Is there a way to make custom guides or overlays in FCP?

[Tom Wolsky]

Digital Heaven Guides will do what you want.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Tom Wolsky]

Digital Heaven Guides will do what you want.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Michael,
FC have a Grid (Video Generators> Render). Is quite limited but I think is enough for what you are trying to achieve.
Set Background Opacity=0.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Bret Williams]

Nope. But you can take that screen grab to photoshop, and make an overlay with an alpha that you simply put on an upper track. I’ll bet there’s a plugin that does the same thing.

When I’m working in HD, and will also need SD output, I often make a SD sequence and place my nested HD sequence within. Keep them both open and you can flip back and forth.

BUT SURE would be nice if the title safe had options to do what you want. Seems like such a simple little thing. It would also be nice to have title safes displayed downstream on the ntsc monitor. Perhaps Kona or Matrox do that, I’m not sure. If they don’t they should.

[Michael Nielsen]

Thanks for the tip. I found them and they work perfect. I just placed that jpeg into my timeline as a reference and adjusted the digital heaven guides to match. Just what I needed because I don’t have to render.

Thanks.
Michael

[Josh Olenslager]

I’ve also used the color solid in the matte folder in the video generators effects. Simply figure out the cropping data for top (one color matte) and bottom (second color matte) and crop up/down in the motion tab. Set the opacity real low on the mattes, to like 20 or 25 % — Overlay them over your video track bed — like track 6 and 7 or something that still gives you room to work. If you’re going to be using FCP to do the cropping, controlling the data with the mattes will give you an accurate look at what you’re output is going to be like. As long as the color mattes match the sequence settings, it won’t cause more rendering than is normal for an edit. I’ve used a photoshop overlay as well, so that’s another good idea that’s been mentioned.

best of luck!

Josh

Digital Media, Thought Equity Motion

[John Fishback]

Checkout Andy’s Guides. https://web.mac.com/andymees/Free_and_Easy/main/Entries/2008/1/29_Andy%E2%80%99s_Guides.html I’ve played with this and I recall it needs to be rendered. Another thought if you have a Kona3 card is to make your guide as a graphic and use the downstream keyer in the Kona to insert the guides on your monitor.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870
ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE Enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
24″ TV-Logic Monitor
Final Cut Studio 2 (up to date)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

[Andy Mees]

>I’ve played with this and I recall it needs to be rendered …. MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM

Hmmm … think that might depend on chosen sequence codec and particular system config John, doesn’t need rendering on my lowly first gen MBP with any of the supported camera native codecs, uncompressed etc Checking now tho and it does only seem to manage preview quality with ProRes sequence settings. Thanks for the heads up.

[Michael Nielsen]

I tried the matte generator and really like it for the way it masks off what I’m not using, but does take some rendering for every small move and am trying to avoid that for now. It’s something I would probably put in to render out for the client once I have a rough cut ready so they can get an accurate idea of what the final will look like.

For now the Digital Heaven filter is perfect.

Thanks for all the suggestions.
Michael

[Spencer Tycksen]

The Digital Heaven guides worked excellent for me. Thanks Tom!