[Ian Bailey]

Obviously you’re creating video to be hosted on a website. Take a look at Easy HTML5 Video, it kicks out your video in a number of useful formats, including WebM and with a Flash fallback:
https://bitly.com/VlKdGA

[Ian Bailey]

Export your media using the ProRes4444 codec. I’ve not tested this with AE, but if it’s CS5.5 or CS6 and you’re using it on a Mac, I would expect this to work.

[Ian Bailey]

Select the clip and use Ctrl-V to bring up the Video Animation panel. Click on Transform: All and you can select Scale from the menu.

You can drag the keyframes left or right to change the timing and you can add more keyframes by Option-clicking. You can’t change the scale in the Video Animation panel, for that you’ll need to go to the Inspector or use the Transform controls in the Viewer.

[Ian Bailey]

Very useful, I tend to agree with most of what he says. But I would have liked to have also seen a comparison with Avid.

There were some inaccuracies. For example you can bring an image sequence into FCPX, it’s just more complicated than it is in Motion.

[Ian Bailey]

I’m pretty darn excited.

This is pure speculation on my part… I’m wondering if the intention is for it to not only be a compositional tool, but also a sound design tool. Apple’s purchase of Redmatica could add more sophisticated sample manipulation and a sample library.

[Ian Bailey]

[Paul Boone] “When I used FCPX for slow-mo, I first batch conformed all my clips from 60p to 24p using cinema tools.”

No need to do this for FCPX. Drop your 60fps clips into a 24fps Timeline, select them all and choose Conform Speed from the ReTime menu.

[Ian Bailey]

Hi Sam,

It’s certainly the case that Shake is very capable and there is still training material available. However you will encounter problems as OSX and QuickTime are up-dated (which will benefit FCPX and Motion) and Shake won’t handle new video formats. I would suggest you talk to people on the COW’s Shake forum regarding these issues and the gamma shift bug you linked to.

If node-based compositing is your thing then I would suggest you take a look at Blender. Although primarily for 3D animation, this free app has a node-based compositor and a camera tracker built-in. The developers are very active and there are regular up-dates. You’ll find online tutorials covering compositing and rotoscoping in Blender.

There is now the SendTo app for extracting tracks from a FCPX XML to send to Motion: https://bit.ly/yp43Ta
But without that, going from FCPX to Motion and FCPX to Shake are quite similar. You would export your shot from FCPX as a video file or an image sequence and then import into Motion or FileIn to Shake.

Converting to an image sequence will be a more reliable option for Shake if you’ve shot in a new-ish format. But you can’t yet import an image sequence into FCPX, so you’ll need to export from Shake as a video file or as an image sequence and then convert in Compressor.

Motion is aimed at creating titles and on-screen graphics, whereas Shake is for people wanting to build cinema quality vfx. Their purposes are different, but they have a number of tools in common. What you will mainly lose by using Motion instead of Shake is the very fine control of colour channels. For example, if keying with 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 footage I would usually do the following in Shake:

– Convert the shot to YUV colour space
– Slightly blur the U and V channels to reduce blocky artifacts
– Convert it back to RGB ready for keying

You are unable to do this in Motion. Having said that, the new Keyer in both Motion and FCPX appears to be very good, so might not require this pre-processing.

What you will lose by using Shake instead of Motion is a whole load of pre-built content, pre-built behaviours, a variety of effects, the particle and replicator systems, the integration of templates and widgets with FCPX.

Ian

[Ian Bailey]

Hi Sam,

I was a big fan of Shake before it was killed off and used it for all my compositing work. However, it took a lot of hard work and a great deal of time to learn it properly. Why do all that for a dead app?

My advice would be to learn FCPX and Motion thoroughly and see if they fulfill your requirements. If you need more specialist vfx software you might want to consider plugins such as Conduit Suite or maybe a separate app like After Effects.

Ian

[Ian Bailey]

I’ve been wondering whether this can be achieved with the new Keyer in 10.0.3. I’ve not tried it, but this is a possible solution:

– Dup the shot twice so you have three versions. One will be the background, one the smoothed skin foreground and one the alpha channel.

– Apply the Keyer effect to one of the shots and choose the skin colour. Invert the effect (you want to keep your selection) and change the view to the alpha channel and make sure it is just the skin that’s selected and not features that need to stay sharp such as eyes or hair. Use the Soften slider to soften the edges of the matte. This is now your alpha channel clip.

– Apply a Gaussian blur to the clip that’s going to be your foreground and set the Amount so the skin looks smooth. Apple the Image Mask effect to the same clip. Make sure Source Channel is set to alpha and make your alpha channel clip the Mask Source. It’s important that the Gaussian and Image Mask effects are applied in the right order, otherwise the blur will also effect the new alpha channel.

– Place the foreground clip above the background clip.

– You should be able to Disable the alpha channel clip.

If that doesn’t work let me know and I’ll do a proper test. I’m excited about the new Keyer as I reckon I can now use it to do all the advanced secondary and fx stuff I used to do in Color.

[Ian Bailey]

Hi Adam,

Trails is now in the Distortion category, but I can’t find Echo. However, it does live on in Motion 5.

Ian