I use a nice little program called Pixelmator for photo editing. But mainly I use it to drop the backgrounds away from a logo for use in video. I find it easier than Photoshop which I no longer have anyway.
To retain the clear background, I have to export the file as a gif. But I found out yesterday that FCPX doesn’t like gifs. Sure, I could import it, work with it on the timeline and all that, but it wouldn’t render and I couldn’t export the movie. It hung up the whole works.
Finally found a simple workaround.
Import the gif into Motion as a basic Motion project.
Set your project parameters (frame rate, size, length, etc.) and then export it as a ProRes 4444. Takes about a minute.
That’s it!
Then you can import back to FCPX, do anything you want with it, and FCPX will gobble it up.
The Video Whisperer 
Hello Video Whisperer,
Not only .gif supports an ‘alpha-channel’, or ‘transparency’. Also .tiff files do this. And FCPX does like .tiff!
I am also a Pixelmator fan, and when you make someting whith layers in Pixelmator, and export it as .psd file (Photoshop), then you can import the .psd file in FCPX, while retaining all the different layers! In FCPX you can expand the different layers and do all the things what you can do with any clip. I made the start of this movie in this way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSDiq_Xr4vE&feature=share&list=UUBuPJ3pFqdGAi64AVvoN5Vw I did the animation in FCPX, the airlock sound are also from FCPX. Greets!
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Thanks Jan! I knew FCPX likes .tiff, but I thought I needed Photoshop to export the .tiff with a clear (not white or black) background. Exporting as a .psd from Pixelmator is intriguing. I know I used to import .psd files into FCP7 with no trouble, so this definitely opens up some possibilities.
Well done on your video. Very clever!
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