[Zak Mussig]

If it’s for a student, and she’s in an all DV environment then this will be fine for her… just encourage her not to cheap out on RAM (that doesn’t necessarily mean pay what Apple asks either). I’m to the point where I wouldn’t buy a MacBook and expect to edit on it beyond a little light DV work for myself, but my first Mac was an 500 MHz iBook G3, and that got me started on FCP. That was 5 years ago now, and Motion would have laughed at that machine ( I doubt it will be too responsive on a MacBook either).

The bottom line is that, if you’re a student, you get what you can, and it gets you through until you need or can get something better. Just don’t do you student the disservice of telling her it will do everything she could ever dream of. If she knows what she’s getting, and it does what she needs to do, at least for the foreseeable future, then there you have it.

Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Dan,

Felt I should just try and clarify a point that some other people have made. The “Send to Motion” option is not just a one way street because you can reopen and make changes to your Motion project, and FCP will update to reflect those changes when you save and close the project. The programs are talking to one another, but that doesn’t mean that the communication between them is telepathic. If you’ve changed your mind and now want to us a different clip than your originally told FCP to send to Motion, but want to keep everything else about your project the same, you have to somehow tell it that. SInce FCP is simply reading a Motion file, you have to tell the Motion file that you want to use a different piece of media than you are currently. The issue just seems to be how to make the clip available in Motion to make the swap. You’ve gotten several good options, so just pick one and run with it.

Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Matt,

I think the reference movie concept was assuming that he wanted to use only a specific portion of a longer clip rather than having a clip that is the correct length, and has the in and out he already wants. Exporting a reference movie would give him more control over which part of the clip is being brought into Motion to minimize futzing in the Motion timeline.

Dan,

Your Motion project is still as editable as any Motion project, but it is very correct that just replacing the clip in your original sequence you sent to Motion will take your right back to square one. All you’ll need to do is open the project in Motion (through FCP is preferable so it looks for changes) select the clip you want to replace and drag the clip you want to replace it with into it’s media container in the inspector. If Motion shares it’s media window between open projects (I don’t know if it does or not) you could conceivably change your clip out in FCP, and select just your new track 5 clip and send that to Motion. When the new project you make opens, just add the clip you sent to the media list, and then you have quick access to the clip you want, with the correct in and out points, from your real Motion project. I kinda just made that up, and it’s speculation… but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that media list was shared among all open projects.

Hope that helps you out without muddying the waters too much,
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

I believe (compressing right now so I can’t test) if you pre-comp your image you can apply a border to a cropped image. Select your clip, and go to Sequence > Nest Items. Now apply your border to the sequence that is in your timeline. Double-clicking the sequence in the timeline will open it, so you have to select it and press return to open it in the viewer to tweak your filter. This can be a handy trick, but nested sequences can cause a lot of trouble in an off-line on-line situation, and there comes a point when you should just do your effect in Motion or AE, and just bring the result back into FCP.
If I remember correctly and that works for you, that should do you well for simple things like that.

Hope that helps,
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Scott,

Try a Save As in a different location. Are you, per chance, trying to save your project to a firewire drive? Almost everything I do is on firewire 800 drives (including the project files). I have this issue from time to time. This is one reason it’s a bad idea to keep your project file on a firewire drive. I make a lot of backups, and I often just copy the project file to system drive, do my work, and copy it back when I’m done to keep everything portable.

If you just can’t save, you could export to xml (with your browser selected) and reimport that as a new project.

Hope that helps,
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

I just had another thought as I de-interlaced about 400 still images from HDV footage…
Is your footage, 1080i or 720p? I’m dealing with Sony’s 1080i, which can get a lot of field offset (I’m sure there’s a real term for that, but I don’t know it) with fast motion.

If your footage is interlaced, you may want to de-interlace it before attempting your key. You’re already working with less color info in the HDV space than you have in the past with DigiBeta… I could easily see interlaced footage causing you nightmares.

