exporting graphic with alpha layer?

hellow everyone!
i made a few lower thirds that i am trying to export as .mov (or seomthing) so that i am not bothered by really bad render issues. i put the text layers on a scratch timeline, export with "none" compression and check "millions of colors plus" and yet when i bring the resultant movie back into the orginal timeline, it includes a black background!
i tried with animation codec as well. what am i doing wrong?
thanks!!
greg

Export as 'animation' million plus. You need the right codec for the alpha channel to be recognised.

as far as i know, FCP doesnt support a "no-render" alpha channel situation. best you can do is do them in motion. that way you only have to render once...

Oh - you want no renders. I thought you meant you weren't bothered by the bad render times. Wayne's right. Fact of life. May as well just render them on the timeline, then if you need to make changes you don't have to recreate them.

Won't have to render with unlimited RT, not until output.

Couple of ways to export with alpha channel. One is using QT Conversion, but you have to make sure you don't render the file in Final Cut first or it will export the render file and doing it in Animation millions+, which is the correct way, will give you the black screen. The other way is to export to QuickTime Movie and instead of using current settings, go down to Custom and make it Animations millions+. This will force a re-compression so it will render out accurately.

great tips, tom.

i suppose your lower 3rds are moving, gregory?
if they're not, then export with quicktime conversion as a still image.
if you choose TIFF, it'l have an alpha.

nick

wow, thanks for the responses everyone.
Tom, it sounds like you have hit the nail on the head. i usually render first, then export, which would explain why some of the files i have done, using the same settings, came out correctly and other came out with a black screen. i'll get back into it and coinfirm this is the problem, but thank you so much for the tip!! it was turning into one of those hair pulling moments in which i am thinking of throwing the comp off a cliff bc i am pretty sure i am doing it all right but can't figure out what i'm doing wrong!!
thanks again!
g