-
New FCPX user, what’s all the hate about?
-
[Andrew Kimery] “Jeez Tony, your missing out on half the fun of editing if you aren’t swearing at the footage and wondering if the ‘camera guy’ was really just a Jack Russell Terrier with a GoPro strapped to his head. ;)”
hahahaha Well done Andrew
No kidding. We really earn our money when we are called in to fix messed up work, and with the price of cameras dropping like they have any and everybody shooting, there’s plenty of that out there to keep many people employed : )
-
Hi Gabe,
I completely understand where you’re coming from, and it sounds like FCPX and Motion are a great fit for your business. My only point is that Adobe CC can be a great fit for single operators and small shops as well. Though, I think Walter and Andrew made the case better than I did.
[Gabe Strong] ” Do you small one person shop guys really have the time to learn how to use all 50000 programs in CC? :)”
I don’t, but my personal belief is that no single subscriber uses all of the CC applications… I could be wrong though. As a Cinema 4D user, I don’t have a use for half of the features in the program… but I’m willing to pay for the half that I do use. I see Adobe CC the same way. 🙂
Shawn
-
[Shawn Miller] “Kidding aside, I’ll have to take your word for it as I’ve never used Motion. “
If you’d like to get more than a little bit jealous, check out some of our friend Simon Ubsdell’s Motion tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7c46tWEb2grLQ95OGLxBJQ
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Walter,
Yeah and Metal isn’t even being used yet. But I find it hard to believe that
Apple would not optimize FCP X so it uses it, so I’m guessing speed increases will
be coming but who knows when and how much?And as I said, I don’t see any big advantages now to Premiere. It’s cool
that they were first to have several features. I have CS6 and I thought it
was pretty good. Maybe that’s why. But still, nowadays they all seem like
‘Just NLEs’ to me. No huge advantages to any of them anymore.As for the other apps….I am aright in AE, know how to do a few tasks in
Photoshop. Illustrator always baffled me. I taught myself one thing with
it so I could use Zaxwerks 3d plugin for type and logos but not an app
I can do much with…… Plus, you may have heard, FCP X does 3D text now. 🙂Gabe Strong
G-Force Productions
http://www.gforcevideo.com -
Hi Ronny, I’m confused, you say that changing to .mod or .tod extensions lets you import the files into FCPX. I had no idea what those extensions were, but regardless I did change the extension in one of the mpg files first to .mod and then to .tod. Neither of them worked. Shows grayed out in the import window and drag and drop doesn’t work either. How is it that you are able to do this but I can’t?
-
[Tony West] “Stabilization is a nice tool, but as far as I’m concerned, you should either be on a tripod or with a Stedi-cam or Stedi knockoff in the first place. A professional shouldn’t hand you a bunch of shaky footage.
If you are doing a run and gun doc you should have a shoulder mount camera or a rig.”Tony, in an ideal world, things would always work that way. But in this world it doesn’t. And let’s not forget that FCPX is not only targeted at professionals but prosumers as well, which is evident from its $300 price tag. And regardless of whether you’re a pro or not, if you’re also a regular person who likes to go out to parks, lakes and whatnot, you won’t always take a bulky tripod to carry around while you’re walking around with your family. You might just take a small camcorder and being a professional you will shoot footage that is far less shaky than the regular Joe, but you will still watch it at home and think some takes could use some stabilization.
Unfortunately the only software as far as I know that does an outstanding job in this area is Mercalli Pro. It analyses and solves faster than real time, and wherever it saves the information it’s not in the project file, unlike Premiere. Premiere comes with Warp Stabilizer, which is an abomination that is a huge stain in an otherwise excellent NLE. It takes ages to analyze and solve, sometimes it leaves you with terrible results, and worse of all, it saves its data to the project file, so after you used it in even one small clip, it takes at least ten seconds to save the project, and if you use it in a long take, it will render your project useless, to the point where you have to go back to a previous version because it will simply not open, even if you wait all night long. And I speak from experience.
I think it’s great that FCPX comes with its own stabilizer, which is to a point better than the one in Premiere but it’s not really that great when it comes to results. Even at the maximum stabilization, footage is still shaky, even if still better than the original. For example, my GoPro Hero 4 doesn’t have any type of internal stabilization (that I know of, I just got it so feel free to correct me) so the footage is extremely shaky, even it came with a pseudo steadicam (called “Steadicam Curve”) but even when walking as smooth as humanly possible, the footage is shaky. I stabilized some of that footage in FCPX and the result wasn’t that great, even if still better than the raw.
This is why, even though my main system is a MacBook Pro now, I keep Edius 6.08 in my PC in case I need to stabilize something really fast and with good results, because Mercalli 2 came bundled with it. For now even if I have to mount the Windows share, copy the take to the PC and export the stabilized file to a large uncompressed file and finally copy to the Mac via network, it’s still a lot faster than using Warp Stabilizer in Premiere and the results are better than FCPX’s own stabilizer.
-
[Walter Soyka] “[Shawn Miller] “Kidding aside, I’ll have to take your word for it as I’ve never used Motion. ”
If you’d like to get more than a little bit jealous, check out some of our friend Simon Ubsdell’s Motion tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7c46tWEb2grLQ95OGLxBJQ“
Thanks, Walter. I subscribed to Simon’s YT channel shortly after he started it. There are some really good tips and techniques that many compositors and motion graphics artists could find useful, regardless of application. 🙂 Now… if I could just convince him to slant a bit more towards integrating live action and CG elements with 3D tracking data. 🙂
Shawn
-
more like verbal diarrhoea Jim..
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
-
[Aindreas Gallagher] “diarrhoea”
Very original spelling of that word. Probably one of the most misspelled words in the English language, and I can’t never get it right without autocorrect. Seems to me that that word is a load of crap. One could even say that whoever invented that word was full of s**t.
-
Hi Ronny, I’m confused, you say that changing to .mod or .tod extensions lets you import the files into FCPX. I had no idea what those extensions were, but regardless I did change the extension in one of the mpg files first to .mod and then to .tod, neither of them worked. Shows grayed out in the import window and drag and drop doesn’t work either. How is it that you are able to do this but I can’t?
Edit: I found what the problem was. For some reason, the files were showing the .mpg extension. When I changed the extension to .mod in the Finder, they would still show grayed out in FCPX. But when opening the info module in the Finder for one of those files, I realized “Hide extension” was checked, and though the file was showing .mod, when I unchecked the hide extension setting, it was showing .mod.mpg. So using the info module I deleted the .mpg and that way they show in FCPX available for import. Interestingly enough, when associating the .mod extension with Quicktime Player, said player can’t open the file, even though it had no problem opening it when the extension was .mpg. Oh, the lovely world of Apple…
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up