Maya to Final Cut Pro work flow

I recently started learning Maya and wanted to know:

1. What is the proper work flow from Maya to Final Cut Pro, and
2. What are the settings/process in exporting from Maya and importing into FCP 6.0.5?

If I'm thinking of green screening the Maya creatures/figures I created and importing background clips from After Effects and combining the two in FCP. Thoughts anyone?

Thank you.

I sincerely mean no offense, but you need to learn more about Maya. A lot more.

There is no workflow from Maya to Final Cut, per se. Final Cut's an editor, Maya's a 3D modeling and rendering system. You render out passes from Maya as image sequences, then take them into a compositing environment to assemble them into shots. Those shots come out of your compositor as image sequences again, usually, or you could take them out as Quicktime movies for assembly in Final Cut. I guess in theory you could render out fully composed scenes from Maya, convert them to Quicktimes, then drop them straight into your Final Cut timeline, but that's a very impractical way to work. The time you'd waste on re-rendering alone is mind-boggling.

If you're thinking in terms of pulling a chromakey off rendered Maya shots, then you haven't really gotten what it is that Maya does yet. I'm no Maya expert, just a fairly educated amateur, but I wouldn't even know how to take a Maya scene and put it on top of a green backdrop. Everything comes out of Maya as RGBA, historically usually as 16-bit TIFF but typically 16-bit half-float or 32-bit float OpenEXR these days. It's becoming increasingly common to render all your passes into a single OpenEXR sequence, if your compositing platform of choice has support for multipass OpenEXR. Point being, you would never need to pull a key on a Maya shot, because the shot has a matte built right into it.

I hope you take this advice in the spirit in which it's intended: It sounds like you're skipping ahead. You're talking about workflow, when it sounds like you haven't yet learned the basic concepts involved in 3D modeling, rendering and compositing.

If you have After Effects, and you're talking about doing an FX composite shot, then you should just stay in After Effects. It has a much better keyer, and it's made to do composites.

When then entire scene is put together, then export is as a QT movie and edit it into your FCP timeline.

Andy

Definitely- if you have AFX no need or advantage to comping in FCP. It's capable but without adding plugins AFX blows it away.

Noah

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Thanks for your thoughts guys, no offense taken. And yes, I am a newbie. Trying to teach myself, it's a HUGE learning curve. Anyone recommend any good links?