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using AE in FCP Studio
Posted by filmman
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using AE in FCP Studio March 04, 2010 07:03PM |
I'm seriously considering acquiring & using After Effects with my FCP 5.04 to enhance & compliment the filters and plugins of FCP. Can you advise me regarding what are the major benefits of adding the capabilities of A & E to FCP Studio 5.04? Thanks --vic
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Re: using AE in FCP Studio March 04, 2010 09:27PM |
You can't use AE in FCS to enhance and compliment filters and plug ins of FCP. It is an Adobe Software application and cannot be used within FCS. For more info on AE and it's capabilities go here:
[forums.adobe.com]
When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.
[forums.adobe.com]
When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.
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Re: using AE in FCP Studio March 05, 2010 05:19AM |
And skip the Premier step (and the need to buy Premier) by using this
[www.popcornisland.com]
Great for simple timelines, dumping green screen selects etc.
ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!
[www.popcornisland.com]
Great for simple timelines, dumping green screen selects etc.
ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!
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Re: using AE in FCP Studio March 05, 2010 01:56PM |
AE = Blackberry / Motion = iPhone
WHAT?????
I use to use motion for everything graphic from from its 1st version until now. I still use it for quickies or for behavioral reasons. It does a lot of nice stuff and you can get very complicated 3d animations.
I have had AE for about 2 yrs and i can tell tell you with zeal motion is not on the level that AE is. Its really not within 15% or even 25% IMHO. Better keyframe workflow, better control on effects, much better compositing tool set, better handle on obj files, and some.
I say you start out in motion and graduate to AE.
AE- iPhone / Motion - early 08 HTC PDA
""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."
> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"
Quote
Francois
WHAT?????
I use to use motion for everything graphic from from its 1st version until now. I still use it for quickies or for behavioral reasons. It does a lot of nice stuff and you can get very complicated 3d animations.
I have had AE for about 2 yrs and i can tell tell you with zeal motion is not on the level that AE is. Its really not within 15% or even 25% IMHO. Better keyframe workflow, better control on effects, much better compositing tool set, better handle on obj files, and some.
I say you start out in motion and graduate to AE.
AE- iPhone / Motion - early 08 HTC PDA
""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."
> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"
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Re: using AE in FCP Studio March 06, 2010 05:10AM |
If Vic is talking about a feature length show, I'm not sure if he wants to port the whole thing over to AE. A thousand cuts in a feature would mean a thousand layers in AE. It's a scrolling nightmare.
Use AE for scenes that require special effects/compositing. Then use Color to colour.
www.strypesinpost.com
Use AE for scenes that require special effects/compositing. Then use Color to colour.
www.strypesinpost.com
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Re: using AE in FCP Studio March 06, 2010 12:25PM |
Ugh. You're fixating on tools again, Vic. Stop doing that.
Digital compositing is an evolution of optical compositing, nothing more. The goal is to combine two images in such a way that it looks like a single photographic plate. That's it; it's really that simple. We can break this down into two parts: obtaining those two images (shooting them as plates, shooting them as elements, creating matte paintings of them, synthesizing them entirely using a computer model or a simulation, getting your kid nephew to draw them with crayons on construction paper, whatever), and combining those two images together once we have them. These are separate parts of the process. They inform each other, but they're not the same.
You're coming at this like After Effects (or whatever) just does these things. That's not right at all. That's like saying that your whisk makes scrambled eggs for you. It doesn't. You make scrambled eggs, and the whisk is a tool that some people like to use. Others use a fork. Some use a blender. They choose the tool that works best for their specific situation, because they understand what they're trying to do.
Maybe you don't need to understand organic chemistry and biology in order to make up a batch of scrambled eggs on a Saturday morning ? but I promise you, if you were making scrambled eggs for the very first time in all of human history, if you were a scrambled-egg pioneer, you'd either start by breaking it down to the underlying science, or locking yourself in your kitchen for a hell of a lot of trial and error. Hint: Pretend eggs cost a half a million bucks apiece, and they take six months to cook. Trial and error doesn't sound so appealing any more, huh?
