[Mark Dobson]

[Craig Seeman] “The MacPro is performing poorly and it’s why I believe it will be replaced . . . by a potentially more powerful system that will have wider appeal.
“

Would anyone buy a MacPro at the moment? With thunderbolt yet to be added to the machine it would be like buying a car and being told that whilst it performed well you couldn’t take it out on the motorway.

I’m really struggling with my 2008 Quad-Core but at the moment I’ve got nowhere to go as I just don’t want to buy an iMac.

Want I want is both Thunderbolt, eSata and firewire but as time passes this seems less likely.

[Mark Dobson]

[Geoff Addis] “You can disable unwanted FX Factory plugins and prevent them appearing in the FCPx menu by opening up the FX Factory menu in the Applications folder and then unchecking the unwanted apps.”

Thanks for that info Geoff – I just watched an installation tutorial on their site – pretty slick operation. why they have stick lift music on all their instruction videos is beyond me.

[Mark Dobson]

[Craig Seeman] “Seems this isn’t a high priority port for FCPX. I”

Have you tried contacting Digital Heaven? They are very responsive. I just contacted Martin Baker over an other issue and he got back to me very quickly.

There is a contact link on their website.

I suppose exporting the clip you want to put the text over and doing it in FCP7 then re-importing is what you are trying to avoid.

[Mark Dobson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “I see what you’re saying – although the handle can’t actually be extended as such, the further away you move the mouse once you’ve grabbed the handle the more you “gear down” the adjustment factor, i.e. the further away you “hold” it the greater the arc through which you need to move the control to make the adjustment.”

Hi Simon

where you get this handle is when rotating in the transform tool. You are right about the gearing effect – it’s a much finer adjustment the further out you extend the rotation tool.

One reluctance I have towards the new Nattress FCPX Color plugin is that it ships with FX Factory which will install loads of watermarked FX which just clutter things up and I’m not about to buy their FX Factory Pro at $399 – I’d rather put that towards a new C300!

[Mark Dobson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “The rotation handles are currently just using the default Motion OSC for rotation which was the easiest way to do it – not sure what you mean when you refer to shape mask handles?”

Thanks Simon,

I had thought that you could extend the rotation handle to get finer control but must be confused.

What’s great about your plugin is it’s keyframable – something that a lot of people have complained about
with the colour corrector in FCPX.

many thanks

[Mark Dobson]

Thanks Raphael

[Mark Dobson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “See here for another example of the overlay idea for color grading:”

Hi Simon – great work

And whilst I don’t want to grumble I’ve tried it out and the only problem is that it is not possible to remove the overlays from the clip once the effect is applied.

There is a box for turning off colour wheels and legends but that still leaves the control handles and positioning icon on the screen.

Maybe I’m doing it wrong?

It would be great to be able to extend the rotation handles as one can do with the shape mask handles.

[Mark Dobson]

[Rafael Amador] “In your Mac OsX Utilities folder you have a wonderful “Digitalcolor Meter”.
rafael”

Hi Raphael

Just wondering how you would be able to use the Digitalcolor Meter within FCPX?

Am I missing something?

[Mark Dobson]

[Matt Surf] “Hi,
Does anyone know where the eyedropper tool is in FCP X? I’m trying to match the colour of a logo with a solid colour from the generators menu but can’t find anywhere to match the colours like in FCP7!”

Hi Matt

If you select the custom generator (it’s black) from the generators and add it to the timeline – open the generator in inspector – in the published parameters there is a colour well – click on this and a colour display opens up – there is a ‘magnify glass’ picker there to allow to select a colour from anywhere on your screen.

hope that helps

[Mark Dobson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “In one if their videos, it says it’s for primary only.

I wouldn’t call grading, more of a looks generator.”

Yup – don’t think I’ll be spending money on this one.

With necessity being the mother of invention I’ve been getting used to the onboard FCPX colour correction and actually finding it to be a pretty powerful tool for both primary and secondary corrections.

What gives it power is the ability of adding separate corrections to the same clip and then universally balancing the corrected frame.

It’s also a lot more versatile as a ‘looks’ generator than this offering.

However the biggest downside of the FCPX Color Correction is the lack of key frame control – ok you can key frame the shape mask parameters but the only way to adjust temporal changes in a clip is to split the clip and add a dissolve.

Mark Dobson
Producer and Director
Alembic TV
http://www.alembic.tv