Round trip with Motion... desperately needed???

Question

Round trip with Motion... desperately needed???

I'm used to FCP (not FCPX). Recently I started moving some of my work to FCPX and overall have been pretty happy with it... until I discovered that, apparently, round tripping to Motion is not supported...?!?!!

Here's what I need: I have a one-hour video segment. We've used multiple camera angles, added titling and other effects, corrected lighting, and done quite a bit of audio cleanup. It's ready to go, but now we want to add several effects from Motion.

In the past (using FCP and/or Premier, with a totally different workflow) I could export to Motion, do the f/x work that I wanted, and then round-trip back to FCP without having lost any information. For example, I'm doing a cut away on how we produced an action scene, adding muzzle flash and ground explosions to a scene. All of the post-shot work has been done. I want to load the scene into Motion, add some partial f/x work (e.g.: "this is how we did it"), and bring it back into FCPX.

The problem is, it appears the only way to do this is to export the entire movie as a .MOV (flattened, rendered media), add my f/x in Motion, and then load the movie back into FCPX. EVERYTHING will have been flattened!!! That is, all track, titling, and audio work will be gone, rendered into a flat movie -- which is NOT what we want!

Am I totally wrong? I hope? Am I missing something Really Really Obvious in FCPX, and life can go on? Or do I have to go back to FCP/Premier...?

Posted on Mar 11, 2012 1:08 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

andynick

Level 5

4,955 points

Mar 11, 2012 3:53 PM in response to Zacharias Beckman

I've only dabbled with Motion since moving to FCP X - but I think the idea is to 'Publish' (?) Motion effects, etc etc to FCP X - a sort of round-trip.

The little that I've done works extremely well, but I don't know what sort of thing you are looking for.

Ripple Training does some great tutorials on this stuff.

http://www.rippletraining.com/categories/final-cut-studio-courses/motion-trainin g/rigging-and-publishing-for-fcpx.html

Andy

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Answer 2

Mar 12, 2012 7:55 AM in response to andynick

Thanks Andy, will definitely take a look. Not sure if it's the answer I'm looking for but will find out soon enough.

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Answer 3

Mar 12, 2012 8:35 AM in response to Zacharias Beckman

This utility might be of interest to you http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/news/743-now-you-can-send-clips-from-final-cut-p ro-x-to-motion

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Answer 4

Mar 12, 2012 10:10 AM in response to innocentius

Thanks innocentius. Incidentally, the discussion on that page also answered my question: No, FCPX cannot do round tripping at this time, and yes, it seems like the professional community regard this as a vital failing in the current (10.0.3) version of FCPX. There also seems to be a good bit of consensus that Apple will have to add it back in... someday... :-x

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Answer 5

Mar 12, 2012 10:51 AM in response to Zacharias Beckman

It seems Zacharias that the third parties are simply taking over the development of FCPX, are Apple giving up ?

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Answer 6

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,010 points

Mar 12, 2012 11:03 AM in response to innocentius

Giving up? Four product releases in nine months. That's a pretty aggressive development schedule for a new product.

Motion is a separate development track and always has been. Roundtripping to Motion was not available in its first releases. Apple has taken a new approach with publishing and rigging, which has great benefits. It basically meant that the entire effects, transitions, generators, and titling architecture didn't have to be rebuilt in FCP and that the two applications can work together. There are a lot of things this allows. For instance, if you want to add effects from Motion to clips in FCP, roundtripping is quite unnecessary; simply publish the effect with the parameters you need and apply the effect inside FCP.

Roundtripping is really useful for a lot of things and will probably be implemented. In the interim third party soluations using XML hooks are available.

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Answer 7

Mar 12, 2012 3:39 PM in response to Tom Wolsky

Tom Wolsky wrote:

Giving up? Four product releases in nine months. That's a pretty aggressive development schedule for a new product.

I disagree with you Tom. Aggressive updates, you say, with so little advance to the better. I honestly think that Apple does not care about this software and something is telling me that the company will abandon video Application for good.

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Answer 8

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,010 points

Mar 12, 2012 4:25 PM in response to innocentius

with so little advance to the better.

Really? You could be right about Apple abandoning it. It would be a great loss. You'd be left with Premiere or Avid, basically two versions of the same application.

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