Just got FCE – three questions

[Sijmen]

About a week ago I went ahead and bought Final Cut Express. It's awesome, I'm especially happy with keyframing/motion. Also got a book, but I still three two questions:

1. Is it possible to set a custom resolution, or even better, to have it work resolution independent until I export? I'm under the impression that if I choose PAL and then export to a different format movies get rescaled twice: once to PAL and once to the destination format. The reason I'm asking is because I'm doing mainly computer generated graphics (by another app) meant for different resolutions.

2. I've exported a movie but it's noticeably brighter / has less contrast than the original content which I recorded with Snapz Pro X with the H264 codec. I didn't find anything related in the export (to 720p) options though.

3. Does FCE have a movie track equivalent of the 'merge layers' features of graphics apps? Even better would be if I could embed a sequence like any other movie track into another sequence. This would be very useful when I want to treat a composition of clips as one new clip which I can keyframe as a whole.

 

[AviationFan]

1. Is it possible to set a custom resolution, or even better, to have it work resolution independent until I export? I'm under the impression that if I choose PAL and then export to a different format movies get rescaled twice: once to PAL and once to the destination format. The reason I'm asking is because I'm doing mainly computer generated graphics (by another app) meant for different resolutions.

FCP6 can do what you are looking for; I doubt FCE has the same feature, though (sorry, I only have FCP myself, so I cannot verify for sure). In FCP6, the clips you put on a timeline (i.e. sequence) can be different than the sequence itself, and upon export it renders the output. Changing the target resolution just means changing the sequence settings, without a second (and undesireable) conversion. In FCE, maybe a workaround is to use a sequence with very high quality settings, so that the second conversion doesn't do much damage, whatever the final output format is.

3. Does FCE have a movie track equivalent of the 'merge layers' features of graphics apps? Even better would be if I could embed a sequence like any other movie track into another sequence. This would be very useful when I want to treat a composition of clips as one new clip which I can keyframe as a whole.

In FCP, you can drag a sequence from the broswer into another timeline. Subsequent edits to the original sequence are then propagated into the timeline that references it. I'd be surprised if this did not work in FCE.

- Martin

 

[Sijmen]

I'm now using 720p for my stuff. My iMac has some trouble handling it though.

It was indeed possible to drag an entire sequence. Stupid I didn't think of it before, it works great!