Chris Walsh
Forum Replies Created
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Also forgot to mention to use the free trial of After Effects (and any other software) to test drive it and see if it works for you.
And personally, I wouldn’t start with 3D software yet unless you need to create complex biological, medical, or real world simulations. There’s always time for that later, once you’ve got your basic workflow established (e.g. record audio, edit in FCPX or Premiere, animate in Motion or After Effects, output and bask in the glory).
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
It depends a bit on your source material. If you have a lot of video files (lectures, demonstrations, stock footage), then FCPX will very helpful for cutting everything together, and adding audio. If you are using mainly stills and text, you will eventually want more control than FCP can give you. Both Motion and After Effects can give you great results, but they do have a steeper learning curve. There are template projects available that can save you time (just google royalty-free After Effects templates to find some), but it can be tricky to modify some of them.
If you’re going to be doing a lot of text animation, consider a plugin from Yanobox called Nodes. They haven’t released an FCPX version, so you should email them if you’re going the FCPX route, but it works in After Effects and Motion as well. Nodes is great for building big, text heavy animations very quickly. It has a learning curve, and the documentation is little obtuse, but if you spend a day messing with their built in presets, you’ll get the hang of it. They have another plugin called Motype that might be helpful — it works best for single words or short phrases. If you’re making a list, you’ll end up stacking a bunch of Motype layers.
A completely different approach, that you may have already considered since it’s popular with educators is prezi.com, that let’s you build animated presentations combining video, stills, audio, and text. You’ll have to experiment a bit to find the tools that are right for the job you want to do. No one tool is perfect, and the choice is about personal comfort as well as features. I’ve built a lot of multi-layer animations in FCP 7, that would have better suited to AE or Motion, but I simply wanted to stay in FCP 7.
So consider your message and audience….does your audio carry the most important information, and the video enhances it? Then use a tool like FCPX (or even FCP7 or Express if you have copies of these older versions). Audio will be easier to handle and sync with visuals in a video editor, even if you visuals are less whiz bang to start. If it’s all about the animations communicating new ideas or relationships, then go for After Effects and do the lynda.com training. It will take longer to get up to speed, but you’ll have the tools you need.
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
This is one of my favorite Onion videos of all time. I shared it and laughed, and then of course they released they iPad, and did exactly this with great results.
The tag line is the best though, “It remains to be seen if the Wheel will catch on in the business world, where people use computers for actual work.”
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
They have a dense page with a handy illustration of the relationship:
They also mention any intriguing structure called a “Track” in the AVAsset class:
“Each of the individual pieces of media data in the asset is of a uniform type and called a TRACK. In a typical simple case, one TRACK represents the audio component, and another represents the video component; in a complex composition, however, there may be multiple overlapping TRACKS of audio and video. Assets may also have metadata.”
I really like this “track” idea.
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
I’m with Gary. I’m not switching yet, but I’m taking the $300 I would have spent on FCPX and putting it toward the Adobe Suite.
The ability to open legacy projects is crucial. I kept my discreet *edit system running until 2008, and I was still cutting on it 3 or 4 times a year, because I had so many old projects on it. I do miss *edit even today. I could unarchive a project, open a timeline, and have an undo list of every edit I had made four years ago. I could step all the way back to an empty timeline if I so desired. Plus I miss real time all the time.
But hey, times change. I’m sure there will be things about FCP 7 that I’ll miss (STP, DVD studio), that will never be the same or as easy or as good, no matter if I end up in five years on FCP X, or PPro, or Avid. And for those that decry the tone of this forum, the *edit forum was like this for a year or more, as was XPRI, Media 100, etc. at different points. It’s the circle of life, or swirl of EOL.
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
I saw this too and at first was skeptical, but for CrumplePop, FCPX is great news. I’m a CrumplePop products I’ve used are sophisticated Motion templates (so developing for another platform would be tough). But FC solves a lot of the integration problems that existed for them with previous versions.
And I think their target market and FCPX’s are in synch out of the gate: small shops and one-man-bands doing short form.
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
Thanks for posting the video. It does seem significantly more involved than right-clicking. Reminds me a bit of some older versions of Vegas. Does FCPX have any kind of macro-like key recording that could combine the seven steps into one? That was the solution for some of the more convoluted Vegas commands.
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
Nice balanced evaluation. My favorite quote was, “..it’s not better, it’s constricting.” (regarding using a single viewer rather than 3 monitors when you have the option).
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
I figured it out. Grab and hold the center slider in the divider to pull the whole divider down. Very intuitive. God forbid I should use the edge the windows, or any part of UI that changes when I hover.
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
I came late to the Mac party, arriving just two years ago, mainly because of Final Cut. But I found that I loved the OS and environment as much as FC, and am a bit of an OSX fanboy (mainly the reduced maintenance vs. my 3 PCs).
I don’t buy the argument that this shift by Apple is all about markets and money. In fact, they’ve always told me to expect more of them then just bottom-line priorities. They could make all their hardware more cheaply, and increase their margins, but they’ve chosen to put other elements first (design, build, etc.). This has been the point of Aindreas’s “Technology/Liberal Arts” sig image. They’re doing fine financially, so there’s no pressure for FC to “save the company.” With a couple million registered users, it can’t be losing money can it?
And above all, FC was the pointiest spearhead of “Made on a Mac.” Film, TV, and video slowly adopted Final Cut, and much of the last 10 years of pop culture has been “Made on Mac” because of FCP. For this reason alone, they should have respected the pro market…not just for our notorious whining. They should maintain the pro apps to maintain their creative leadership position — even just as PR.
I know their ad agency was always required, even in 2000, to cut the Apple spots on a Mac, with FC. I wonder how they’ll grade, mix, and layback the next round of spots out of FCP X. We’ve seen over the last week how “Unmade on a Mac” works. It’s amazing that Apple seems not to care…maybe time will tell. Maybe they need competition to prod them to action, the way that Avid and Adobe did.
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover