Is this possible in FCPX?

A friend has asked me if I can do a promo movie for his company.  
He's sent me the following youtube movie as an example of the type of thing he's after:

Is this all possible in Final Cut Pro X, or do I need other software like Motion to create some of the effects.


I'm a relative beginner to using FCPX so would trying to replicate something like this be a tall order for someone of my experience?

Read my reply to your post at ASC:
discussions.apple.com/thread/6471892

Hi Tim, welcome to the forum.

There are three levels in this production:

1. The speaker

The edges around the left ear of the speaker and the gaps in his glasses indicate that the person has been shot in front of a green key background. If the video shows exactly what your client is looking for this would be a 2 to 4-hour shoot in a small green key room. Wether it's 2 or 4 hours depends on how fluent the person is with his text. As he is constantly looking to his right this may indicate he is reading his text from a teleprompter. I don't know if is due to the youtube compression but that white shirt looks completely overlit and it has an orange cast, so you should do better than that.

Once you have the green key video you can key out the green and replace it with the still (or animated or live background) in FCP X, which has a great keyer for this kind of work. If the video has been recorded correctly (well-balanced and even lighting, good sound, using a decent camera that shoots in a high quality format...) you will be able to pull this key in a matter of a few minutes to a few hours. If the video has not been recorded correctly it will take you much more time, and sometimes you will never be able to fix it.

A good key effect is prepared during the shoot, not in the editing room. Setting up a great green key recording is specialist work, and I'm sure there are people here who can give you excellent detailed advice on this, but that's beyond the scope of this question.

2. The titles and effects.

Very easy to do all this in FCP X in only a few hours, so let's move on.

3. The animated logo

The logo in the video is not a true 3D animation. I f you look at it frame by frame you will see it is even not a good animation at all. But as it moves fast you don't see the mistakes, so it passes.

With a lot of trial and error and plugins you probably could simulate such an animation in FCP X, but Motion 5 is far better equipped for this kind of work and it will save you loads of time and headaches. So yes, you should use Motion 5 for this. There is no standard advice anyone can give you on this, everything depends on how the logo looks, how you wish to animate it and what kind of effects you want to add to the animation. If you consider the logo in the video, any decent Motion artist will pull this off in less than a day.

- Ronny

Ah, now i can reply - how strange I couldn't log in earlier. Thank you, Ronny, plenty of food for thought in your detailed response. So good of you to spend the time writing this