[Rodney Sims]

Hi Sarah,
For a fast and effective way to lift impenetrable blacks in FCP, I’d really recommend Lyric’s free ‘Shadow Highlight’ plugin. It’s certainly great for over-crushed DV footage. You just need to be careful about how much to lift (and where the ‘knee’ is), and ensure that the chroma setting is at zero, or everything gets a little too rosy. I imagine the 8mm will be pretty well saturated anyway! But the plug-in controls are easy to get to grips with.

https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/

Good luck!

Rodney

[Rodney Sims]

Alexander,
A very nice and thoughtful explanation – however…
Your technique for applying an overall speed change to a clip via the media is only workable if your clip is a shot already broken down on the rushes roll as a separate entitly. If your rushes were done on a professional format with backspace recording, your rushes will be a continuous 40 minutes or so. Although you have specified the exact section of rushes you wish to send to Motion, applying an global 50% speed setting turns the whole rushes duration to 50%, and suddenly you’re looking a a slow-mo’ed bit of footage you didn’t want. Having to first export and re-import footage as a new clip is ludicrous. Why isn’t that a user-definable command within Motion’s import function?

There’s a simple analogy to this: I select a book in a bookstore and when I get to the cash desk, I find they want to charge me for the entire shelf. It doesn’t make any more sense in Motion, and to create unnecessary within tight-time workflows is insane. The only reason I can think of is that other (Avid) systems have sewn up the copyright on any sane way to produce exemplary slow mo’s. And if any of you are able – check out the Avid speed ramp tools / graphical interface, and you’ll see what I mean!

Good luck with your speed fx.
Rodney