Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Oliver Peters] “[Mark Morache] “I believe Motion is an awesome product, and if that’s the model for what they want to do with FCX”
Huh? Motion 5 took several major steps backwards from previous versions. And Motion has never been up to par with AE, Nuke, Fusion or even Shake when it comes to really complex work. I’m not saying it isn’t a fun program to use at times and the new keyer is definitely better than before. But I have to wonder, how many users do more than just fiddle with a few templates.”
I think the Motion comparison is actually a very apposite one – I think people do elaborate stuff on Motion in despite of its essentially semi-pro nature which is clearly a fundamental design decision.
Behaviors are a way of giving animation control to folks who don’t want to have to learn about all that fiddly keyframing stuff – but on the other hand they are a great design idea and can be very powerful.
Motion (and even more so Motion 5) is badly lacking in some fundamental pro features – the inability to manipulate/combine/recombine individual RGBA channels is a very big mssing piece. Apple obviously don’t think their users are were ever going to want this and tellingly we have now even lost the basic Channel Swap filter out of Motion 4.
More serious still is how limited the whole Image Mask feature set is for any serious compositing – there are workarounds for a lot of things but there are many situations where you simply can’t create or adjust the matte to the job in hand, it just isn’t designed that way.
Motion is quick and easy (much faster than AE in many basic situations, especially with the real-time playback which has always been a huge strength), but it’s never going to cut it as a heavy-duty compositor up against the big guns. But it was never meant to!
FCPX feels like it’s built with exactly the same philosophy and intended audience – fast and clever for the basic stuff (OK, so you might disagree with that assessment of FCPX but you get the idea!) but showing its limitations for the big stuff that it was never really designed to handle. Both are entirely Apple desgined products (unlike legacy FCP), and it shows … for better and for worse.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Because it’s Xmas I thought I’d make this for you anyway – it’s an effect that enables you to bring on a PiP, have it hold and then move it off without you having to keyframe anything:
For example, you can set the position from which the PiP starts (defaults to offscreen Right) using the Start X/Y Pos parameters, and the start scale using the Start Scale parameter. Similarly with the position and scale for moving the image out of screen (End X/Y Pos, End Scale).
You can set the hold position either using the onscreen control or in the info tab, and you can also set the hold rotation value, as well as the initial (and end) rotation values).
The speed of the animation in and out can be controlled using the Speed In/Out parameters.
Again no keyframing is required at any point which should massively speed up your workflow.
In order to get the full Apple effect that you’re hoping for you could use it on both images but on the one that needs to come and go from full screen you just have to set the parameters to the reverse of the defaults, so that the start (or end) X/Y Pos are at zero and the scale at 100%.
Hope that all makes sense!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
If you wanted to give me some more precise co-ordinates/timings for this then I’d be happy to adjust the template to make it work that wya for you … as I say, it’s easy to do and would be an instant answer to your keyframing headaches.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
It sounds like you’re talking about a Difference Matte – you can do this very easily in After Effects with the Difference Matte Effect.
Motion 5 currently does not have a Difference Matte Keyer nor does the old Motion – and you can’t do it in FCPX obviously.
But you could do this in FCP7 – it’s available under the Video Filters/Key menu.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Hi Joe
I don’t know what you have in mind for your animations but here’s an alternative version of this effect that has a Cover-Flow style move in and out, which can be tweaked to taste.
As I say, it’s pretty easy to customize this kind of effect if you know what you are trying to achieve animation-wise, but it’s hard to come up with something that covers every possible eventuality when you don’t know what those eventualities might be.
Hope it’s useful for you anyway …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
If you could indicate what sort of animation you had in mind it’s probably fairly easy to help … are you sliding them in, from left/right/above/below? Arew they also moving off in the same way? Or do you have something else in mind?
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
You might find this effect useful:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/344/2544
Make sure you set the scale to 100% (rather than the default of 80%) for what you are trying to achieve, but it should work fine. I know Brendan did something similar as Tom points out but this should work OK for pulling a drop shadow off your key (or any other alpha source).
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
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[Jeremy Garchow] “You crack me up.”
Absolutely – and I’d like to be the first to nominate Aindreas as my Man of the Year 2011. Unquestionably the best thing about the last twelve months!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Bill Davis] “Just so you realize that in digital video files, once the luminance value of a pixel gets set to 255 (full white) theres’ simply nothing there to “recover.””
But you’ve got more than one channel to play with (three in fact) and sometimes (often) there is more information in one or other of the channels that is less clipped than the others that can usefully be harnessed to restore detail. This is the way the very clever Captains’s Blow-out Fixer works – or used to. Once Apple give us back Channel Swap in Motion 5 (don’t know where it went to) it should be reasonably easy to make this kind of filter again.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com