I’ve been reading a lot about the new Final Cut Pro X and how managing source files and projects can be a bit of a pain. Most notably, that there’s no (logical/easy) way to reconnect media that’s been moved to another drive. It turns out that’s not entirely true.
Say you have an event called Brian Visits Brooklyn on your computer’s internal hard drive, and an associated project called The Moon. The event is huge and you’d like to reclaim the space for your collection of 2011 WWDC session videos. So you connect an external hard drive and drag your source files (your event) to the new hard drive.
Do the same with the project, dragging it to the drive you want and selecting just the project and render files.
Uh-oh, the project is still pointing to the event on your internal drive. That’s no good. So what to do?
Access the project’s properties by choosing File –> Project Properties… from the menu bar, or by pressing Command + J. A new inspector-style window appears with two tabs, Properties and Sharing. Under Properties click the big Modify Event References button. You should see the referenced events on both drives, with the option to drag to the top whichever event you want the project associated with. Click OK and you’re done.
I realize it’s not as robust as it used to be, but it’s a bit more than the nothing I keep reading about.
We got our first major snowfall here in Salem and, just like last year, I wanted to try and capture it. If you’ve ever scrolled through a long grid of photos in iPhoto, Aperture or Lightroom you might have seen something that looks a little like the video above. That’s where I got the idea anyway. Unfortunately, it didn’t really turn out like I had imagined. I was hoping the difference in color would be really apparent as the snow blew in and night fell. But, at this point, I’ve already spent two days on this and I’m sick of looking at it.
I used the iPhone’s camera and let it shoot every five seconds for two hours. The phone was supported by my Glif on top of a camera extender on top of my Manfrotto 501 baseplate.
I used a replicator in Motion, each offset by one frame in a six by six grid. That was enough for my computer to beg for death, so I baked it out and finished the rest in Final Cut. The music is Dirty Glass by WHY? [iTunes].
I made another title animation in Motion, this time 20 seconds instead of 10. That turned into around 16 hours of work and another 9 or so for export.
The texture I used for the floor and wall came from cgtextures.com, who appear to have a very reasonable terms of service regarding commercial and non-commercial use. The reason it took so long to export was because of the text. Since I wanted the camera to fly in so close to the title I needed the text to render at a very high quality. That takes time. The settings I used also did some hardcore anti-aliasing for object intersections which helped sell the point where the wall and floor met.
To compress for the web I ran it through an iOS droplet I made from Compressor with a data rate of 1Mbps. Any higher and my web host seems to have a problem delivering the video fast enough to iPhones or iPads. The Ogg Theora (Firefox) version was encoded in Terminal with FFMpeg2Theora at 3Mbps. The WebM version was done with Make Web Video, a Firefox extension (also at 3Mbps).
I’ve never spent a ton of time working in Motion. I’ve always assumed After Effects was a superior application for compositing, so trying to become as skilled in Motion as I am (or at least as I think I am) in Final Cut seemed like a waste of time. I recently watched this tutorial by Andrew Kramer and wondered if it was even possible to create those kind of elements within Motion. He, of course, was working in AE.
Turns out you can, more or less. I spent a few hours yesterday poking around in Motion and made a proof-of-concept title animation. This is what it looks like.
Here’s something I worked on recently. Shot with the DVX100a equipped with polarizing and UV filters. Edited in Final Cut Studio and graded using Magic Bullet Looks.
