[Lars Fuchs]

You could create a series of opacity keyframes that go to zero for 3 frames every six. You need to bring the opacity down in 1 frame, so 1 frame after the 1st kf at 100% opacity, make a kf at 0%. Similarly to go back to 100% you need a kf at 0% after 3 frames, then a kf at 100% in the next frame.

You could save that as a ‘favorite motion’ and reuse it.

[Lars Fuchs]

As Dave said, definitely the best idea is to do it on set, NOT in post.

Try to imagine what sources of light would plausibly still be on in a ‘dark’ office. For example the Emergency Exit signs would still be lit, and they give off a soft red glow. Perhaps somebody in the office left a computer on? Does the office have any windows? If so, they will let a little light in. What about the stairwell or foyer? Some light might leak into the room you’re shooting in. Then try to emulate those light sources with your lighting kit

Shane makes a good point too. For example, exterior night shots are often shot around noon on a bright cloudless day. That’s because the the strong shadows cast by a sun high in the sky are similar to the shadows cast by the moon. It works best in black and white together with some strong blue filtering, but the principle is the same.

When you get it into post, remember that in low light situations human vision can’t distinguish color well, if at all. So really dark scenes are practically monochrome to the eye.

Good luck! And don’t forget to share your solution when you’re done, I’ld love to know how you pull it off!

[Lars Fuchs]

You can also create a black solid in a video layer above the footage to be letterboxed, and mask out the middle. Then you can adjust the crop later without having to go back to photoshop.

[Lars Fuchs]

Very awesome tip. Thanks for sharing it!

This part, though –
[Rob Tinworth] “If you’re working on an offline project, you’ll want to delete these ahead of the online.”

makes me want to ask the COW FCP community, how many of you do offlines, as opposed to working at online (or delivered) resolution from the start?

[Lars Fuchs]

Here are my 2¢”

[Quincy Boardman] ”
1)Single click option- Instead of double clicking (or a single click + return key) to open a timelined clip in the viewer, why can’t it be just a single click like in Premiere or even imovie 🙂

This is just a user-preference question. For instance, Avid uses double-click too, so I like the double-click. FWI, Avid adds the option-double-click to open in a separate viewer window, which I like.

2)Interpret Footage option- Seems to me, Adobe (Premiere and After Effects) kicks some serious FCP butt on this feature. Instantly change your frame size and frame rate on any clip without loading it into a new sequence or exporting.

I agree, this would be a nice feature. FCP does allow you to freely mix different frame sizes and rates on the timeline; the autoscaling-to-fit-frame-size is a switchable user option. One area where this feature might be handy would be in correcting pixel aspect ratio. Otherwise I wonder how useful it actually is. Could you elaborate on how you envision using it?

3)Rate stretch tool-I know there is the fit to fill option which does essentially the same thing but takes about 10 times as long to do.

I agree with you on this one, too. I find FCP’s time-remapping functionality very disappointing.

4)Clip usage info-what is a quick way to know which, of the thousands of clips in my bin, i have used, and how many times I have used them?

Again a good idea. If anybody knows a technique for this, I’d love to hear it. Avid has something like this: “Select media relatives”. Maybe there’s some sort of XML tool?

5)Convenient search option-Lets face it, Adobe has always had great search options in their clip browsers and effect pannels… where is final cuts? (Apple+F is not a convenient method)

This I disagree with. I’m quite satisfied with Apple-F. I use AfterEffects, but not premiere. nevertheless, I don’t think I know what you’re referring to as far as Adobe’s search functionality. The seach in FCP is way better than avid’s, generally. Except for the Bin-sift tool, but the search function comes awfully close to the same thing.

6)Spaces goofiness- While using FCP, and moving back and forth from other applications using Spaces, sometimes the FCP windows will be thrown all over the place. Timeline in bottom space, browser elsewhere etc etc…

I’m still on 10.4, so don’t have an opinion on ‘Spaces’. But you’re favorite window layouts can be assigned hot-keys. In fact, the first several (can’t remember the # offhand, 3 or 4 though) saved window layouts (counting alphabetically) have default hotkeys assigned. If you look on the “load window layout” menu, you’ll see the hotkeys. If Spaces throws your FCP layout out of whack, justs hit the layout hotkey to bring it all back to order.

7)Limited timeline- How come FCP decides where to put the automatic In-Out points on still pictures/ Color Solids?… Right in the middle? If I want a color solid that goes my entire timeline, why do I have to open it in the viewer (by double clicking it haha) and lengthen its duration? Same goes with .psd files??? Limited durations?

I think this is also a user preference. Its a fairly arbitrary decision where to mark ins and outs, and doing it another way would just annoy somebody else. However, you don’t have to change the mark point of a solid or .psd file in the viewer. There are a number of other ways.

For example, to make a solid fill the whole timeline, simply edit the generator into your timeline with its default marks (10 seconds, I seem to recall). Then select the leading edge of the clip, hit ‘home’ to move the cursor to the top, and hit ‘e’ for extend. repeat for the trailing edge of the clip.

Alternately, you could delete the marks in the viewer (option-x) and mark your entire timeline in the sequence (‘x’) and overwrite.

There are other ways I’m sure, these are just two I can think of quick without opening FCP.

8)Free Choice Cut-N-Paste- When I cut and paste a clip, why can’t I select what track I would like to paste on. If I copy from v1 but want to paste to v4 I don’t have a choice!?

already answered in previous post by Francis. THANKS! I didn’t know that. Excellent tip.

9)Audio or Video only- I know I know… I can disconnect the a1 from A1 and a2 from A2, but can’t there be an easier way to drag down video only? Or audio only?

