Alpha effects

[Brian Wells]

If it’s any help, Tom, we use the Digital Juice stuff constantly here. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they all work beautifully as a simple overlay. Drop the transition/swipe on a high track and scootch it laterally so the proper frame(s) obscure the edit below. DJ usually gives you two or three frames of fullscreen coverage to cover any vertical edit.

For that hundredth occasion, they also supply perfectly matched alpha mattes to go with each transition as well as pretty much all their motion elements, L3rds, isolative overlays, etc. just in case you need the extra definition. Appropriate sound effects come with ’em, too.

I swear by the stuff, and highly recommend their backgrounds as well. Makes most of my projects very easy indeed, and I’ll use them to help me cook up proprietary mo-graphs in Motion when I need something more brand-specific.

DJ do try awfully hard to convince you to use their proprietary media browser/organizer called Juicer, but I’ve had better luck just archiving the raw stuff itself so I don’t have to keep loading DVD’s to recall a toolkit I used six months ago. Select appropriately to your license/needs.

Brian Wells
Media Services
Walt Disney Travel Company
Anaheim, CA

Obligatory Disclaimer:
1) I work for a company. A not-so-small company. Any opinions I may express ought not to be assumed to be those of said company.

2) The content I create and the tools I use to create it are generally the property of said company, meaning it is highly unlikely I will be able to publicly share said content. In the event that I do share said content, any failure on my part to remove or obscure proprietary elements of said content shall not be construed as permission to do anything whatsoever with said elements or with said content as a whole.

[Tom Wolsky]

Thanks Brian.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Barry Fraser]

Thanks to you Tom, Bret,Brian and Steve.

I now have the info I needed and things are working just fine.
Thanks,
Barry