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.