Erratic Exports

Working with FCP 6.0.4 and Motion 3.0.2 - I carefully select a range of clips in the FCP timelime, send them to motion and... WTF?

A project opens in motion and there's nothing there. Or all the clips have turned into stills, sometimes all the same still. The motion timeline shows material of the same duration - but there's no, well, MOTION. It just lays there. And this is before any effects have been added.

This doesn't happen every time - but enough times a day to make me crazy when facing a deadline.

Any thoughts?

Could it be because I have already applied basic motion settings in FCP before exporting? Could this create conflicts?

Any changes you make in FCP to the Motion tab (scale, rotation, crop, drop shadow, retiming, etc. including keyframing) are retained when you send those clips to Motion.

What doesn't make the trip are transitions, generators, and filters.

What kind of footage are you working with? It should work.

footage is computer screen capture - 1344x840 animation codec 25fps

FCP sequence is 1280x720 ProRes 25fps

I let the "send to" command create settings in motion - I don't usually touch those

(excellent Rippletraining Vids, BTW)

That's your problem - footage without timecode.

Try re-exporting your screencapture through quicktime as animation, keyframe every frame (the file will be huge, but Motion should be able to now work with it)

huh...

The guys in the FCP forum recommended I edit the animation footage in a prores sequence to avoid some frame display inaccuracies I was experiencing.

Just so I'm clear -- is it the fact that I've changed sequence codecs that makes the timecode go missing?

Ot the fact that I captured in Animation to begin with?

Thanks

It's a capture issue - any codec. You need to re-export keyframing every frame. You can use ProRes but you might get some frame smearing.