Cut Lines: Roundtripping in Final Cut Studio 3

EventDV by Ben Balser

This month I’ll describe the round-trip procedures for moving active project files among the various apps in Final Cut Studio 2009. I’ll start in Final Cut Pro 7 and use the “Send To” command to go out to Soundtrack Pro 3 (STP), Motion 4, and Color 1.5. Then, I’ll explain the return trip to Final Cut Pro (FCP). It’s a pretty tight system. I’ll begin with an FCP project I’m editing. I’ve got my rough cut done and my basic sound clips in place. Let’s say we need to add motion graphics and text— we’ll go to Motion for that. Next, we’ll want to create a stylized look for our video, so we’ll visit Color. And finally, we’ll need to clean up sound and add some audio effects, which will take us to STP.

Moving Into Motion
There are two ways to trip to Motion. The first method we’ll look at is sending a full Sequence. My Sequence in FCP is ready for some motion graphics work, but I need to be aware of some things first. Not everything in FCP translates to all the other apps. Specifically with Motion, things that will not follow your Sequence from FCP are Filters (except for SmoothCam, which will travel to Motion), Transitions, and Generators. Freeze frames that are created from video clips in FCP by pressing Shift+N come into Motion as video clips with the Hold Frame behavior rather than as still photo files. Don’t worry; almost all of the time, these are things you’ll be doing in Motion rather than FCP anyway, which means there would be no reason to redo the same adjustment in Motion. read more...