working with stills and send to motion

working with prores 2048x1536 24fps sequences and animating lots of stills.
the rendering is killing me. could anyone point me to a better workflow?

i'm trying to stay in fcp. i'm doing so as, when i 'send to' motion, the returned
clip is a motion project which makes tracing the original elements harder. most
of what i'm doing is simple moves so staying in fcp seems to work fine anyway.

two questions:

1. is there a file format for stills that will save me from having to render
everything all the time? it's making things take a lot longer than it would seem
it should. currently, i'm working with jpg's.

2. if i were to do the work via 'send to' motion, can i trace the elements of the
returned motion clip from within fcp? or, can this only be done from motion?

thanks,
BabaG

Don't use the send to motion function because as you can see rendering takes forever. It is much easier to export a still frame as jpeg or what ever format you want use. Then bring that into motion to do your movements and tricks. Render that out as QT then bring that into FCP.

Depending on if you are using Motion 3 or 4, Motion 3 uses Animation Codec as its default and Motion 4 uses ProRes 4444 the both support an alpha channel if needed.

A couple more steps involved but no rendering issues and playback is instant. Never use the native Motion document in your FCP timeline. Its not a perfected enough technology to be convenient as a dynamic way of working.

Also as I have found out if you have to many Motion documents in FCP and go to render out your finished timeline it can take upto hours longer and sometimes just crash and can't even finish rendering. Because FCP not only has to render your normal timeline when it comes across the Motion files now it has to find all the pieces that are involved in that project as well and render those to, which to me takes longer than just rendering everything in Motion to a QT then importing into FCP. Also things don't always come out correct if alpha channels are involved.

Motion in Fcp Timeline is "perfect enough" for light projects. The round triping is great

It's true that when it comes to heavy projects, involving long renders, specially in your case, with large stills ... (pan & scan, some Motion blur I guess, (the render killer)... that's where the problems begin.

And if you modify something else in Fcp (an other layer) even unintentionally ... you'll have to render again ! so a rendered QT out of Motion is wiser in your case.

but you can keep the Motion project in the Timeline, (desactivated) on a track below

you have to keep in mind that in case of rendering a Motion project in Fcp it's the graphic card at work, not the CPU as it would for regilar a Fcp render. kinda "mix situation"