[Brian Wells]

Thanks again, Dave, and you are correct, sir. AE has simply never been in our budget. We were extremely fortunate to get the full meal deal FCStudio two years ago. Fiscally speaking, I’m lucky to have the CS5 apps I do, and AE ain’t one of ’em. To coin another phrase, “If there’s a bright [budgetary] center to the galaxy of my employer, I’m in the line of business that it’s furthest from.” Buying a font causes much furrowing of brows and gnashing of spreadsheets around here. I keep crossing my fingers at LAFCPUG to get a copy of AE or Boris or something.

I’m certainly willing to give a new workflow a go, even if I have to be dragged, whining and slouching (“kicking and screaming” just takes too much work), out of the aforementioned comfort zone. Anything to advance my skillset toward a faster, more efficient, more professional rhythm.

But here’s my line of questioning: I’m probably missing one or several things, but I’m not seeing that there’s anything all that complex about this particular effect, and I’ve done this sort of thing a hundred times before in Motion: Animated the logo with a fully transparent background, exported a QT.mov clip out of Motion at the same res/rate as my FCP sequence, pulled that clip into FCP, laid said clip down on a high track in FCP, and everything’s been hunky-dory. All alpha transparency’s been good, etc. etc. Until now. And it’s weird to me to see such a difference between exporting the Motion clip as ProRes4444+Alpha vs. Animation +Alpha. Since I often end up re-using my Motion logos in multiple FCP projects, using FCP as the central work hub has previously seemed to make sense, as opposed to making Motion the work hub and using FCP as little more than an editor.

Now again, I’m good with the animation export. It’s working, so the project is fine, and I’ve kludged a substitute black bar to stand in for the full logo so I can edit in FCP until I’m ready to render’N’export the whole schmeer. I’m really just curious as to why the alpha channel should seemingly be so markedly different between the two Motion export settings.

So to get back to your AE insight, if I’m reading you correctly, the standard workflow for FCP/AE folks is to do only editing in FCP, export an edited sequence, pull that export into AE, and then do pretty much all the comp/logo/animation/effects/etc work there, rather than using AE to generate component clips that can then be laid on tracks back in FCP? So, using my earlier visualization, it seems that AE becomes the central work hub and FCP really just an editor that feeds AE?

Yoiks, I’ve gotten verbose again. Sorry, Dave. I really appreciate your taking the time to go ’round with me on this, and I promise, I’m asking because I realize every day how much I do not know.

[Brian Wells]

Thanks for the response.

Yeah, I tend to get verbose in my desire to be complete and anticipate clarifying questions. “Sorry about that, Chief,” to coin a phrase. Yes, I’m that old.

The crawl was created in Motion. I have a 20sec exported QT .mov that I lay into my FCP sequence several tracks above my video and then dupe to loop along the timeline.

That crawl will be visible throughout the entire 4-odd minute project. It’s a vertical divider for my split screen video halves. Are you suggesting it would be easier to, say, do the whole video bare-bones in FCP and then export/send the entire sequence to Motion, and then lay the crawl down on top in Motion? That would be outside my cushy, sheltered, barely professional little comfort zone, but doable. It also would require me to be a lot less sloppy with my video cropping, since I’m using that logo to cover any seams between the video halves.

I know, rough life, but that’s the way the project has come together so far.

[Brian Wells]

I’m going to hang a +1 on the HMC150. We now use two of them. I did several weeks’ research into our most recent camera purchase (we only get to do that once every five-odd years or so) and found nothing within the price range that offered the same combination of quality and flexibility.

The only Cons I really run into on a regular basis with the 150 are:

1) It does tend to get wonky in low forelight situations. It’s a lot more sensitive to high backlight levels than our Mini-DV SD cameras were. Be ready to shell out for at least a good ENG-class mini light to mount on the shoe to keep faces out of the shadows. Otherwise, get real friendly with the manual iris control, which is admittedly quite handy. We currently use a LitePanels MicroPro, though I’d love to get a budget for their Sola ENG. From a lighting standpoint, the 150 greatly prefers to shoot outdoors.

2) No card relay. There’s one and only one SDHC slot. Still, a 16GB Class-10 card yields 97 minutes per card at the 720p24 at which we usually shoot. Usually more than enough.

3) Minor but frustrating: No short-touch TC reset. You have to go into the menu to reset the TC to zero, whether in Rec Run or Free Run.

4) Live HD output. There are precisely zero SDI ports on this camera. None. Zilch. Bupkus. Unless your client or venue has HDMI input capability, you’ll need a mini-converter from AJA or Blackmagic or someone like that, and that tends to run half a kilobuck or so. The component output is a proprietary breakout connector, so don’t lose that if you plan to go that route.

Those are the biggies. Again, in that price range, nothing else came close to the overall flexibility of the 150 while remaining, as I like to term it, “future-retardant”.

Brian Wells
All-Too-Infrequent Media Guy
Walt Disney Travel Company
Anaheim, CA

Obligatory Disclaimer

Look, I am an employee (yes, we use a different term for it, but “employee” will do for this disclaimer) at this time, so you know the drill:

All opinions I may post here are mine and not necessarily those of my employer. The stuff I do for my employer, and the stuff and licenses to use the stuff with which I do it, belongs to them and not to me, so don’t ask me to cough it up under any public circumstances.

If I post any examples of the work I do for my employer, I will hopefully have remembered to go over it with a fine-tooth comb to remove any references to my employer’s specific intellectual property, or anything specifically trademarkable and/or copyrightable by my employer, and/or such material belonging to my employer’s partners, clients, guests, etc.

Should I forget or in any way fail to remove any such material, under no circumstances whatsoever is that to be interpreted as permission, license, or condonement to use, disseminate, profit from, repost, reverse-engineer, recreate, or make a casserole with any such material.

[Brian Wells]

I would gently suggest reconsidering hanging a 3 kilobuck HD camera on a 2 hectobuck tripod. As was pointed out above, you will very likely find out the hard way exactly when the worst time to have a Tripod Mutiny is. Our small team is a collective big fan of at least the single-stage Cartonis as a minimum to hold our HMC-150s.

-And don’t forget to turn off your OIS when on the sticks.