[Zak Mussig]

Scratch that. My guy was able to do it on his lunch break, so I’m all XML’d up.

Thanks again to everyone who read the post.

[Zak Mussig]

This came up a lot a couple of years back and became a big part of my workflow for a very big project (to me at least) that I was working on.

Compressor is no good, and since you’re in FCS2 ProRes 4444 is out. The way to export from FCP with alpha is:

1) Move your video up to v2 or above
2) don’t render – that bakes in the black pixels FCP uses to display transparency
3) Export > QuickTime Movie, self-contained, Animation codec

That should give you a .mov file with an alpha channel that holds up in any QT based app. The file will be big.

Zak

[Zak Mussig]

It’s h.264 only, so it doesn’t sound like you would benefit much from having it.

I’m still troubleshooting it on my system, which may in itself not be a ringing endorsement, but it’s let me drop data rates pretty drastically while improving visual quality with faster than realtime compression times. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you start doing a lot of h.264 it’s worth a look.

[Zak Mussig]

If you do much h.264 compression for client review or delivery, the Matrox Compress HD card could be a good, albeit less traditionally considered, way to improve your system.

Since encoding speed would probably be the number one reason to upgrade to an 8 core system (at least until grand central dispatch is in wider use under Snow Leopard) this would stretch the life of your 4 core system.

[Zak Mussig]

Alan,

I also read the Ars review and found the bits about QT especially interesting, but didn’t think to post it here… thanks for sharing.

With regards to FCP adding support for Grand Central Dispatch and Open CL vs becoming 64 bit, it’s not an either/or situation, but more like a both/and. Using the new technologies from Snow Leopard and taking advantage of more RAM by becoming 64 bit both involve a rewrite of the FCP code from Carbon to Cocoa. I’m just hoping they hold back on use of core animation when they do make the switch… I’m not particularly ken to watch my clip physically move from the viewer to the timeline when I make an overwrite edit.

With all the potential benefits to FCP users it would surprise me if this rewrite hadn’t been in the works for a while and that FCS 3/09/o-rama represents more of a “we haven’t forgotten about you / here are some new tweaks we came up with that didn’t break the old code too much” release along the way.

Zak

“You can’t fix coverage in post.”

[Zak Mussig]

Hey Paul,

Sorry to second Raphael’s bad news, but what you need to make this work is an Intel based Mac. I’m not certain that Leopard is a requirement, but he may well be right about that as well.

Assuming you’ve gotten FCP 6.whatever to run on your iBook then you may be able to get the Log and Transfer functionality for EX footage to work from within FCP and forget about XDCam Transfer. I haven’t personally played with that workflow and I’m still using XDCam transfer, but it’s worth checking out as it may be your only option without changing hardware.

That said, if you can afford a MacBook Pro (or Mac Pro) you should make the jump. I personally can’t imagine working with that footage on a G4.

My $.02

Zak

“You can’t fix coverage in post.”

[Zak Mussig]

I always thought this was a no-brainer type of plug-in, but I didn’t realize in was an input manager hack. I’m sort of surprised Apple promoted them on the Motion product page as recently as the release of Motion 3.

Zak

“You can’t fix coverage in post.”

[Zak Mussig]

Steve,

If the machine you’re recording is a Mac, then ScreenFlow is top notch.

Zak

“You can’t fix coverage in post.”

[Zak Mussig]

Apply any set of effects to the first A clip and tweak them to taste. Now select the clip and copy it via keyboard or menu command. Command-select every other A clip you want to have the effects, right or ctrl-click and select “paste attributes”. Uncheck every box but “filters” and hit OK.

If you want to make changes later, select all but the first clip and “remove [filter] attributes”. Make your changes to clip 1’s filters then repeat the paste attributes.

Zak

“You can’t fix coverage in post.”

[Zak Mussig]

It may not seem quite as elegant, but you can manually scroll the timeline during playback by holding shift and using your mouse wheel. Depending on how far out you’re zoomed, you may not need to do it so often. I use this all the time, since you can usually see the issue and know immediately what you need to change if you can see the edit while watching it.

Hope that helps,

Zak

“You can’t fix coverage in post.”