Todd Kopriva posts a handy guide on how to avoid gamma shifts in an After Effects/Final Cut workflow using ProRes 4444. Gamma shifts have been the bane of my existence over the years and Todd gives a nice step-by-step and points to some good supporting resources.
Apple has updated their Final Cut Apple Event sample code to reflect the new Apple Events added to Final Cut Pro 7.0.
Quite a few look really interesting and I’m hoping to dig in as soon as I get my upgrade in place.
Michael Cinquin has developed some handy workflow tools for FCP/Pro Apps. Lots of glue code for Red, FCP,Color, etc. Most of the tools seem to be web apps which makes it handy for remote locations. I’ve been wondering lately if a lot of workflow media tools and processes shouldn’t be moving to a web service architecture? Having been doing mostly web development for a while I can vouch for how handy it is to have an API to solve a problem.
This one has taken a while, but it looks like Apple has finally documented the Motion XML format. It’s been fairly easy to reverse-engineer, but now if you’ve got questions or gotchas you know where to look to find out what the deal should be.
The section on Modifying Text is especially useful for day to day hacking.
Just a quick heads up that I’ve decided to focus my efforts on FCPToAE and related tools to the CS3 Suite only. With a strong subset of ECMA-357 (E4X) (pdf link) parsing in Extendscript 2, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep inventing workarounds to FCP-XML parsing. I do plan on incorporating bug fixes to the scripting side of the equation to the AE 7 app, so it’ll stay feature compliant to the current state, but I won’t be updating new features.
This will definitely make things a lot easier to develop tools, and it opens up a whole new slew of possibilites for Web 2.0 mashup tools and explorations when combined with After Effects Socket or new HttpConnection support. kuler explorer anyone? If you’re a scripter, you owe it to yourself to check out the ExtendScript Toolkit (ESTK) 2.0 there are a lot of features that sort of “hide” in Extendscript that aren’t obvious in the After Effects CS3 scripting guide(pdf link).
I’ve never spent much time with Apple’s Automator technology. Which is a little strange, considering how interested I am in automation and workflow technologies. I think some of it is a sense that it seems inaccessible, it doesn’t seem clear how to make things generalizable enough to be useful, and at least part of it is my aversion to Applescript as a scripting language That said, it’s clear that there is a lot of power available with Automator and I’ve started to dip my toe in the water and seeing If I can learn a few things and maybe create something useful.
This is the first fruit of my experimentation. I often need to make a tape log of a sequence in Final Cut Pro, and a quick way to get the sequence details into a text file could be useful. The most approachable way to address the problem seems to be with markers. You can store all of the values I need for a tape log in a marker – item number, name, description, length and the starting timecode. So, that’s how we’ll approach it.
Apple posted some interesting sample code called TimelineToTC that takes a Sequence XML file and returns a basic edl file of the selected attributes. Not very full featured, as is typical of Apple sample code, but is a good starting place for someone looking to do conversion work or a more full featured edl. Worth a look especially for a nicely packaged function/method called FormatTimecode which takes a frame count and returns a formatted time code string accounting for drop and non-drop frame sequences. handy.
One of the most popular pieces of content here is Moving Between Final Cut Pro and After Effects: The Scripting Option. I think the idea of using scripting to move between Final Cut Pro and After Effects resonated with people working in a production environment.
Unfortunately, the post was more of a tech demo of the kinds of things that were possible with After Effects scripting and less of a practical demonstration for non-technical users. I still urge non-technical folks to dip their toes into the scripting waters, it can be really rewarding, but the challenges presented in “rolling your own” in this situation may be a bit much. So, I decided to write a small application to provide a way for readers who don’t want to deal with the scripting hassle to use some of the techniques I described in the article.
FCPToAE (working title) is an application for OSX 10.4 and above designed to create a .jsx file from a Final Cut XML file for import into After Effects without the hassle of scripting the different parts yourself. Read the rest of this entry »
Looks like Apple’s chocolate is in Adobe’s peanut butter, or is it the other way around? Import Motion Files Into Adobe After Effects is an Apple tutorial on how to bring Motion files into After Effects.
The cool thing about Motion files is that the project format is a well formed XML file that Quicktime understands how to render. That’s how you get cool products like Digital Heaven’s Automotion. If you’ve got more of a DIY bent, that also opens up a lot of possibilities for creating cool projects via XML transforms and scripting. More to come as I explore some of the possibilities.
Update 03.08.2007
While I was researching, it looks likes the folks at motionsmarts have already been hard at work with cool scripts for Motion. After Effects Position to Motion Position script looks particularly useful for the kind of stuff I do.
Apple is hosting an online seminar on creating rich media podcasts with Final Cut Pro.
It’s a nicely paced tutorial with a lot of useful information marred only slightly by too many required fields in the registration. Interface gripe – Is anybody else tired of web forms with every country in the world included in alphabetical order and the most common countries like I don’t know, the US and the UK requiring days of scrolling. I’m sure all those users in Antarctica are happy to not scroll.
Update 03.02.2007
Martin Baker writes a nice scrolling tip to address the above
Avoid scrolling tip:
Click the menu once and release mouse. Press a letter on the keyboard and the list will scroll to it.
It’s a beginner level tutorial, but you’re likely to pick up at least a few tips. I’ve gotten to where I play this kind of stuff in the background while I work as an alternative to music. Yeah, I’m a geek.