This seems to happen over and over again with you, Vic. No disrespect intended, but I have the impression that often you'll ask a very specific question, but a little prodding reveals that you're trying to do this massive complex thing, and you've got all the steps out of order, and you're frustrated because you can't find the "make Venus" button or whatever. Sometimes it seems like you want a painted house, so you start by carefully applying two coats of white exterior latex to each individual two-by-four before you nail any of them together.
It's great that you're ambitious. Ambition is awesome. But if you want to avoid frustration, you really need to temper it with a little discipline. Okay, I need to composite Venus into a shot. What should that look like? Maybe I should take my stills camera out with a really long lens and shoot Venus near the horizon just before sunrise, for reference. Or maybe that could be more than just reference; if I shot at a really high ISO, maybe I could get a grain-free still that I could use as my element for that shot. But I'll need a lot more than six stops of dynamic range to make that work; maybe I should google exposure bracketing and HDR photography so I can set up a tripod and shoot multiple exposures to get 13 stops? That way I can shoot Venus ? or any bright star, really; it's not like anybody's gonna get out an astrolabe ? on a pure black sky with high dynamic range and just do a simple additive composite to put it in my shot. And what if I used fractal noise in a matte to make it flicker? By god, that might just work!
Once you get to the point where you can follow the basics of that line of thinking, congratulations. You're a visual effects supervisor.
But you have to understand the basics, man. You need to stop thinking about computers and programs and learn the core principles. What's an element? What does it mean to additively composite two things? What's dynamic range, and why is it important? How does ISO affect the amount of grain you're going to get when you shoot an element? Why should you go out right now and put a piece of gaffer tape over the button on your camera that lets you change the shutter angle?
Gotta walk before you can run, Vic. Stop looking to technology as if there's some magical secret that editors, compositors and other effects artists know and that they won't tell you. It ain't so.
"I don't know if I'll be able to learn AE well enough to be able to do these kinds of shots," you said. That right there is your problem. Do you know what "learning After Effects" means? It means you know where the buttons are. It means sitting down and going, "Okay, I've already planned how I'm going to solve this shot, I've got my elements, and I know what I want to do. Where's the 'over' button? Where's the 'add' button?" Somebody who "knows After Effects" is able to sit down and carry out their plan without having to refer to the manual, because they remember how to perform all the basic operations they need. What you need to do is to learn what those basic operations are ? simple stuff, simple! ? and start thinking of shots in terms of those basic operations. Then you can sit down at After Effects and go, "Okay, first step is to load my elements, which I have prepared in advance. Where's the 'load' button? Now I need to draw a matte; which is the matte-drawing tool?" The manual is very good at answering those kinds of questions, because it's written with the assumption that you already know what you want to do, and you just need to be told how this particular program does that specific thing.
Have some discipline, man. Take that Venus shot you want to do and shut out everything else in your life, and just focus on that one shot. Break it down to the most basic level, as if it were a recipe for a particularly complicated and esoteric batch of scrambled eggs. Understand just exactly what it is you want to do, then come up with a plan ? a series of steps. Then break each of those steps down, and figure them out one by one. Make your failures many and small, so you can make mistakes and correct them and learn.
"Clearly I need to buy After Effects so I can do this shot" is just totally wrong-headed. What if you do? What if you go out right now, this morning, and plop down your credit card? What then? You'll be right back where you started, with absolutely no plan, but you'll be sixteen hundred bucks poorer. That's not how I'd choose to spend my Saturday, but maybe that's just me.
Digital compositing is an evolution of optical compositing, nothing more. The goal is to combine two images in such a way that it looks like a single photographic plate. That's it; it's really that simple. We can break this down into two parts: obtaining those two images (shooting them as plates, shooting them as elements, creating matte paintings of them, synthesizing them entirely using a computer model or a simulation, getting your kid nephew to draw them with crayons on construction paper, whatever), and combining those two images together once we have them. These are separate parts of the process. They inform each other, but they're not the same.
You're coming at this like After Effects (or whatever) just does these things. That's not right at all. That's like saying that your whisk makes scrambled eggs for you. It doesn't. You make scrambled eggs, and the whisk is a tool that some people like to use. Others use a fork. Some use a blender. They choose the tool that works best for their specific situation, because they understand what they're trying to do.
