[Colin Mcquillan]

Very simple. Just drag the photo in. trim it to the length you want and add the ‘Fade In/Fade Out’ behavior found under Basic Motion. Use the HUD (F7) to set the duration of the dissolve.

If your picture’s duration isn’t long enough, go into the properties tab, and under timing set the end result to hold, or if you find all your pic’s don’t last long enough change the duration of imported stills in the project preferences.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Colin Mcquillan]

[david bogie] “ut a collection of pre-rendered clips that have holes in them? That’s a hack but it DOES create a “package.” Trouble is, any changes have to be made to the original Motion/FCP elements and then exported again. This method does not create “templates.” “

Creating overlays with transparencies and semi-transparencies that the end user (in Premier) can then insert whatever clips they desire underneath does create a template. As mentioned the functionality is limited, but none the less does offer the OP a viable solution (better than your offering, or lack there-of)

Better yet, If the Premier crew have AE on their box the Motion user could export each layer on its own, and then have those layer reassembled in AE. I have done the reverse with GFX packages built for AE that I have re-created from its layers in motion.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Colin Mcquillan]

[Thax Clave] “You should “Mixdown” the Audio for playback before you dub out of FCP”

This is something I always do before laying to tape. Unfortunately, with this particular stuttering media issue, it doesn’t help.

My best guess is the trouble lies with the raid card, or how the system is communicating with the card, as I’ve never had this issue pop up when working from my internal media drive, just my RAIDs and external e-Sata drives.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Colin Mcquillan]

[Alexander Kallas] “Repair permissions, and run DiskWarrior.”

Have done both when I first noticed the trouble. Neither have worked on my system.

Once I wrap my current projects I plan on rebuilding my system from the ground up. Hopefully that will wrench out the gremlins.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Colin Mcquillan]

[Baz Leffler] “So maybe that is going to sleep a little bit do you think? “

Could be. I’m running the g=tech card that ships with the G-Speed eS. My system is set to never sleep though.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Colin Mcquillan]

[Baz Leffler] “when playing the timeline it would occasionally freeze then skip (drop framing playback) so I saved, closed FCP and reopened everything and it was still occuring”

I’ve had this happen to me as-well. For me it happens only after I have been running for a couple hours, and only when running media run through my e-Sata card and I’ve been running a few different apps simultaneously (ie: FCP, Safari, Fetch, Motion, so on..)

Likewise for yourself, only a re-boot cures the problem.

Is your media coming in through an e-Sata or fiber card?

I have an internal media drive as well as my e-Sata raids, and I’ve never had this issue when working from the internal drive, only the e-Sata card, wether it be the RAID, or single e-sata drive.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Colin Mcquillan]

The best you could do is leave transparent “windows” which the end user in Premier could insert clips underneath your overlay. This limits what you can do, and clip interactivity reduced to alpha overlay. Still, with a motion path on the alpha window, and on the clip that will be placed underneath, some interesting effects can still be achieved.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Colin Mcquillan]

[Jared Goodman] “I just imported a .mov into a new project. The video is not compressed. When I dragged the video into my sequence FCP asked if I wanted to change the settings to go with the clip. I accepted. “

Are you sure you wanted to do this? By uncompressed what do you mean? 10-bit UnC, Animation, None…? Are your drives fast enough to work with an uncompressed timeline reliably? What is your final output format going to be?

[Jared Goodman] “the video plays in the canvas when i press play in the in the timeline but when I press stop it disappears and turns to black. Does anyone know how to fix this problem? “

You may have accidentally changed your Canvass setting. Hit ‘W’ and see if your picture comes back.
W cycles through the 3 canvass viewer settings.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Colin Mcquillan]

[Jim Kropp] ” what the most practical, and efficient way to add watermarks to video created in FCP and before posting it to the web?”

Depends on the machine you are encoding with.

If you have a multi-core machine, ideally and octo-core, Setting up a virtual cluster and adding the watermark in Compressor while encoding for the web would be the best bet.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Colin Mcquillan]

I feel it is a little of both!

Definitely, as Peter mentions, try stuff out, experiment.
But this wont help you when you need to deliver something for broadcast that has to be to certain specifications. If you don’t fully understand what broadcast safe means or how to read a vectorscope or waveform monitor, data-rates vs drive throughput, what the advantages of maintaining a pure digital workflow is, and some of the ‘gotchas’ that can hit you in a digital workflow if you don’t fully understand the compression of certain codecs… so on…

Trial and error/experimentation is best left for the creative side of what we do.
When it comes to the technical aspect of editing “Just see where this will take you” may very well take you right out the door! Especially when deliverables get rejected by QC, or your client wonders why the colour in the spot you cut is ugly, the contrast is all washed out, movement is jittery and the text/gfx is buzzing like crazy.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.