Pro video blog…Produced by Philip Johnston DoP/Editor

 

I had installed Final Cut Express onto my iMac in order to give my son a computer to edit his blog videos. It was a pain in the ass every-time he needed a new graphic as I did them all on Motion-4 in the edit suite next door, then came the breakthrough, Motion 5, downloadable from the APP store.

I was not to sure if Motion 5 was compatible with FCP- Xpress but if you don’t try so I paid a further £29 to Apple and installed Motion 5 on the 27″ iMac, fortunately it’s one of the newer breed iMac’s with an HD graphics board as Motion 5 needs Open CL to work properly.

As you can see I used Motion 5 to tart up Scotts newest blog video about his charity football match but the one thing that had scuppered me was the ability to extend the duration of the timeline, this was easy in version 4 but some clown in Apple has decided to bury this very important feature in a menu.

First thing you do is click on the project at the very top of your layers window as shown, then click on the Property tab under the Inspector tab and you will now see the “Duration” and can make the timeline any length you want.

 

Once again the plonkers at Apple have taken it upon themselves to keep all the Motion windows locked after allowing us the freedom in version 4 to position the windows between two screens, if you so desire.

Quite frankly I do not see much difference between version 4 and 5 but then again I am not yet using FCP-10 which has a few effects shared with Motion 5 but the fact you can now download it for £29 and use it with FC-Xpress is worth every penny in my opinion.

Here is the video we produced for my sons football blog using the Sony NX70 at 1080 50p (Mistake), this had to be ingested into FCP-7 using my AJA box and down-converting to 720 50p.

author

Having been working in the video business since 1988 I have amassed a great amount of knowledge of both the kit and production values over the last 30 years.

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