OT: Small rant about FCP

smhontz wrote on 11/8/2005, 8:01 PM

I just don't get why everybody thinks FCP is so great. Every time I have to help my friend do something in it, we spend hours trying to figure out why it doesn't work.

For example: she had an animated .gif file with a transparent background. Put it in FCP, the background ISN'T transparent. Fool around with changing the alpha settings. No dice. Try a non-animated GIF. No good. Try a PNG. Transparency works there. Look in help. No help. Google around. No help. Post to the CreativeCow FCP forum. Advice: GIF doesn't support transparency. Well, yes, it does.

Me: Drop same animated GIF into Vegas. Background is transparent. Drop a non-animated GIF in. Background transparent. PNG, MOV, WMV, whatever you want, drop it in, IT JUST WORKS. (By the way, did FCP ever get it so you could use MP3s direct in the timeline???) Life is good.

Comments

Laurence wrote on 11/9/2005, 7:23 PM

I agree! I have all my music stored as mp3s on a hard drive. With Vegas I just drop whatever I need on the timeline. With FCP I had to convert to AIFF then change the sample rate to 48k! In Vegas when I want to make a DVD I just render to Mpeg 2 and AC3, then author. In FCP I always had to make a full bandwidth MOV render before authoring. Vegas is just so much better, yet you'd never know that from talking to the FCP crowd!

Jessariah67 wrote on 11/9/2005, 8:37 PM

I continually run into the FCP people - at least now they don't raise a brow when I say "Vegas"

What can you say - the Mac crowd is certainly an interesting breed.