I’ll have to look into this, but all of the audio and video track assignments have hotkeys, so this shouldn’t be too troublesome.

10)Scroll Position- Lame how in FCP you have to type in your positioning in the motion effects tab. Seems like there should be arrow/scroll options…Like After Effects”

I don’t understand your issue here. Could you elaborate?

[Lars Fuchs]

[Tom Wolsky] “Subclipping an FCP clip will not have any effect on time remapping. It still accesses the whole media file. You have to export the portion you want to time remap and then reimport the file.”

Actually, I just checked this. In FCP 6.0.3, using NTSC DV footage, I created a 3:28 subclip from a master clip 8:13:21 in length. I edited the subclip into the sequence; then I cut the same media into the sequence from the original master clip with the same mark-in and out that I used to create the subclip. I opened each in turn in the viewer by double-clicking.

The subclip behaved as I expected – the start of the ramp was frame 0 (the first frame of the sub) and the top of the ramp was frame 118 (3:28). When I opened the master clip the start of the ramp was frame 7166, and the last 7284, or 118 frames, out of a scale that went from 0 to 14795. Visually they were quite different: the subclip displayed a nice nearly 45 degree ramp, while the master clip was basically a horizontal line.

So indeed, you will get more precision if you subclip your footage before time-remapping it, at least if the source clip is considerably longer relative to the clip length in the timeline.

Here are some screen grabs:
Subclip:

Master Clip:

[Lars Fuchs]

One thing I almost always do is make a subclip of the footage I want to manipulate with time-remapping. The time-remap graph scales to the size of the ENTIRE source clip (including the handles) so if you’re using clip that several minutes long or longer the graph covers just too much material to be precise. Its easiest if you subclip only the frames you want, but then you lose handles. (The difference between avid and fcp subclipping will have to be the subject of another thread.)

Another thing you can do is enlarge the viewer window to as big as you can make it on your monitor. Then enlarge the time-remap portion of the motion tab by pulling down on the baseline so that the time-remap is as big as possible. that will give you more room to work. If you find yourself doing this a lot, set up a window layout that way, and one for your normal workflow. If you name the layouts so that they’re alphabetically the first two of all your layouts, you can use the keyboard shortcuts to switch back and forth between them.

You can also use the time remap tools (hit ‘S’ three times) in the timeline to adjust the timing of the clip, but I haven’t been able to get my head round them. The time remapping is counter-intuitive for an ex-Avid head like myself, so I generally don’t use them. But the manual makes them sound really cool. The can be used to do exactly what you describe: pin a particular frame in a clip to a particular time in the sequence.

Good luck!

[Lars Fuchs]

I hardly ever use region select – maybe twice in 3-4 years. I’ll have to toy with it, see if I can find a use for it.

I had a heck of a time transitioning from Avid to FCP. Whew, that’d be a long post. After a long hard slog I feel I know FCP almost as well as I do Avid (been using MC since 4.2).

The FCP manuals are actually pretty good (avid’s have sucked since 5.0) so I recommend them. Its possible to remap your FCP keyboard to be very similar to your Avid layout, but I don’t do that. I often have to switch between MC and FCP, even on the same day. Its possible to get close, but not completely, emulate your avid layout, because somethings are just plain different (like audio scrubbing: toggled on/off in fcp, activitated by shift or caps-lock in avid, just to name one), and that subtle difference threw me off. I now prefer to keep the FCP keyboard almost in its default configuration. One of the few keys I changed was CMD-R, which I set to Redo, same as MC.

Don’t bother with FCP’s trim mode, its not worth the effort. Use the rollers. Asymmetric trimming is a bit tough in FCP, and can have odd results.

Also, in FCP unlike avid, you can have many sequences open at once. That means you can undo in a sequence that isn’t visible. You can also edit in a sequence that isn’t visible. For example if you select a clip in one timeline, switch to another, mark-in and out and press delete, you’ll delete the selected clip in the first timeline, not the stuff between the marks.

One of the weirdest things to get used to for me coming from avid is the way selection trumps marks. In other words, in avid, only material between the mark-in and mark-out on the active tracks will be affected, period. In final cut, if you have anything selected, editing operations will affect that regardless of your mark-in and out points. One simply gets in the habit of clicking the empty space on the timeline or pressing CMD-Shift-A to deselect (or is CMD-Option-A?) anything that might be selected before deleting or ripple-deleting.

The biggest advice I can give you is to not try and compare them, or try and force one to be like the other, or get mad because one is different from the other. I like to think of them as two different intstruments. A percussionists can often play both a drum kit and a marimba, but he still had to learn to each on its own terms.

[Lars Fuchs]

Other posters have commented on the marginal utility of the Media Manager. I haven’t used it since version 4.x out of fear. I dutifully hew to fcp’s implicit mantra: media management=more drive space.

While its possible that media manager in newer versions of fcp work better, my big beef with it is that it doesn’t (or didn’t used to) manage file-based media. In other words, stuff you imported as qt files, as opposed to stuff you captured from a timecoded tape. When I tried to media manage (consolidate, in avid-speak) a project, all the file based media remained in its original form. Only tape-based media were reduced to just the media used in the project (with handles, of course).

I suspect this is due to timecode, that only media with timecode can be handled by media manager to consolidate or decompose. Now that file-based acquisition is becoming the norm, I am often dealing with QT files from P2 etc. I know that these files have TC, and so MM might handle them fine. However, I cant afford to risk major downtime from MM quirkiness, so I avoid using it with client media.

I’d be grateful if anyone out there can shed some light here.

[Lars Fuchs]

you can also try iClone from Reallusion. That comes with a bunch of prebuilt dance moves, and there’s a pretty big community of users who create and post more.