Final Cut Animation

This week has been great. I am really enjoying EDT 521, and 532, but 521 is very refreshing at the moment. Don't get me wrong, there have been many times where I learned a great deal because I was told to "do a task" using only one program, i.e. Keynote, Photoshop, or Dreamweaver, but it has been very invigorating to be given a task, i.e. create an animation, and one aspect of the creativity is that we all choose whichever tools we think will work best.

I made the layers and content in Photoshop, but then animated them in Final Cut. This was important because Final Cut specifically assigns values for position, opacity, etc. When you try to animate position, Final Cut recognizes what you are trying to do. Photoshop has no way of understanding what has changed from frame 1 to frame 2, so it just cuts or fades from frame to frame.

It all goes back to tools. A person animating by hand would have to hand create frame after frame. A person using Photoshop could copy the original frame and then modify it to create their next frame, but in Final Cut all you do is tell FC where you want to start, and where you want to finish, and it does the rest.
That seems to be the name of the game when it comes to digital media. If you know the right program, you can tell the computer what you want, and it does the rest.
The only limitation is that most computers incrementally change the value so that each frame is an equal portion of the total animated change, which may not be what you want.

Then again, I know of a few programs that include a feature sometimes called "random seed", where the animation values are randomized within a specific range of the original value. But, no matter how much work the machines do for us, they still need a creative mind to guide them and decide what to do.