[David Bogie]

We used to do this (somewhat tediously) by adding control points to a square mask and pulling the handles out.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

the new MacPro announced today will likely result in the used Macintosh market getting a boost of excellent machines. This will take a few months to happen. Sit on your money for a while.

You can also visit the apple.com store and look for refurbished MacPro systems.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Wait at least a few weeks to see what the wonks have to say after Macworld Expo. Otherwise, you become the bleeding edge beta tester.

Sit on your money for a few more months.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

A total scorched earth and reinstall of everything is the universally espoused wisdom but I hold it is not absolutely necessary at all.

Of course, I may have to eat my words when we upgrade our 15 Macs to Leopard later in the year. We won’t dive in until Adobe and Microsoft support Leopard with Office and CS3 patches.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Audio drift is almost always caused by media captured form a Canon camera.

You did not say anything about your sources, sequence settings, or formats. That information would help.

Separate/unlink the audio form the video and see if the times for the two tracks are exactly the same. Activate timecode overlyas and see if the audio and video t/c are exactly the same if you park the playhead in various places. If they are the same, you are having hardware issues, your audio cannot be processed fast enough to play in real time with the video.

If the times are different, you do not have a 48k audio source but, without any additional information, I cannot begin to tell you where to look for resolution.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Please don’t crosspost everywhere. It’s just not necessary.
You’d have to explain what you want to accomplish, exactly. These are all radically different systems, odd that you would consider this list as representative of a style or production need.

Try AE Portal for some other packages. There are literaly hundreds of olugins for AE but you’ve alos posted in the FCP forum. You probably cannot use the same package in both apps.

https://msp.sfsu.edu/Instructors/rey/aepage/aeportal.html

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Do you have access to After Effects?
Shatter is fabulous for this kind of thing.

We just don’t have the depth of experience around here in Motion so trying to search the tutorials for Motion effects won’t get you much help.

I hope others will chime in over the next few days with some helpful suggestions. You might also try the Motion forum at apple.com although most of the wonks post at both locations.

Please let us know if you figure it out and how you satisfied yoru client’s demands.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

The project exists in your list of RECENT PROJECTS. That may exist in your FCP prefs or as a function of your system prefs. Clear both lists.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Brian Maffit’s early SHATTER tutorials included an interesting approach. He photographed some buildings in various stages of demotion and construction. Cutting and pasting in PS created a decent wrecked building that was layered under an image of the completed building. He used Shatter with various grayscale maps to drive flying debris from one layer to reveal the wrecked building underneath.

Add some ArtBeats media and particle layers to simulate explosions, dust, fire, smoke.

How much effort you put into these effects depends on your stylistic approach. Ever seen the imploding buildings at the end of FIGHT CLUB? Not necessarily physically accurate but the illusion was appropriate to the film.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

[simon bonner] “So, as you’d expect from 2 progs made by the came company, they work quite well together. “

Thanks for the contribution, never used the Adobe suite for video myself, stuck with Apple’s tools which, by the way, do not necessarily work well together at all much of the time and the pathways that link the various Final Cut Suite applications together is inexplicably obtuse.

Even Adobe’s tools, from your explanation, suffer from requiring new or confusingly synonimical terminology to carry elements between the applciations.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”