I’ve been on the Creative Cow email list for years now, and while The Creative Cow—Creative Communities of the World—deserves its popularity for providing support for the myriad video and multimedia development apps out there, it hasn’t always provided articles or tutorials that served my immediate needs. Today, though, I discovered their Final Cut Pro podcast and I’m bowled over at how the tutorials they’ve posted cover so many topics I’ve wanted help with: title animation in Motion, Photoshop-to-video, and more more more. I haven’t watched them all, so I can’t comment on their overall quality, but if they’re in the same league as their written tutorials then this is a valuable resource. Go for the Cow.
Matt McCullin of our University Relations department put together a nice graphic for our College of Education. With help from Ripple Training’s online tutorial for animating Photoshop layers in Motion, I created an interesting fly-through effect for the opening sequence for a series of video podcasts we’re producing. Just above is a tiny version of it. (I wanted the text of this entry to wrap around it as though it were an embedded image, but no go.)
While looking for information about DV Expo (will they offer one on the east coast next spring or summer? Don’t know yet), I discovered EventDV, “The Event Videographer’s Resource.” On the Table of Contents page for the current (July 2008) issue, right at the top, is this tutorial: Cut Lines: Using Apple Keynote as a Motion Graphics Tool.
In this installment of Cut Lines, we’ll look at a growing trend among Final Cut users: utilizing Keynote as a quick-and-easy motion graphics tool. Everything you can do with graphics in Keynote can also be done in LiveType or Motion or directly in Final Cut Pro, and those larger apps can do much more than Keynote. The value in Keynote is that what it can do is really cool, really fast, and really easy. I’ve found I can do some graphical elements in Keynote faster and easier than I can in any of the Final Cut Studio (FCS) apps. Even with its limited abilities in this area, it’s still a valued part of my video graphics arsenal.
This is a really good idea! An easy video editor, really, if for making how-to tutorials to post on the web, too – this gets me thinkin’. Thanks to Ben Balser and EventDV for the tutorial.
The bottom line? Video looks different on your computer monitor than it does on a television. They reproduce their images in very different ways – pixels vs. lines of resolution, etc. Some of the same issues apply with iMovie as well. This is a good introduction if you’re having issues like this, and can lead you to a better understanding of how digital video works.
I just watched this video tutorial about creating animated paint effects in Motion from Creative Cow, and the effect is really good. I like specific goal-oriented tutorials like this because they can show how to use parts of the interface without trying to show the whole thing. This is how I learn software, usually: work on a narrowly defined project as a starting point, and work upward and outward from there, playing with different settings and watching the effects, working toward a more conceptual understanding of the application. Check it out.
Ken Stone posts Steve Martin’s Final Cut Pro 6 – A First Look, which covers several new features from the point of view of “these new features make editing easier, and here’s how” rather than “I read the awesome Apple press release.” As always from Steve, useful explanations, detailed screenshots, and real-world examples, all written in a conversational style.
While I’ve heard it said that Final Cut Pro 6 does not have that much in terms of “new features” I would have to disagree with that assessment. I always base the value of an upgrade not so much on how many new “bells and whistles” have been added, but in the sheer weight of a given tool’s worth in terms of saving time and ultimately money. The mixed format timeline alone is worth the cost of the upgrade in this reviewer’s opinion. When looking at Final Cut Pro, it is now impossible to consider it apart from the suite of apps called Final Cut Studio. Apple has once again given us dollar for dollar, a most impressive set of tools unmatched by anything else in its price range.
Today we’re going to take a look at creating a billowing fabric effect in Apple’s Motion 2. Using a combination of filters, generators and even particles in Motion, it’s possible to create a pretty wide range of effects that add depth and movement to otherwise boring 2D objects. Case in point: a banner stretched across the crotch of the Arc de Triumph announcing that today is my birthday.
He’s got QuickTime movies to show the effect, too. Very nice.
When I set off to benchmark the MacBook Pro, the question I wanted answered was how close the MacBook Pro could come to matching the performance of a common G5 tower. That it matched or exceeded the performance of the G5 in the vast majority of tests was quite surprising to me. Even though the MacBook is rated slightly higher in GHz than the G5, it does use a mobile chip, which you wouldn’t expect to match the chip in a desktop system.
Oh boy. These Mac-on-Intel laptops really fly on everything, he says, except the HD and H.264 encoding, and this is just the first release of the Final Cut suite for Intel. Oh boy.
Blogging this live will be tough… it’s hands-on. We’re doing a basic project – a bouncing ball, to which we apply “behaviors” which allow all kinds of action or movement without key-framing. Very impressive. I’ve seen demos of this before, but this is my first hands-on with it. Won’t be the last, etc. etc.
Well, there you have it – 5 differents ways to change the speed of a video clips using Final Cut Studio, with a focus on using Motion. By trading off quality, cost, and render times you should be able to determine the best path for your projects.
A thorough discussion with very clear screenshots explaining several methods for this – the usual very good tutorials from Ken and his contributors. Mark Spencer also has a site dedicated to motion, AppleMotion.net. Nice.