Maybe you don't need to understand organic chemistry and biology in order to make up a batch of scrambled eggs on a Saturday morning ? but I promise you, if you were making scrambled eggs for the very first time in all of human history, if you were a scrambled-egg pioneer, you'd either start by breaking it down to the underlying science, or locking yourself in your kitchen for a hell of a lot of trial and error. Hint: Pretend eggs cost a half a million bucks apiece, and they take six months to cook. Trial and error doesn't sound so appealing any more, huh?
This seems to happen over and over again with you, Vic. No disrespect intended, but I have the impression that often you'll ask a very specific question, but a little prodding reveals that you're trying to do this massive complex thing, and you've got all the steps out of order, and you're frustrated because you can't find the "make Venus" button or whatever. Sometimes it seems like you want a painted house, so you start by carefully applying two coats of white exterior latex to each individual two-by-four before you nail any of them together.
It's great that you're ambitious. Ambition is awesome. But if you want to avoid frustration, you really need to temper it with a little discipline. Okay, I need to composite Venus into a shot. What should that look like? Maybe I should take my stills camera out with a really long lens and shoot Venus near the horizon just before sunrise, for reference. Or maybe that could be more than just reference; if I shot at a really high ISO, maybe I could get a grain-free still that I could use as my element for that shot. But I'll need a lot more than six stops of dynamic range to make that work; maybe I should google exposure bracketing and HDR photography so I can set up a tripod and shoot multiple exposures to get 13 stops? That way I can shoot Venus ? or any bright star, really; it's not like anybody's gonna get out an astrolabe ? on a pure black sky with high dynamic range and just do a simple additive composite to put it in my shot. And what if I used fractal noise in a matte to make it flicker? By god, that might just work!
Once you get to the point where you can follow the basics of that line of thinking, congratulations. You're a visual effects supervisor.
But you have to understand the basics, man. You need to stop thinking about computers and programs and learn the core principles. What's an element? What does it mean to additively composite two things? What's dynamic range, and why is it important? How does ISO affect the amount of grain you're going to get when you shoot an element? Why should you go out right now and put a piece of gaffer tape over the button on your camera that lets you change the shutter angle?
Gotta walk before you can run, Vic. Stop looking to technology as if there's some magical secret that editors, compositors and other effects artists know and that they won't tell you. It ain't so.
"I don't know if I'll be able to learn AE well enough to be able to do these kinds of shots," you said. That right there is your problem. Do you know what "learning After Effects" means? It means you know where the buttons are. It means sitting down and going, "Okay, I've already planned how I'm going to solve this shot, I've got my elements, and I know what I want to do. Where's the 'over' button? Where's the 'add' button?" Somebody who "knows After Effects" is able to sit down and carry out their plan without having to refer to the manual, because they remember how to perform all the basic operations they need. What you need to do is to learn what those basic operations are ? simple stuff, simple! ? and start thinking of shots in terms of those basic operations. Then you can sit down at After Effects and go, "Okay, first step is to load my elements, which I have prepared in advance. Where's the 'load' button? Now I need to draw a matte; which is the matte-drawing tool?" The manual is very good at answering those kinds of questions, because it's written with the assumption that you already know what you want to do, and you just need to be told how this particular program does that specific thing.
Have some discipline, man. Take that Venus shot you want to do and shut out everything else in your life, and just focus on that one shot. Break it down to the most basic level, as if it were a recipe for a particularly complicated and esoteric batch of scrambled eggs. Understand just exactly what it is you want to do, then come up with a plan ? a series of steps. Then break each of those steps down, and figure them out one by one. Make your failures many and small, so you can make mistakes and correct them and learn.
"Clearly I need to buy After Effects so I can do this shot" is just totally wrong-headed. What if you do? What if you go out right now, this morning, and plop down your credit card? What then? You'll be right back where you started, with absolutely no plan, but you'll be sixteen hundred bucks poorer. That's not how I'd choose to spend my Saturday, but maybe that's just me.
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