Workflow for bumpers and opening titles

Hello to all,

One of the shows I edit showcases short films. For the opening titles and bumpers I assemble clips from each film using FCP and then import into After Effects. I want to see if there is a more efficient way to create my opening titles and bumpers.

Here is a link to a sample of the animation:
[www.badamitv.com]

This is just a sample. Usually for each film, the title of the film pops up, then 3 clips from the film. The clips show in the center window of the film strip. This is the only window where the footage is replaced.

Once I've assembled the clips from the individual films in Final Cut Pro I export a Quicktime file and then import into After Effects. I use After Effects to merge the Quicktime files and opening titles together. The opening titles were created in Lightwave. There is a separate alpha channel file for the center window. I thought once I did the initial keyframing I would be able to drop the new movies for each episode into my After Effects timeline without having to keyframe again. However I find myself keyframing every time I put in new footage. Someone's head is out of the frame, or someone is too far to the left, or a face is not large enough, etc.,...

Is it possible to make it where I can just drop the footage in? Would using Motion be easier than After Effects? Other thoughts?

As always, thanks in advanced.

Peace,
Lisha
FCP 5.0.4
2.5 ghz dual G5
AE 5.5
Motion 2

Motion 3 is pretty much made for what you want to do. Has a killer motion tracking behavior that eliminates keyframing. I'm not a graphics person and the fact that your elements are coming for all over the place might be a problem. Thing is, you can do all of this in Motion 3

You can download the manual and look through it and see if it suits your needs.

[www.apple.com]

Michael Horton
-------------------

If you were to construct a template in Motion3, you can actually make 'drop zones' where once in FCP you can just drop the footage in:-

[www.apple.com]

Peter

[idustrialrevolution.com]

Since it looks to me from here that there isn't any distortion on the alpha channel area, just a zoom in and out, there's no reason you couldn't put this together inside FCP. Just use the alpha channel and insert the vision behind it with a keyframe at the head, middle and tail for the zoom in and out. Since it's a hole that has covered edges, your movie frames don't even have to be accurately placed.

I would tentatively say that you could also use a skeleton version with all the moves built in, where you just replaced the vision, but I was going to write a tutorial on this recently and found it didn't actually work in 5.1 anymore. Maybe it will be back in 6.0.

It's just the centre box that changes each week, right?

Here's an old (but still useful) Alpha travel matte tutorial from Ken Stone.

Oops. here's the link. Forgot it in the other post.

[www.kenstone.net]

Hi Lisha,

It's actually very easy to automate this in AE.
? Import your trailer into AE
? Create a new comp with it.
? Set the backcolor to orange or something like this
? Create a new comp with the same aspect as a frame of the undistorted filmstrip
? Create a solid there which has the size of the comp
? Make it's color inverse to the background color
? Drag this comp to your main comp
? Temporarily hide your source comp (the one you dragged)
? Now go to a point somewhere in the middle and find out where your animation does have a keyframe - where it the filmstrip distortion starts.
? Apply a 'corner pin' to the source comp
? Set the transparency of the source comp to 60 (you may add a 'difference' blending mode)
? Set a keyframe to for each corner and adjust them
? Step thru by 4s and adjust until the 'main' distortion ends and set keyframes there.
? Check the animation and add keyframes if needed (though I doubt)
? Copy the keyframes
? Go to the time where the distortion starts to reverse
? Paste the keyframes and reverse them as well
? Copy all keyframes
? Go thru all the other 'distort animations' and paste
? For the start of the trailer go to the point where the distort ends, paste the keyframes and drag them to match the end keyframe.
? Go to a start keyframe in the middle of the timeline
? Open the source comp again in a new window
(options:
? Apply a 'bezier distort' to the solid
? Keyframe the edges
? Keyframe Scale
? Go to the 'distortion max' keyframe in the main comp
? Match visually edges, and scale vertical
? Copy all keyframes and go to the time the distortion starts reverse
? Paste keyframes and reverse
? Repeat like as in the main comp
)
? Precomp the solid in the source comp and leave all attributes there
(this will be our footage comp)

? Select the main comp and change layer order to make the rendered animation top
? Scale the 'corner pinned' layer slightly so it always is a little bigger than your matte
? Reset the transparency to 100
? Add your 3d title
(? you may add a 'highlight' to the main comp and animate (procedure as above))

? Import your footage and arrange it in the footage comp

With new trailers just replace the source footage or replace/rearrange the stuff in the footage comp.

The above is finally faster done than written here. And yes you could use AE's motion trackers, but in this case it's easier to do it by hand, since you can use the guides to keep the corners in perfect position.

You can do it in a similar way in FCP, but there aren't these features for copy paste keyframes.
I'm not so familiar with Motion but as far as I know these features like in AE aren't available there as well.

Though the above sounds complicated - it is not. It took me roughly 15 minutes to do the (quick'n dirty) setup with your example movie.


Hope this helps
Andreas

Sweeeeeeeeeeet! Thanks Andreas and everyone!

Peace,
Lisha

In AE..
hold down the option key and drag your new footage onto the old....

Thanks Chris for adding this. I assumed everybody does know, sorry.
So here is another one: The "select-footage in project bin" & cmd-H will replace the footage in any related comp.

Andreas

I knew the "option key and drag", but i didn't know the "select-footage in project bin"! Keep em comin'! LOL!

Lisha