[Jim Giberti]

It’s why a healthy dose of shame is not a bad thing for people or corporations.

There is absolutely no excuse to streamline your offerings the way Apple did with the Final Cut Suite of Apps – and then literally disabling the ability for the two remaining apps to integrate.

It should have been the first thing that was addressed in an early fix and now they’ve got another upgrade and still no way to practically work between X and 5…absolutely absurd.

I mean people like us who are working professionally with X and do a lot of compositing and animation and 3D go from a wonderfully integrated system to one that costs us countless time and frustration trying to do basic work.

Shame on Apple.

And don’t even talk about publishing.
Sure that’s nice, but it has nothing to do with integrating FCPX workflow and projects with Motion 5.
Work out the critical details first – then release your programs, please.

[Jim Giberti]

Yes, not terribly smoothly but machine dependent I’m sure. Definitely best to render for playback at full res.

[Jim Giberti]

Just a quick follow-up on Cosmo. It isn’t a stand alone app for FCPX. I didn’t realize this and it would have saved me some sleep if I had. Anyway Red Giant support was great (woke me up trying to get that sleep) and I had to upgrade to the full Looks package to get Cosmo.

I don’t know how much of the rest I’ll practically use but Cosmo is doing exactly what I needed. It’s not as full featured as it could be (version 1.0) but it took no time to work out the interface and the results are great and fast rendering.

[Jim Giberti]

I’m with ya Ian but even in Color, we used EMA because it’s much faster to get great tones. I have some nice presets that got great results. I doubt that the keyer in X will ever get that kind of power but if they simply allowed throwing a gaussian blur directly into the color board they’d have a fast and slick way to grade and smooth skin.

[Jim Giberti]

Thanks Mark,

I was specifically looking for a keying program for X like EMA. There’s way too much involved in moving masks and layers when you’re used to high end keying. Fortunately after talking with Peter Sheffield about EMA I realized that Magic Bullet had released Cosmo as a stand alone for FCPX just last week. It’s a direct smoothing plug based on Colorista and Looks but much faster to facilitate and speed is what I need for all this grading and rendering.

So i just downloaded it a while ago and have a few spots already finished that were in the queue. I might even like this better than EMA, and it renders very fast. For $99 you should check it out.

[Jim Giberti]

[Jason Jenkins] “The “cartoon” effect at 70% or so can look pretty nice.
“

Thanks Jason,

Yeah, unfortunately there’s no way to isolate skin and leave the critical eye focus, hair detai etc.. They’re just one step away with the Color Board.

[Jim Giberti]

THanks Oliver,

I had built some nice trees for it in Color but going that route is so…32 bit, and kludgy. I got spoiled with Ema in terms of speed and render. This is something that I hope they’ll add to the Color Board. It would be a nice option right beside the Mask and Key.

[Jim Giberti]

[Oliver Peters] “This preset combines Cosmo (MB’s face smoothing effect), diffusion, vignette and 4 color correction tools in the chain.”

On the Cosmo note Oliver. I’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with skin smoothing for my existing projects. I just got an email from Patrick Sheffield yesterday confirming that he was going to release a rewrite of EMA for FCPX. I’ve never used Cosmo, do you think it would be a good, immediate alternative?

One of my real, little frustrations with X development so far is the great and direct job they did with keying and masks in the Color Board, but I’m amazed that they don’t provide a way to attach a blur filter to the key. So simple to do and such an essential part of the process.

In fact Im going to take this over to the techniques forum.

[Jim Giberti]

It’s a really unfortunate and stupid flaw that we’re dealing with with 6 heavily designed TV spots that we’re still working on.

[Jim Giberti]

I went 100% crash free until the upgrade and have experienced the same thing Oliver as well as a crash while CCing a clip, something that never happened before.