FC keyframes are quite limited.
  There are two wais to set your k-frames:
  – In the Motion Tab: left- click in the key-frames and check “Smooth”
  _ In the Canvas: You can use the small “diamond” in the Canvas window to set k-frames. Left-click and select “Easy In-Easy Out”.
  rafael

  http://www.nagavideo.com
• 

  Tony Brittan

  February 11, 2010 at 1:36 pm

  You may also want to open that psd back up in Photoshop and re-export as .png and 72dpi, with a size no more than 25% larger than your frame size. No larger is best though. FCP is kinda particular about images such as photos and graphics. .png holds alpha channel/transparency very well. Just a tip!

  Tony Brittan
  Apple Certified Pro – FCP
  islandshoreproductions.com

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