[David Bogie]

I don’t remember the advance from 6.5 to 7 being very big. Stick with what works. If you must have AE7 or CS3, buy a used G5.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

There are so many ways to do this. Here’s one and it depends on your ability to precompose, match grid locations, and use basic expressions to link opacity of your grid to the luma of another layer.
You can use a fractal noise layer as the driver for a Mosaic filter. Then use the Mosaic comp’s output as the opacity driver for the grid sections.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Depends on what device you used as the digital interface.
Here’s a quick fix:
unlink the video from the audio. Find the out point of the audio track, trim it back, and write down its length. Find the outpoint of the video track and write the exact length. They will obviously be different, usually the audio is a bit shorter but you have said. Use speed adjust on the audio track to manually set a length that is exactly the same as the video track. Relink the tracks, tjhey will align perfectly.

You may want to export and create new media. Otherwise you will be forever losing sync.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Isn’t Optical Flow available from directly within FCP6?

I’m not where I can see the manual.

there are some gotchas when sending a clip to Motion for Optical Flow analysis. to prevent most of them I usually export an uncompressed clone of my clip, trimmed out of the master clip. Sometimes Motion will try to analyze the entire master clip, that can take hours.

also, if your footage contains much motion blur, fast moving objects or camera and captured with a 1/30 or 1/60 shutter speed, Optical Flow can get really confused. If you have not shot this footage yet, or can reshoot it, try to shoot at 1/120 or 1/250 second.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

CC Light burst will give you excellent halo-style laser effects if you get in and tweak the controls. but you do NOT get the effect of an intense beam of light reflecting off dust or fog particles.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You might want to find the FCP feedback folder on apple.com and suggest subtitle support. With ADA coming online seriously in 2009-2010, I think all forms of accessibility are going to be universal features in all content creation and playout applications.

You amy already know this stuff but I usually post this collection of links to subtitle and captioning inquiries:

https://www.captionmax.com/faqTechProb.php
https://www.ccaption.com/nccwork.shtml
https://www.robson.org/capfaq/
https://ezinearticles.com/?Video-Subtitles-Or-Video-Captions?&id=1195664
https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31486
https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26479
https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33168
https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23578
https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31000
https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/32086
https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/8026
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/subtitles_dvdsp_stone.html

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

A little warning about the stupidly loud audio on that clip would have been nice.

These are known as volumetric lighting effects. You will find hundreds of helpful threads with a search here and on other AE forums. the best require third party tools such as Trapcode. There are ways to fake them using radial blurs and time effects but they are not easy.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Steve Eisen] “Your camera is limited to shoot ONLY 25 frames per second.
Shutter does not effect the frame rate.”

While it is true that shutter speed does not directly affect slow motion acquisition, good crisp images will (or can) assist optical flow in rendering ‘tween frames.

If you want buttery smooth slow motion, you MUST acquire more than 30 frames a second. you need at least 90.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Drop by the Apple store and look very carefully at the minimum specs for Final Cut Studio. You will want to be able to upgrade your graphics card, RAM, and add additional drives or eSata ssytems. Can’t do any of that easily on an iMac.
also, OS10.6 is coming out in the next six months or a year and we can probably expect the Studio to be upgraded within a year. You need to be able to expand yoru base machine. Portables and iMacs don’t do that.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The jiggly lines?
Use wiggle on the outlines. Or add the wiggle expression to a ripple effect. Or use displacement.
Cycling the wiggly lines is a bit more complicated. Those frames are often hand-drawn (or the result of three or more steps of distortion) and looped.

bogiesan