Final Cut animation

I have now also edited my animation using Final Cut. A problem I encountered earlier was that the shortest frame duration was 1 second which is much too long for an animation. I got around this problem by speeding every frame up by 700%. This took forever. I'm sure there is a quicker way to do this but I am yet to figure it out. Unlike i movie you have almost total control over what you want to achieve as it has much more advanced functions. For example I added a fade in and fade out at the beginning and end of the animation in i movie. But you could only attach the fade to the first and last frame so the fade wasnt that gradual. Whereas in Final cut you can layer a fade or cross dissolve over as many frames as you like making the transition look much smoother. Another even better way to control fade in/out using Final Cut is a small button called 'Toggle Clip Overlay' which creates a black line on every frame in the timeline. Using the pen tool you can then drag the line up or down to give different opacities, it also works on audio tracks so you can adjust the sound levels easily. 

I did, however, find that the titles were much easier to create on i movie than in Final Cut and because i movie has such a wide selection and an easy to use interface i think you can get just as good results as in Final Cut. I could not figure out how move text around the screen in Final Cut but it was really obvious and easy to use in i movie. 

To make the animation more interesting and less static I experimented using key frames to adjust the movement of the 'camera'. This also took me a while to figure out as at first I was trying to create movement using just a beginning and an end key frame like I had been taught in the Animatics workshop. But because I was working with a stop motion animation I had to add a key frame to every frame in the sequence. I am beginning to see why Flash is the preferred option as using motion tweens in between keyframes drastically reduces the amount of time you have to spend editing. I used key frames to zoom in on and pan over to important features of the animation to direct the eye the parts I don't want the viewer to miss. I find the whole idea of key framing brilliant as it gives you complete control and i think its amazing how the computer actually knows what to do. I really enjoyed figuring Final Cut out on my own and it actually working for me, as usually I have to bother the IT technicians with simple questions. I could possibly say I am now competent with Final Cut and am looking forward to being able to say I am confident using Final Cut. 

Next stop - Flash!