Can’t export QT with Alpha channel from FCP 4.5

[John Pale]

Toggle off track visibility. Your render files will go offline. Your sequence is now unrendered…this will allow the alpha to be in the export. Export. Undo to restore your render files.

[David Bogie]

Good workflow suggestion, John. It would have taken me four paragraphs to arrive at essentially the same place.

To the bigger question: Don’t you think this should be an Export Option, built right into the interface? Everyone needs to export alpha channels sooner or alter, don’t they? It’s silly to be forced to figure out the effects must be UNRENDERED before they can exported to Animation codec files. Lame design.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[John Pale]

Yeah, bogie, its totally unintuitive. It makes sense, if you really think about it….the render file is a composite of everything, like a flattened Photoshop file, but who would guess you would have to unrender stuff to export. Time to use the built in FCP feedback link again.

[Chris Poisson]

Wow,

I never knew about this, but it makes perfect sense, or nonsense that is. Glad to know about this, thanks.

[Mccaincow]

I am attempting the same thing. I am trying to render a QT movie with an alpha channel that I can reimport into FCP in a different sequence on a different computer. I did all of this and nothing works! I can not seem to have the alpha channel rendered into the QT movie. Any ideas?

[Tom Wolsky]

Export to QuickTime Movie. Set a custom setting rather than current settings. Choose Animation millions+ just as you would in QuickTime Conversion. This will recompress the frames, ignore the render files and create the Animation file with alpha.

All the best,

Tom