[Mark Suszko]

Did that, but the mask does not follow the null…

[Mark Suszko]

There are foley’d servo sounds right within FCPX’s audio collection that are good for this, but if you’re looking for something a little more custom, sounddogs will have this kind of stuff. It can also be fun to foley it yourself, using for example, the power seats in your car.

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe something to consider is, if the viewers are watching TV with the overscan “stretch/zoom” features on. You can’t control the users being (redacted), but graphics placed too close to left or right or bottom can end up cut off when TV’s are in this mode. I’ve seen this a lot in waiting rooms running cable TV feeds, and in some restaurants as well. Takes all my willpower, to not get up and start adjusting their sets. They don’t care that they’re “wrong”. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Something I might do with a problematic greenscreen job is to not bother trying to do it in just one step, but to first “re-generate” the green background, by adjusting the levels and brightness/ saturation to make the key work, without regard to what it’s doing to the look of the subjects.

The point is to only worry about the matte, and to re-composite that matte with a fresh background. The new background for that first key attempt is… a pure generated green or blue, depends on needs of the job. Then what we’re doing is imitating an old-fashioned optical printer, layering a composite of the new matte over the untreated original footage, to generate the actual chromakey. I have saved a couple of janky keying jobs this way in the past.

[Mark Suszko]

That screen-capture ploy would be my last, desperate method, but before that, did you try running it thru FFWorks or FFmpeg?

[Mark Suszko]

How will you address white balance?

[Mark Suszko]

If it’s the zoom into earth from space shot you’re after, I found a couple shots on shutterstock that come close, and a customize-able effect project on MotionVFX.com (Motion project number1272) that possibly might be altered to match.

Motion VFX .com offers identical versions in AE and Apple Motion, most of the template projects run 40-50 dollars and can save a lot of time versus starting from scratch.

The way the clouds layer bulges and stretches in your original example, this looks to me less like a pure 3D CGI job, and more like a multi-layer AfterEffects Comp where flat high rez maps are being wrapped into a sphere and bulged while animating the virtual camera. If it’s not custom, then it -might- be found as a template at Adobe’s site. Try Adobe Stock File #: 13784280 that’s $75 I think… I typed “space zoom” into Adobe stock and got a bunch of samples…

For a small fee, you can use Google Earth 3D to quickly animate a custom space zoom to specific target spots that looks good by itself or could be added to an AE comp.

If you mean the city fly-thru’s with the motion-tracked glows and callouts, that’s an AfterEffects job combined with custom aerial photography clips.

[Mark Suszko]

One idea off the top of my head would be, locate the nearest “business incubator” and offer to do all the “in-house” production for every business there, at a higher quality level than they can do “DIY”, for a shared fee between them. At any one moment, one of the several companies in the incubator has to need some video production services and help with promotions. As established companies graduate out of the incubator, you can follow them and become their exclusive “in-house” supplier, do this for several of the “graduates”, and/ or stay at the incubator to help the next incoming business.

I suspect there are a couple of big-time food distributors in your area that supply all the restaurants and institutional kitchens. I’d pitch your food photography to these suppliers, to help promote more of their wares to the various restaurants, and then you leverage that connection to hit the individual restaurants as well. You might also pitch the training office at a large restaurant franchising outfit – they might already have all their production done in-house or on contract, but sometimes, there might be specialty projects that pop up, which you could service.

[Mark Suszko]

Raul, this is karma, telling you, it’s time to move on. If finances are an issue, you might try DaVinci Resolve for free, it’s pretty similar in feel to FCP-6/7.

I was where you are now, just about two weeks ago. My home setup was FCS3/ FCP-7 until this month. It was getting more and more impossible to work with. I resisted change as long as I could but had reached a crisis point. I nuked everything, and started afresh in Mojave with a new install of FCPX. I’m missing seven less every week, as FCPX has so much more capability, and is so much faster.

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[Mark Suszko]

I think I understand what you’re asking.

To be clear, as I understand it, you have an artist doing what we call “whiteboard animation”, drawing-in an illustration on a white background, a bit at a time, then sped-up, either by time-lapse or simple speed ramping in post production. The ideal way to do that, and maintain ease of later editing options, of course would have been to have the artist consciously take their entire hand out of the camera shot in-between each segment or frame of drawing, though many people prefer to see the artist’s hand doing the drawing the whole time.

Another way to shoot those is to start with a finished drawing on an erase-able surface, use the “marker pen” with a bit of sponge on the end as an eraser tool, erase the drawing a bit at a time… and just reverse the video in post, to look like normal drawing. This has the advantage of full control of the frame and your drawing has no mistakes mid-way.

As to removing the arm afterwards, I don’t think there’s any perfect, automated way to do this. It’s going to be a rotoscoping/masking job. This can be done in AfterEffects or Apple Motion. One other way to approach it is to export a “frame movie” of the segment into Photoshop, and opening that in “filmstrip mode”, you can use the Healing Brush, frame-by-frame, to paint things out. It’s not certain as to which method would be more effective or efficient. The Photoshop method allows you to add in new elements simultaneously. One thing that can help with that is, select and copy a few poses of the artist’s arm and hand, by itself, and put that on another layer, so you can animate it to cover the new lines of the revised drawing.

There are cheap, web-based apps that will simulate whiteboard animation. You feed in the finished drawing first, and the app adds a masked or keyed-in gif animation of various artist hand poses, set to follow the lines of the drawing in a general fashion, all set to animate rapidly to simulate time-lapse. It’s not that great an illusion, to me, because it acts more like an animated wipe across the drawing, than a true animation of the individual picture lines. But it’s fast, and many audiences are casual enough that they don’t appreciate the difference.