[Alan Okey]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I will defend AE until the day I die. If you compare AE CS5
to say AE 5.5 – first release with camera, last release with floating tabs, the refinement and strengthening of that App is astonishing – literally every last square inch of the thing has been honed to within an inch of its life. Razor clean chrome, brilliant keyframing, industrial strength effects, its just an absolutely cracking piece of software.”

AE is good, but probably its main advantage is its ubiquity. In my opinion, AE still has a ways to go to catch up to the late Autodesk Combustion, at least in terms of its utility as a compositor. I find AE’s UI needlessly cluttered. Combustion’s UI was far more elegant and task-aware. Combustion’s schematic view was actually usable like a node tree, whereas AE’s is simply informational. And I can’t fathom why there’s still no per-vertex mask feathering in AE without a paid third-party plugin.

But I’ll grant you that Adobe supports AE very well, and continues to improve it in each release. And on the plus side, at least Adobe hasn’t demonstrated the perverse propensity to heartlessly and arbitrarily kill its own children like Discreet/Autodesk, or even Apple – at least not in regard to its video apps.

[Alan Okey]

If you want better MPEG-2 encoding than what Compressor can offer, check out BitVice or CinemaCraft MP:

https://www.innobits.com/bitvice.html

https://www.cinemacraftusa.com/cinemacraft_encodermp.php

[Alan Okey]

(post deleted)

[Alan Okey]

[Katie Nemmer] “Does it matter if the shift direction is +1 or -1?”

Nope, either direction is fine. Good luck!

[Alan Okey]

Sounds like a field order mismatch. Try putting a shift fields filter on the video in FCP, re-export and check it again.

[Alan Okey]

[Dennis Radeke] “We built a version of Premiere for SGI once”

I used to use Premiere 4.2 on an SGI O2. Premiere was notorious for crashing at the worst possible moments… As I understand it, it was developed using a translator tool that ported Mac code to IRIX. It did have some cool features that the Mac/PC versions didn’t have at the time, such as the ability to create your own 3D transitions that were accelerated in hardware. It also supported the O2’s built-in video subsystem and hardware MJPEG encoder/decoder. I cut quite a few projects on that system before I eventually moved to FCP.

[Alan Okey]

[Christopher Fodde] “2. compressor is h.264 should this be changed to prores”

YES, absolutely. FCP7 cannot reliably edit h.264 footage, and that goes for using h.264 as the sequence compressor as well.

[Alan Okey]

I’m going to have it printed out on vinyl and wrap my car with it.

[Alan Okey]

[Michael Jones] “Am I missing something basic?”

Motion, which is included with Final Cut Studio.

It’s far superior to FCP for any type of movement that requires finesse. FCP is a blunt hammer compared to Motion or After Effects when it comes to having subtle control over animation curves and keyframing movement.

[Alan Okey]

This whole FCP X “debate” has grown incredibly tiresome. If you like X, great. Use it. If you don’t, great. Use something else. Personally attacking people for what software they choose to use or not to use is childish and unproductive.

Editors who dislike and do not use FCP X are not necessarily old and inflexible. It’s not that they “just don’t get it,” or that they are dinosaurs; they just don’t like it, and choose not to use it. By the same token, editors who like and use FCP X are not necessarily any less “professional” if it fits their needs.