What format do Adobe Illustrator files need to be saved as in order to bring them into FCE as Alpha channels? All I want to do is set some type (just a few words) and import them in to superimpose over my footage. (The reason I'm having to do this is that for some reason the font I want to use will not show up in the FCE font menu - it works in all of my other software though).

I tried quite a few different formats last night and the best I got was to either get the whole Illustrator page canvas coming through or something weird where the type whent yellow on black and duplicated itself on a seperate timeline...?

To the best of my knowledge you can't use Illustrator with FCP. You might be able to run it through Photoshop, but I've never tried. I use Photoshop for most of my text generation. Illustrator is vector based and many programs do not support vector based graphics.

Aha that could be it then - I'll stick to Photoshop. Thanks Jeff.

I'd like to point out that After Effects imports Illustrator just fine.

Stop the clock!

On a hunch I just tried importing an Illustrator saved PDF into FCP, and it works! It does not continually rasterize the file like After Effects would, FCP seems to rasterize i.e. convert from vectors to pixels, at the size the PDF is set from inside Illustrator. However, it's still pretty useful since it allows you to edit the original file in Illustrator as vectors and once saved you just need to reconnect the media in FCP.

I like this. Another good use of PDFs inside OS X.

Sorry, I just assumed you use OS X.

Thanks for the tip.