Final Cut Suite for a photographer?

[Mike Teezie]

I am a photographer. One of my most popular items with clients is the DVD slideshow. Currently, I use iDVD with a template, and just drag and drop. It's ridiculously easy, but very template-y.

What I'm wanting, is simply more. I want cooler menus for the DVD. Maybe even to splice up the slideshows themselves a bit, which currently are simply photos against a black background fading in and out.

One of my colleagues is a high end videographer, and I have access any time I want to one of his Mac Pros with the Final Cut 2 Suite. If I'm able to make something I like, I have no problem purchasing the suite for my own Mac Pro. I'm completely new to the suite, but I'm a fast learner, and have been a "Photoshop pro" for years. A question I have, is how would the workflow go? Build menu graphics in Motion, import to DVD Studio Pro, import images to FCP, all mash it all up?

Are there resources out there? Perhaps Motion plugins or DVD Studio Pro templates that are available for purchase? Maybe that would be a good starting point to get my feet wet. also, I'd love to see any examples of people's work that might come to mind.

As always, thanks in advance. I'm off for some heavy Googling.....

 

[AviationFan]

Mike,

if your source material always consists of still images exclusively, then I would say Motion is the most important tool out of the suite for you. You can build your own templates in Motion and reuse them quickly - even drag them directly to a Final Cut timeline, which to me has been one of the most important new features when FCS2 was released. In your case, though, I am not sure that you would even use Final Cut Pro - with still images, I'd probably stay in Motion, and use Compressor for a high-quality MPEG-2 encoding for the DVD. Then, of course, use DVD Studio to author the DVD.

One fairly easy and inexpensive thing you could do to get a better idea of what all the different tools do is this: get a subscription from lynda.com just for one month ($25), and go through some of their video tutorials. Don't watch them all, at least not right away - that would take forever - but rather look at the topics that you feel have a lot to do with your intended use. From observing how the features are used on these videos, I bet you can make a much better decision as to whether it's a good investment for you or not.

- Martin

 

[Mike Teezie]

Thanks for the reply.

I'm definitely check out the site!