Zak

[Zak Mussig]

I’m with Jerry on this one. I thought that no project file changes were made until 5.1, but that’s a big guess. If that’s true though, your project should open just fine in the older system, but differences between version quirks could give you trouble, so I would just update the 5.0.1 system if you have the power to.

Zak

[Zak Mussig]

If you have experience and have had success keying in Motion, I would definitely stick with that. Given the tools that I have available, Shake, Motion, and FCP, keying with the standard filters in FCP would be my last choice. Even without Shake in front of you, the standard toolset in Motion will almost always produce better results than that in FCP.
3rd party filters and plug-ins are be a different story , but my experience there is incredibly limited, so I can’t speak much to that option.

Hope that helps,
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Shayne,
It seems to me you and your client need to decide on a delivery format before you go buying anything. If you are delivering on good ol’ DVD then I vote for setting up a compressor batch to turn your DVCProHD footage into the anamorphic DV that your system likes, and can play out to a monitor. Do you take a hit in quality? Yes. Would it be better to down-convert using a hardware solution like the Kona card Walter mentioned? Yes. Does that workflow let you do what you want to do on your current system without buying new hardware? Yes You’ll still see a little benefit from the original copy being shot in HD.
Depending on what kind of distribution you’re looking at, there may not be a viable HD format for you. When Walter does HD I believe he outputs to tape for Food Network. If your project is headed to home theaters, DVD is probably your best bet. If an HD capture card is beyond your budget, I’m assuming Blu-Ray or HD DVD authoring and replication are as well… never-mind that no one has or uses these yet.
The newer version of Compressor uses an optical format conversion technology (extent of my knowledge and understanding) that’s supposed to do good work. Your Mac Pro should be able to tear through the conversion relatively fast (probably an overnight thing)… I’m happy with the speed of ours.
If your client absolutely must have HD, then they need to pay for it. I’m not saying you can get away with charging them the cost of your HD conversion, but the costs most definitely go up. If you and / or they aren’t happy with that reality, then they probably shouldn’t be your client.
I’ll admit that I’m saying all of this knowing very little about what your project actually is, or who your client is and what they actually want or need done.

Hope that helps a bit,
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Ric,
We’ve had our Mac Pro since just after they were announced. It’s a Quad 3 with 5GB of RAM running the universal version of FCS. I also have Shake 4.1 and Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 running on the machine. Since all comparisons here are relative, the machine I upgraded from was a dual 2.5 GHz G5 with 8GB of RAM. Both machines have 256 MB graphics cards. I’m hazy on the model of each card, but the Mac Pro is the standard card. The new machine has 4 SATA hard disks in it, 2 of them are matching 500s which are striped. Most of what we do is DV and HDV, so most projects live on Firewire 800 drives (yeah, I know) for portability.

The system has been doing pretty well so far… FCP feels very fast and responsive, and I’m struggling to remember a time when I had to wait on the machine that wasn’t the fault of a disk. Rendering is noticeably faster on the new system, and Motion feels much more responsive. I know it unloads a lot of work on the GPU, and since I don’t know a ton about graphics cards, and the differences between / advantages of PCIe vs AGP I’m willing to admit that may be a me thing.

I was worried about Photoshop, but while it may not run faster than it would on a Quad G5, it feels as fast or faster than my dual 2.5. The only slow down there is running actions on large batches of files, which we do pretty often here. Making something else the frontmost application seems to speed that up a bit since it stops trying to show me everything, and just does the job.

My guess is that any issues you run across will be from 3rd party hardware, and drivers for it. My old system had an SD only Blackmagic card that I used for video and audio output. Because of costs that aren’t mine to pay, changing needs that isn’t being replaced with a PCIe version. We got an M-Audio Firewire Solo to send audio out to monitors, but it doesn’t work with the current version of the OS 10.4.7.

Hope that helps,
Zak