Question/tip/fluke exporting transparent alpha to flash (not a how-to)

[David Roth weiss]

Sure, you’ve just discovered a strange FCP behavior that you should commit to memory, because at least for now that’s the way things work.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Daniel Rucci]

wackyness. Glad to see that there are more undocumented flukes that cause people to get confused and write more questioning posts about it. yikes.

[John Pale]

[daniel rucci] “Then I did the same thing but RENDERED it in the timeline first and when i did that flash wouldn’t read the alpha for some reason. Very strange. So naturally curious I took two segments of video in the timeline, rendered one, left the other unrendered and exported them as one movie… lo and behold the part that was UNrendered in the timeline was alpha’d in flash, and the part I RENDERED snapped to a black box around the person, in the same clip.

Very strange. Anyone have any explanations?
“

It actually makes perfect sense, if you think about what a render file is. If you look at an FCP render file, it is a COMPOSITE of all the video layers into one file. This, of course would eliminate the alpha channel, as the background is part of the composite.

[Daniel Rucci]

that’s an interesting take.

You need to see the full-res render of the key before you send it to flash so I put a white background under my clip for keying purposes, render it and watch it, and then blow away the background when I’m finished and leave it UNrendered.

I guess the default black background is misleading then. I know you can change it in FCP, but perhaps it should be checkerboarded like photoshop. how annoying would that be? yikes.

…or perhaps in future versions there should be an on/off layer selector in the export window.

[David Roth weiss]

[John Pale] “It actually makes perfect sense, if you think about what a render file is. If you look at an FCP render file, it is a COMPOSITE of all the video layers into one file. This, of course would eliminate the alpha channel, as the background is part of the composite.
“

John, No other NLE on the planet works that way…

I think that might be considered a rationalization…

Rationalization: Finding ‘good reason’ for things that we really know are wrong.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Pale]

[David Roth Weiss] “John, No other NLE on the planet works that way…

I think that might be considered a rationalization…

Rationalization: Finding ‘good reason’ for things that we really know are wrong.
“

What other NLE can retain the alpha at all. Avid can’t retain the alpha from a timeline export to Quicktime at all. Don’t know about Premiere?

[David Roth weiss]

Adobe can do it in spades.

Discreet Edit could do it ten years ago.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Pale]

Good to know. My experience (other than FCP) is with Avid, and they are 10 years behind the curve from FCP on this stuff.

Feature request time.

[Rafael Amador]

Jeremy pointed to this issue few months ago and I’ve been trying to reproduce it without any sucsses.
Whatever the way I export, rendered, not rendered, I get a beautiful Alpha channel:

I’ve just exported the text with/without rendering in the time-line.
Back in FC, all of them shows the Strait Alpha. And it works as you can see in the canvas window.
So please tell me how you doing that.
I don’t want to have a FC version more clever than the rest.
I want an average one:-).
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Daniel Rucci]

Hahah, I totally understand what you mean, I often think HAVING the discretion is better than not having it if it means I have to futz with it a bit.

My project had simply two layers. A white flat background on track 1, and the video of a woman walking on a bluescreen on track 2. Then I set my keying filters on track 2 until they were okay on the white and then I deleted the white video and left the other video on track 2. With just that ONE layer I did the export.

What export method are you using? I never tried animation codec for this, i just used my usual (and I think better) quicktime:none export.