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Losing Transparency after Render in Final Cut Pro X

I purchased a pre-made video with transparency and after importing to Final Cut Pro X and placing it on a project, everything is fine until it renders. Then the transparency layer seems to disappear. I've tried everything I could think of to fix it including make sure the alpha handling is set to straight. It's still not working. I would really appreciate any advice or tips on this. I was also wondering if I bought Motion and edited and re-exported the purchased video in the program would fix it. Thanks so much for any help!

MacBook Pro with Retina display

Posted on Jul 31, 2015 11:42 PM

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8 replies

Aug 1, 2015 1:55 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Tom Wolsky wrote:


CAn you give details of the media specs you're dealing with? Are you layering this video on top of another and it's losing it's transparency there? What exactly are you doing?


THe defaulr render codec in FCP is ProRes422, which carries no transparency.


Tom, you are correct, as always, but this last statement may mislead the OP.

If a clip has an alpha channel, as in this case, FCP X is smart enough to keep it and renders it correctly automatically, the user does not have to somehow tell the software to render as ProRes4444 or anything.

Aug 1, 2015 2:14 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

That's not the behavior I see. If I have the background set to checkerboard and have a clip reduced in size in the timeline, I see the checkerboard background. If I render the clip, the background is black. Saying I'm rendering a clip is a little misleading, as the application doesn't render the clip per se, but a designated section of the timeline.

Aug 1, 2015 2:28 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

I just went and retried this.

When placing a clip with transparency above another clip, everything rendered correctly.

I had not tried just placing it on the timeline with nothing below it, and sure enough, just as you said, it renders the transparent parts as black, indicating that it is rendering to ProRes 422.


I stand corrected.


Nevertheless, it still exported a master file with the correct alpha channel when I chose ProRes 4444 as the output codec.

Learning a new thing every day :-)

Aug 6, 2015 11:16 AM in response to Doopyloops

Thank you both so much for your response! I had to actually set this aside I was getting so frustrated. Luis, your suggestion to modify the settings was definitely helpful and I think it may work on the projects themselves but I'm finding its the original clip that has the issue. Before I import it's definitely showing the checkerboard background but as soon as it gets in my clip list, it's showing black. I really apologize because I'm new to a lot of this but since it happened after it rendered, I assumed that was the issue. The clip I'm using definitely has the alpha channel it's just not being recognized. It's an image of a superhero that I'm layering on top of the atmosphere text element. I also have a couple other layers on top of that. Basically it's the atmosphere text, the superhero with transparency, another text element and music.


This is a screen shot of the inspector for the superhero clip itself if that helps at all. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with me I feel like I'm swimming the deep end here.


User uploaded file

Losing Transparency after Render in Final Cut Pro X

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