[Mike Weber]

Alex

Unfortanately I’m at the limits of my knowledge about this. Rather than give you bad advice, I’ll flag this message for Floh…

[Mike Weber]

Alex –

In case you just have a few clips, and plan on working in the standard DV codec in FCP, this is the procedure that has worked well for us. I’m assuming you captured your footage originally as 720×486, 4:3 with the M100 codec.

– Export your footage as a By-Reference movie from M100.
– Open the reference movie in QuickTime Pro
– Export it as a DV movie. Be sure to set the size dimensions as custom – 720×480.

For the record, I’ve tried the obvious – exporting the DV movie right from Media100. For some reason, the movie looks bad when dropped into FCP, slightly jittery, like the field order is wrong or something. When I check the movie, it says lower field, just like the one made via QuickTime. The one made via QT looks great, the direct one doesn’t, so who knows? It’d be nice to do this in one step instead of two. Floh?

mw

[Mike Weber]

I have my AJA IoLA box hooked up to one of the firewire ports on the mac, and my DSR-1500 deck hooked up via firewire to a Sonnet Allegro FW400 PCI card, and have had no problems. I’m using v. 2.1 of the IoLA driver.

[Mike Weber]

Shane – I mentioned trying that in the other part of this thread. I got it to work, sort of, just not as simply or elegantly as in AfterEffects. I’m fine working with the plug in for simple moves, and using AE for when things need to get more complex.

[Mike Weber]

Thanks for the info on the Lyric plug in. I downloaded the demo, and in 5 minutes figured out how to get it do what I want to do. Seems like it would be $49 well spent.

Mike

[Mike Weber]

>>>there’s no easyease function if fcp, smooth is that function, thats odd how it’s “wiggling all over” it really shouldn’t be doing that, how did you set the keyframes?

Let’s say I want to start wide and centered on an image. I double click it from my timeline, so that it goes to the Viewer window. Then I click the Motion tab in the viewer. Then, I set a keyframe for Scale and Center at my current position. I jump ahead 3 seconds. I then zoom in using Scale, and reposition the image in the lower left. If I play my sequence, it does the zoom & reframe, but it starts and ends very suddenly, not gradually. My goal is to just go from point A to point B, but with a gentle start and end.

If I control-click on the Scale keyframes, and select “Smooth”, it changes the keyframes to have bezier handles. (Which, for the time being, I am not adjusting). If I were just doing the Scale, and not a postition change, it would look great. But because I am doing a position change as well, and you can’t apply “smooth” to the Center keyframes, when I play back the move, the picture slides around in an “S” shape, as it is zooming. It still starts and ends in the right position, but the path it takes is nowhere near a straight line.

I took Ben’s advice and tried control-clicking the start and end positions in the canvas window, in wireframe mod. There is indeed an ease in/ease out option. Just selecting that and leaving it as is make the whole motion a little more on track, but it still does some shifting around on the way. I guess I need to play with adjusting the bezier now.

When I was doing this in After Effects, I would simply select the start keyframes for scale & position, and choose “easy ease out”, and then select the end keyframes, choose “easy ease in”, and it would work perfectly, not really needing any adjusting. And if I did have to adjust, as long as I adjusted the bezier in the composition the same way (between scale & position), it would still look right. I guess I was hoping for such an easy process with FCP, but I’ll have to work a little harder at manually setting the bezier points.

thanks
Mike

[Mike Weber]

Thanks for the reply! I’ll give it a try. I will also post my question in the regular FCP forum to see if I get any alternate ideas. (I am unsure whether this is a “basics” question or not!) Thanks again

Mike

[Mike Weber]

Thanks for all your help – you’ve saved me a lot of time & frustration! Our senior artist position is currently vacant, and so I’m stepping in to help out the best I can. Normally I (an editor) use AE to do relatively normal things like moves on stills, color keys, masking, etc. Usually I can figure things out (or at least fake it), but this one had me stumped. I don’t know the expressions features at all, so maybe I should get more acquainted. Thanks again –

Mike

[Mike Weber]

Thanks for all your help – you’ve saved me a lot of time & frustration! Our senior artist position is currently vacant, and so I’m stepping in to help out the best I can. Normally I (an editor) use AE to do relatively normal things like moves on stills, color keys, masking, etc. Usually I can figure things out (or at least fake it), but this one had me stumped. I don’t know the expressions features at all, so maybe I should get more acquainted. Thanks again –

Mike

[Mike Weber]

Wow, that worked! Thanks a lot. If you’re still in a giving mood, I have a couple of follow up questions. Is there a way to keep it in whole numbers, in other words, get rid of the decimal places? Also, would like to line up the “10” in the proper place at the end. Thanks a million –

Mike