[Marc Lucas]

Thanks for getting back.

I don’t think there is actually anything wrong with the project insofar that I had successfully rendered out the middle of the project (without the BG layer) but trying to render the whole project I could get the alpha. I might re-create a similar project and see if I can replicate the problem.

Kind regards,

Marc

[Marc Lucas]

Hi

Yeah for get the BG layer that was not active in the final render. Yes the main part of the project does have transparency and after rendering out the middle section as ProRes 4444 I did indeed get my alpha. The problem happened when I rendered out the entire timeline where the intro and outdo logo didn’t have transparency because they were a separate imported file into Motion. So when I rendered out the whole timeline the alpha disappeared from the project.

[Marc Lucas]

Hi Andy

Here is the project file

https://www.marclucasmedia.com/

[Marc Lucas]

I thought I had sort the problem because I took a short In & Out from the timeline to test for the alpha. When I exported the small movie exported with an alpha intact I then thought I had sorted the problem. Then I selected the whole project which had a logo top and tail that didn’t have any transparency. When I exported the timeline there wasn’t an alpha again.
So back to square one. I have now found out that if the logos top and tail were making the final output not have an alpha channel so I’ve had to render out the middle section then going to add the logos afterwards in AE.
Is this a bug or does Motion analyse the render from the start of the timeline and assume that the first clip represents the whole project??

[Marc Lucas]

I’ve got to the bottom of it. When you export from Motion using the ‘default settings’ they are indeed ProRes 4444 however to get an alpha into the file for some reason you have to actually select ProRes 4444 from within the export settings for the file to have an alpha rendered in it. Its a bit strange anyone know why that is?

[Marc Lucas]

Yes the project default for the settings I have is a ProRes 4444 timeline thats what I don’t understand. There isn’t an animation export option in Motion 5 there are just the ProRes and a few others

[Marc Lucas]

Thanks for the replies.

I like the look and sound of them but I only want them to record at a top table in a wedding situation so I think they might be over kill to be honest.

[Marc Lucas]

Still on FCP 6 as my working machine haven’t done any project’s on X yet:-)

So I take it Dave that the Animation Codec is only really big in size when there is next to any transparency in the render opposed to say the PNG option where even though there is transparency the file comparably would be larger than the Animation Codec.
I’m not fused about having to render anything in the FCP timeline because I only use AE occasionally with one of my current workflows.
Thanks for the replies!

[Marc Lucas]

Thats I knew there was something I was missing forgot all about that.

Kind regards,

Marc

[Marc Lucas]

This is the process I took. The original image in PS was 5000×3999 I used the crop tool to crop three sections from the picture all of the pieces around 900×600 give or take. Those three images were saved as TGA & PSD (I’ll look into using PNGs and TIFF in the future now, thanks!) and brought into FCP. they were then down scaled by 60-70% to fit into the viewer.