FCP-Inserting Logos
 

Hello, I shot this commercial last week and the final step to finalize this is inserting the company logo. I received an EPS and JPEG logo and have tried a number of different formats but every time it imports with a white background. I know i'm doing something so minor. If you guys can help me out that would be great. I have CS5 as well for changing formats of the logo.

Thanks

GH

Re: FCP-Inserting Logos
 

Hey Greg,
The photo needs to be edited in a program such as Photoshop to remove all of the white (if it hasn't been done already) and then be saved as a .psd, .png, or .gif (I recommend .psd for highest quality). .jpeg and .eps do not have an alpha channel that can be made transparent. Hope this helps!

Re: FCP-Inserting Logos
 

The EPS should be able to be loaded in Photoshop and saved as an image with a transparent background. The EPS may have a transparent background, but as they tend to be vector images rather than rasterized images they won't work in Final Cut correctly - as it has to rasterize them itself and won't assume any alpha channel.

When you save the file out of Photoshop you need to make sure that the background is transparent, and also save to a format that supports transparency layers.

That gives you the option of PNG, TIFF, or PSD

You also need to ensure the image is set to RGB rather than a CMYK color space (as EPS's are normally destined for print it'll probably load in a CMYK color space.)

I would actually avoid PSD's as Final Cut treats multilayer PSD's as sequences, and this can actually be quite problematic especially if you often work with lots of different formats because it loads that sequence with the sequence settings under your video settings, including pixel aspect ratio etc. Whereas straight images are loaded as square pixel and then only altered when dropped onto your timeline.

I actually go with PNG most of the time, because of smaller file size and no discernible quality loss for most applications. Lossless TIFF if I want to be sure, but for logos PNG's are normally totally adequate.

Re: FCP-Inserting Logos
 

I actually have had similar troubles and would say a big thanks to those who answered. A great way to get my system to crash is to try and feed it a large CMYK file. I think it's a problem combined with the Blackmagic that also hates the file.

Cheers