Exporting video with alpha channel in Final Cut Pro 7 using Yosemite

You went from 10.7 to 10.10 in one jump? Ah, the lovely fallout from upgrades. Factor in that FCP 7 hasn't had any official support since 10.6.8 and things do break.

You can do three things.

1. Create a new USER account. Switch to that account and try to run the tasks in FCP. If they work, you likely have a User Preferences problem with leads us to item #2.

2. Download and run Digital Rebelion's Preference Manager to Trash your FCP prefs. Understand this will delete all custom settings and drive mappings and return your FCP setup to the default state (as it was when first installed). You will need to go into the system to reset any critical ones before use.

3. If Prefs manager doesn't work, you can try deleting the whole FCS 2009 suite and reinstalling. If you go this route, use Digital Rebellion's FCP Remover to do the delete. It gets rid of all the hidden system files as well. Once the delete is complete, reinstall the programs from the original discs and update as required. If you don't have a DVD drive on the computer, find one that does and create disc images to be saved on a portable hard drive. Mount that drive on the target computer, open the images on the desktop and the install will go much faster.

Good luck.

x

note: I have no financial interest in Digital Rebellion. I have used these products for years and they work as advertised. Top shelf stuff.

Hi JB:

I switched to using Apple ProRes 4444 with an alpha instead of Animation with an alpha with good results.

With every new release of Mac OS from 10.7 up, Apple has been depreciating QuickTime. As such, a lot of what "worked perfectly in OS 10.7.4" is gone or in the process of going away. Specific to what you're dealing with, AV Foundation supports ProRes under 10.010 while support for Animation (along all of the 32-bit QT codecs) has been dropped.

If you'd like to read more about what's happened under the hood (and directly affecting/disrupting your workflow): AV Foundation - Apple

If for some reason that link doesn't work, do a web search for "moving to av kit and av foundation pdf" and look for the PDF results with the "606.pdf" in it. It's a pretty quick read, but go directly to page 29 for "Not Supported by AV Foundation". Animation is second on a list of 70 items.

-Warren