[Stace Carter]

Yeah, honestly, after watching this on numerous feeds throughout our facility, reading twits about IT guys complaining that the streams were bringing down their networks, I tuned in the MSNBC HD and thought “maybe broadcast television DOES still have it’s place.”

Definitely food for thought!

[Stace Carter]

Your answer will mostly be in the Flash forum, and then you’ll probably come back looking for this:

Re: Exporting alpha channels in Final Cut Pro
by Mark Pope on Sep 22, 2006 at 7:32:41 pm

I don’t know of a way to do it directly, but here’s something I tried. I put the Quicktime Movie with alpha on V1. Then I put a White rectangle on V2, scaled it up to fill the screen. I selected the white rectangle (V2) and used “composite mode” (under “Modify”) and chose “Travel Matte – Alpha”. Rendered. Now I could export that sequence and have the equivalent of “just the alpha channel”.

As I recall this is part of the process you’ll have to go through on the video side.

Cheers,
Stace

[Stace Carter]

Your first call should be to the video wall vendor, they deal with this all the time and can give you targets for the playback device, etc.

Also, you may want to be more descriptive in your post titles, it will help people who are familiar with your problem respond, oftentimes “need help” gets overlooked.

Cheers,
Stace

[Stace Carter]

Save the settings as Droplets; they then become self contained files which can be moved across systems, emailed, etc.

Here’s an example of how to make a Droplet:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/aiff_converter_compressor.html

[Stace Carter]

I’ve had this problem and attributed it to using a PC-formatted drive (my guess being that the resulting capture files exceeded the 2GB limit for NTFS). What is the formatting for your media drive?

Also, for the sake of troubleshooting, try capturing shorter files – :30, :60. 2:00, etc… to see if this is a limitation for you.

[Stace Carter]

I’m actually running my small amount of media off the internal sata (boot) drive for this

This practice is frowned upon for a host of reasons, not the least of which being that the OS and any running applications are competing for drive bandwidth. It most definitely explains the problem. I’d get the fastest external drive you can, and search this forum for recommendations.

Cheers,
Stace

[Stace Carter]

I run into the same issue with ProRes, and I attribute it to slow (FW400) drives I’m using on my portable sys. What’s your storage solution?

[Stace Carter]

David – Arnie is correct that this (rotoscoping)would be tough to pull off in FCP, however it sounds like you’re not looking for a very precise mask; I’d reccomend you try it in motion and keyframe the motion of the mask, feathering the edges and seeing what that gets you. If you can’t go to AE but need more precise motion for the mask/matte, look into motion tracking in Apple Motion (under “behaviors”).

[Stace Carter]

Use the find command in the browser – CMD+F.

https://www.rippletraining.com/find_unused_clip_in_fcp.html?cms=ea169d056353e85f9c14b6587227da66

Note that this is where using the comments section, and using the Browser as a database, can be real handy!

[Stace Carter]

You might also want to try Motion; I’ve had pretty good results there using Primatte RT and the complimentary “cleanup” filters such as Matte Magic.