[Jason Diebler]

Unless you plan to tweak and re-edit the Motion project, you could always export out a baked movie and import it into FCP.

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Jason Diebler]

Peter, no, I don’t think I’ve done anything different, other than maybe a Security Update.

I’m running Motion 4.0.1 and FCP 7.0.1 on a 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, running OS 10.6.2.

I tried the plug-in on a colleague’s machine (which it was also working on 1 week ago), and I got the same error. The error actually occurs the moment the CoverFlux effect is applied (before you even seek out a directory path). So the error message seems to be incongruous with whatever is actually causing the error.

I agree with your logic though, something must have been recently introduced to the equation that is causing the error.

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Jason Diebler]

Frizzy hair can definitely be a problem, but there are a lot of steps you can take to improve your end result.

In studio: you may want to create more distance between subject/bkgd. I can still see the grain in the canvas. Also, a bit more light on the subject is needed. Under the scopes, it looks a bit low in your midtones and highlights. Of course, this doesn’t help you much since this is all afterthought, so…

In post: I would prep this footage in Color (or w/ the 3-Way at the very least). Try to bring your midtones/highlights up, while maintaining good contrast. If you can iso the green range, you can give a lift to the greens altogether. It will help to color correct your footage before you attempt to key.

Plugins: The FCP chroma keyer or color key filters are probably not suitable to give you the best key you want. I encountered this same type of problem w/ frizzy hair and had no choice but to purchase a 3rd party keyer. With research, I went with the Primatte Keyer Pro plug-in from Red Giant. I tested this against all of FCPs native keyers, as well as the keyers in Motion and Keylight in AE. Primatte Keyer Pro will handle this frizzy hair… you may want to look into it.

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Jason Diebler]

Thanks for all the useful insights.

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Jason Diebler]

I think Red Giant has a data/3d graphing plugin… I can’t speak on that, but Keynote has some pretty nice looking (static 3d) graphing capability.

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Jason Diebler]

Thank you, your advice is much appreciated… will wait for downtime to clean install.

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Jason Diebler]

Noah is right, you need an alpha channel. You may need to export animation codec. It sounds like your Quicktime export is flattening your Motion project (excluding any alpha channel you may have had). If you initially roundtrip from Final Cut, you’ll bypass the need to do any exporting out of Motion, you’ll retain your alpha channel. So either roundtrip (to integrate your .motn file in your FCP project) or export animation… what version of Motion are you using by the way?

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Jason Diebler]

You could effect the original master clip with the changes you want to make, then export that… then make that original master clip offline, and reconnect your media to the new clip you made. That would update everything (as long as you don’t effect the clip duration).

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Jason Diebler]

No, but you can achieve that with two cross dissolves, or w/ manual opacity keyframes.

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Jason Diebler]

I think John is right. I experience that phenomenon quite a bit too, & in my case it’s definitely attributable to “Spaces”… The Apple+Tab doesn’t ever work, but if I hit F-13, I can get back where I need to be.

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)