Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with finalcutexpress

HD animated maps for video?

nitsuj — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:54:58 -0800

What's the easiest way to create HD-quality (1080x) animated maps for use with video? iMovie '09 has the nifty little map feature, but I use Final Cut Express and don't want to plunk down the extra cash for another editor. Is there a similar -- perhaps a bit more professional and detailed -- solution for creating animated maps for importing into Final Cut Express?

Ideally this would be a standalone program that creates the maps and outputs them into a format that is easily ingested by Final Cut Express.

(Other details: Final Cut Express 4, OSX.5.6, 2.4GHZ MBP + 4gb RAM)

Give me my old Final Cut Express!

pzarquon — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:13:23 -0800

How do I get Final Cut Express to export straightforward 1280x720 HD videos from my Sanyo Xacti HD700... like it used to? I have a Sanyo Xacti HD700. It gives me 1280x720 MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 files, which my Mac just loves. I used to be able to quickly edit the clips together in Final Cut Express, export using complementary QuickTime settings (specifically, those recommended by Vimeo for HD playback), and get beautiful MP4 files, relatively quickly.

Then, one day, a friend needed me to edit a quick video using a DV camcorder. It was confusing as heck getting the footage into FCE, and not particularly elegant getting it out. But, the project was done overnight, I washed my hands of it, and wanted to get back to making beautiful MP4 files again, relatively quickly.

Except I can't! Now, for one, encoding takes hours. Hours! My source videos and export videos are very similar, yet I sit and watch as the estimate for completion actually goes up for an hour before slowly coming back down.

And frankly, that would be fine, except now my exported videos are the wrong size. They include letterboxes, and the video itself is squished, stretched. So I wait four times as long for a ghastly video. The best I could do is use the Quicktime export settings to "crop off" the letterboxing, but there's still some black bars and it's just not the same.

Here's how my videos used to look. Here's how an exported video looks now. What happened? Out of the box, everything worked perfectly. Now, tainted with actual tape, Final Cut Express seems like it's running my videos through six extra wringers and giving me clips worse than I'd get just cut-and-paste editing the Xacti files in QuickTime Pro!

I Googled my brains out, and all I've learned is, if I had Final Cut Pro, "Project Settings" would have all the switches I need. Well, I don't have FCP, just FCE.

Somewhere, something was set that I want to unset. Can anyone help? Do I have to delete every trace of FCE and just reinstall?

Final Cut Pro/Express Compatibility?

brundlefly — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 00:28:31 -0800

How compatible are Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express? A friend of mine has asked me to clean up some sound on a project edited in Final Cut Express, but I'm using FCP5. Will I be able to read her project file, and, when I'm done, will she still be able to read it in Express?

vector graphics perspective effect in Final Cut Express

planetkyoto — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 05:06:39 -0800

Mac Final Cut Express and vector graphics, maybe Flash: How to make a vector graphics motion sequence to be incorporated into a Final Cut Express video. I am making a kind of travel guide video (final destination DVD and web) and want to animate a vector graphics city map that I am making (in Fireworks). I want to have the map skew from flat overhead view to a foreshortened perspective as shown here. I know I can make a sequence in Flash and import it to FCE. This kind of skew is simple to do in Fireworks or Photoshop, but in Flash (me not so good) when I choose "skew" it just tilts the graphic sideways.

Is there a way to do this in Flash that I am missing, or is there a free or cheap OS X program I can use to edit a sequence like this. Bonus if I can then zoom in to show a single city block or intersection.

OS X tools for overlaying a copyright notice over a film

mrbill — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:07:34 -0800

I'm involved with a "currently in post-production" motion picture. I've got a MPEG of the film (although I can convert to any needed format), and need to overlay a text copyright notice over the entire film so that its visible at the top or bottom of the screen. Can anyone suggest tools for doing this under OS X? Free/shareware/donationware tools would be preferred, as we don't have the budget for Apple's pro-level video software. I've been doing a lot of work with iMovie and ffmpegX. :)