Recently in Motion Category
If you've watched the weatherman on your local evening news, you know what a green-screen or blue-screen does. The chroma keying process is the most popular way to extract talent or props from a moving image and composite them into another image -- like an animated weather map, or a virtual set. Chroma keying allows your software to cleanly and automatically separate subjects from the background, while retaining their full range of detail.Final Cut ships with a simple but powerful set of tools for pulling keys from green screen footage. The keying tools in Final Cut Pro work based on the same engine as the tools in Motion, so you're free to work in whichever environment you're more comfortable with.
In today's article, a quick two-part guide to shooting reasonably good green screen footage and pulling the key in post.
Continue reading Green Screen Keying in Final Cut Pro.
Apple just released the new iMac's and they are incredible. For the first time you can get into a Quad core Final Cut system for under $3000. That's right the iMac line now has a quad core machine. If that's not enough the top end iMac now has a 27 inch screen with 2560 by 1440 resolution, and a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card.
At GeniusDV we use iMac's in our classroom for our Final Cut Studio training. Aside from some limitations to what you can hook up to an iMac in terms of peripherals, the iMac's make for great Final Cut systems. I have personally edited numerous jobs on an iMac, and find them to be quite satisfactory.
I always tell students that unless you need to have MacPro for whatever reason, consider getting both a MacBook Pro, and an iMac. I find that you can get so much accomplished having two systems. Personally I can't imagine not having a MacBook Pro, because I travel so much, and do plenty of editing at 30,000 feet. With this new iMac I can now have a powerful desktop system as the primary Final Cut Studio editing system, and the MacBook Pro system too, for thousands less than a high end MacPro system.
For some reason, we seem to get a lot of people coming to the site looking to draw a heart beat. I haven't the foggiest idea why, but I'm glad – it's one of those examples where Motion can make your life a lot easier.
This is what we're setting out to make today; you can dress it up however you'd like, and you can even use a shape that looks more like a "real" heartbeat than the one I drew. We'll do a couple of approaches -- one is quick, the other is better-looking.
This is what we're setting out to make today; you can dress it up however you'd like, and you can even use a shape that looks more like a "real" heartbeat than the one I drew. We'll do a couple of approaches -- one is quick, the other is better-looking.
Continue reading Animating a Heart Beat in Motion.
As you may have noticed, Apple has retired LiveType as of Final Cut Studio 3. Fortunately for you LiveType folks, though, you can get to almost all of LiveType's functionality in Motion (plus a lot more).Background
Our students really seem to like LiveType's LiveFonts -- sets of animated glyphs with which you could type as if they were a regular font. In my grouchy opinion, the stock LiveFonts quickly grew stale as they began to appear all over the place, but even I have to acknowledge that there are some really nice third-party LiveFonts available, and many of my students have chosen to invest in those.
Motion can indeed use all of your LiveFonts, although it might not be immediately obvious. If you're new from LiveType, you should first realize that the Inspector in Motion works very similarly to the Inspector in LiveType -- and all of the LiveFonts functionality is controlled there. Motion's Library also contains thumbnail previews of all of the LiveFonts you have installed.
Read on for the Step by Step ...
Continue reading LiveFonts in Apple Motion.
One of our newest 2 day training classes, Google Sketchup, will be offered at our Orlando training facility November 5th & 6th, 2009. We are offering a special price for the November class!Google's Sketchup is an amazing 3D modeling program that has users from all walks of life from professionals to first timers. Whether you're an architect, civil engineer, or filmmaker, you will be astounded at what Sketchup can do for you. And the best part? It's one of the easiest programs out there to learn and use. With Sketchup, you can build everything from basic 3D models to entire scenes with a virtual walk-through, and it allows you to add your 3D elements into your video projects.
Other features of Sketchup is the ability to facilitate the placement of models in Google Earth, which is a great tool for video producers when trying to figure out where your shadows lie at a specific time of day during a video shoot. Another great feature is the ability to use the 3D Warehouse, which lets users search for models that are created by other users and lets users contribute their own models to the warehouse.There's no limit to what you can create with Google's Sketchup. There is a limit however to our class size, so call today to reserve your spot!
