[Andreas Kiel]

You also can make just a simple “Layered TIFF” without any rasterizing.

-Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Andreas Kiel]

Hi Alejandro,

No idea why this happens. Never had this issue.

Feel free to send me the SRT and I’ll have a look (my email is in the help file).

-Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Andreas Kiel]

Yeah,

Bottom line: FCPX is a modern, streamlined and IMO feasable for some/several professional work unless you
a) have very specific workflow that only FCP7 does (I can think of several)
B) are paid in hours and your customers haven’t realized you are ripping them off
C) simply ignore modern collaborative production-circumstances and stick to what you feel comfortable with

FCPX is out for 2 years. With 8 revisions since the first shitstorm against it and it still needs a lot of improvement.
That’s the bottom line.

The topline: I use FCPX for 23 months now, 23 of those it has been not my main choice of NLE. I tried PP, but it seemed a step back (although a step forward from FCP7). I still get funny oneliners like “why I can’t export and import a XML with all metadata”, “why are my parameters reset”, “but it can’t export more than 2 audiotracks” or “I don’t want it to look for faces”and so on and that tells me Apple is still not marketing this properly and has a lot of work to do even in development. But so far I have yet to see several directors or editors who watches me using it , who are not going away with the determination to give it an honest and serious try – and some sticking to it unless one of the above 3 reasons stops them.

😉 Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Andreas Kiel]

[Keith wrote]I wasn’t referring to motion xmls. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. I was referring to Motion generator fcpx templates when talking about the lack of role support in motion.

As for XMLs I was referring to fcpxml and problems with text formatting.

Sorry I just gave a quick reply and haven’t been detailed enough.

With .fxpml files you can save several metadata including roles but no parameters for any Motion Template.
Exporting an XML and re-import it will set all of the parameters to their default settings. I personally don’t like that.

One thing you can do with text stuff is to create a role like “Helvetica-44-bottom”. So you can select all of these clips and apply those settings.
A “Helvetica-44-bottom-left” will work as well but won’t help since FCPX can’t apply horizontal alignment to multiple clips. You still can do it 1 by 1.

-Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Andreas Kiel]

Keith,

There are no roles in Motion XMLs, though you can apply a theme.

Using FCPXML always resets all values to the basic settings of the Motion Template since there is no information in the FCPXML about any parameter settings.

Using symbolic links (as mentioned above) is quite a pain as they only work for files and not for folders.

-Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Andreas Kiel]

There was nothing. I played Go with 2 of my friends just for fun for many years — didn’t care about anything special rather than having enough wine for the nights.

The “champion night” happened by chance and was fun. I was visiting an old girl friend of mine after a real long time and her husband said “sorry, me and my friend do have to play/train Go in the living room and must stay focused on the game — so please stay in the kitchen with my wife, or go out for a beer”. I answered “Wow you play Go – cool”. He said “You play Go?”, I said “Yes, quite often — just for fun, I love it.”

So they allowed me to watch. Then the other guy asked whether I want to have training session — so why not. I was allowed to be the first to set a stone and I had beaten him within a few minutes. All following games he was the first. He didn’t win any of those games.
It turned out they both were playing in the “champions league” which I didn’t know that it exists at all.

But as said with all this stuff with FCP X there are some simple rules — understand them and make the best out of it.

-Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Andreas Kiel]

Here just my 2 cents.

I like FCP X for certain workflows and one of the developer guys who build several tools to make these workflows even better.

For other workflows which are more my daily work I don’t like it. Having several bins and sequences open at a time, having a “real” viewer and canvas is essential in these cases.

Lot of people are talking about the “metadata approach” with FCP X.
Okay, it’s there, but it’s poor compared to legacy FCP. Funny thing is that most of the people never used the metadata in legacy FCP since they where not that obvious.

Same with Motion. You always had been able to create templates but with less options for the published parameters. One thing which was better is that with “old” Motion the templates were published for the whole system/all users.
Another thing with Motion Templates: if you change one, you won’t see it immediately within FCP X, the original version is still displayed for the stuff you used it before. You now can use the modified version for new stuff — it will look like expected. Once you quit FCP X and relaunch it all of your older projects will be changed. This can be considered either as good or bad. Was somehow the same with legacy FCP.

Coming back to metadata. As said, the approach of FCP X is more obvious compared to legacy FCP and it works fine with more options in most cases as long as you play in the sandbox of FCP X (“sandbox” doesn’t mean FCP X is bad or kind of kindergarten). When it comes to interchange these metadata (data about data) there is still a long way to go with FCP X.
Take XML. Export your project with effects and templates as XML and re-import — all of your settings are set back to default, most of the keyframes are gone. It even gives links to files which don’t exist.

I don’t say FCP X is good or bad. It’s just an app which may fit your needs or not. It has a lot of potential for sure, but sometimes I have to work today and don’t want to wait for a tomorrow.

BTW: I really love the “Go” thing above, it’s such a good comparison. When I was younger I was an “every day all night amateur player” and one day I met the German champion, and I won four times in a row. As with the given “Go” example, rules are simple. You have to make the best out of it for you.

– Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Andreas Kiel]

One thing you should think about is the way Motion 5 and the old Motion save the templates. In legacy the save path was in the /Library with Motion 5 it is the user movie folder.
So with FCPX you better move manually or by script a custom template before you use it in any project to the matching folder in /Library. Otherwise you will be in serious trouble in a collaborative environment.

-Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Andreas Kiel]

I’m looking into switching from FCP7 to FCPX using Motion templates that I created. I copied over the Motion 4 templates into the movie folder so FCPX can see the templates. I opened FCPX and templates they show up in the generators tab. I am able to place a template into the project (timeline) without any issues. Strangely, I did not even have to open Motion 5 and re-save the file.

The problem I am having is replacing a template that is already in a timeline (project). When I try to replace the template in the timeline the new template changes font sizes, scaling and position. When I scrub the thumbnail in generator it looks fine until I try to replace it. Tried replace from start and just replace file. I tried saving the Motion 4 file as a Motion 5. Also I tried publishing from Motion 5 creating a new template.

That’s the way Motion Templates work — call it a feature or bug. Replacement (at least with text) always go back to the roots of the template.

-Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Andreas Kiel]

[Brett wrote] My only peeve is this having to export a template. It was extremely confusing at first. I figured that was sort of an advanced option and that I could use a default of sorts. But it was required. Why not install a default one and have it use that UNLESS someone wants to select a different custom one? Since you can change everything after the fact in X, why not?

This sounds like a good idea.
But on the question is “which template?”. There are literally millions of options with FCP X.

-Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil