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How to make After Effects and FCP work together nicely or can i do it all in FCP?
Hey fellas, I will be editing/animating a feature film, which is something I’ve never done before, and the project is kind of unusual in the sense that much of the footage will be made from animating photos (in a style similar to Ken Burns’ Documetaries).
I wanted to see if any of you have any work flow advice for me. My rough plan is as follows:
1. start editing with static images just to more or less finalize what goes where before animating.
2. later animate the images using the time alloacated for each static photo.I did a little test run using FCP’s animating tool and found it pretty cumbersome to work with and the movements never seemed as fluid as the animations i did in After Effects.
what do you guys think? am I waisting time doing animations in After Effects that I could do in Final Cut Pro, or is After Effects simply the place to being doing this kind of stuff?
Also any work flow advice, tips, personal experiences with this type of project would be greatly appreciated!
Graze on my fellow bovine! Graze on!
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9 Replies
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Well, it’s really a give and take relationship here…I think it’s pretty undisputible that any AE effect is much better than a stock FCP effect, especially the motion, rotate, and scale porporties. So I’d definatly go with AE from a quality standpoint, however, AE and FCP don’t intergrate well and the workflow between the two is cumbersome, once you render in AE and bring that into FCP and then need to make additional changes, you need to re-render in AE, a real time waster. So from a time-saving standpoint you’re better off with FCP.
So what’s more important-time or quality? I’d go with quality all the way.
Also a third option would be to use Apple’s Motion application if that’s available to you. It intergrates seamlessly with FCP and has way better motion effects. Good luck.
Jeff
“TV said that? Then it must be true.” -Homer Simpson
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I think that you could get by with FCP for the job but, I wouldn’t want to do it there. If it were me, I would either use Motion or AE for this. The Motion advantage is the integration with FCP so you could import your Motion project and palce it on the FCP timeline and if you tweaked anything in the animation it will be automatically updated in the edit. That is a significant timesaver. If you want to go AE, then I would dummy up some AT movies to use as placeholders for each animation and then replace them in the file system so they are updated in the edit. Not as elegant as the Motion workflow but it would work.
-gl
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I’ve done some retrospective video projects using photos and documents scanned from the archives of the college I work for. It’s been my experience that motion graphics programs like After Effects, Boris Red, or Motion have been much more versitle than what FCP alone has been able to do. (Why did Apple come out with Motion in the Final Cut Suite, if FCP was capable of in depth Motion Graphics creation and manipulation?) Anyway, if I were going to do sophisticated work with images like you are about to, I’d do it in After Effects.
Randy
“You are:
1. Untalented but excessively persistent
2. Unbelieveably stupid
3. An artist
4. All of the above”–Norman Rockwell
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Mata,
AE will give you a bit better scaling than FCP, but you can do a lot of compositing in FCP, if you know the ropes. You should optimize your stills in Photoshop, 72 dpi at no bigger than say twice your project frame size. This is usually enough for most moves and zooms.
If this doesn’t smooth your moves as well as AE, then do it in AE and render in Animation+ with a straight alpha channel and you’ll be good to go. If you don’t need an alpha channel then skip the last step
Have a wonderful day.
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Depending on how complex or hard your movements are, you can do the effect in FCP. The effects would still be a bit smoother in AE, but if you turn on the Best Quality in FCP, that makes a lot of difference.
If you use the AE workflow, be sure to purchase the Automatic Duck Pro Importer for AE. You can simply send your timelines to AE and keep working on them there.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Good call on the Duck. Forgot about that. Sorry Wes!
-gl
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Hi,
You may also want to consider using a plugin to get better results, or at least a better interface in which to work. Here are a couple:
I use the former with great efficiency and success. The latter is also much easier to use than FCP’s built-in controls and provides great results, as well. I believe that these plugins approach (or “equal”?) the quality provided by Motion, AE, et al., without having to leave FCP.
Best of luck,
Dave
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Sorry for the multiple posts. There seems to be a problem with the Cow’s post processing 😉
After hitting the post button, the process didn’t seem to complete. I cancelled and tried again… but the post had already been submitted. Oops.
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thanks guys for all the tips! i’ll mull over them and let you know how it goes.
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