alpha not recognised

FCPX 10.3.2, importing a ProRes 422 movie from c4d that has an alpha channel. FCPX isn't recognising the alpha. I have opened the inspector and changed the settings on the clip from none/ignore alpha to straight, but nothing happens, it keeps switching back to none/ignore.

How can I get this working?

ProRes 422 does not support an alpha channel. You'll need ProRes 4444.

tried that still not working! tried animation codec which definitely works in other apps.

maybe I'm missing something - import the 444 clip, set the alpha to be recognised, drag to timeline, doesn't work and setting has changed back to ignore alpha

can anyone help me here, got a horrible deadline!

apparently FCPX cannot recognise alpha channels when using proxy media, but I am not doing that, it's set to use original media

tried animation codec, tried 4:4:4 codec

why is this so difficult?

I've also rendered a separate movie of the alpha channel - can I use that in FCPX like in After Effects by using it as a track matte?

Have given up and rendered my movie with a green background instead of an alpha and keyed it out.

well you worked around your issue, but there must have been a mistake in the rendering settings from c4d. FCPX supports both animation and ProRes 4444 with alpha.

Typically if it's got a proper alpha channel, you shouldn't need to set anything when you import it. You may need to specify if the alpha is straight or pre-mulitplied. To use it, you would just stack the clip with alpha on top of another clip, and it should work. Normally we'd ask you to send the files to check them and try to figure out what's wrong. If you still want to do that, you can, so we can figure out if it's a bug worth reporting.

FIXED: I had exactly this issue this morning render out from Motion to ProRes 4444 including RGB+alpha. You can see the alpha in Finder's quickview so I knew it was there. If you toggle the alpha handling to straight or premultiplied on FCPX it spited back to none by itself within a second or two.

I took the resulting file that came out of motion though compressor as ProRes 4444 RGB+alpha and it fixed it.

If you're not getting alpha out of Motion will all the export settings correct, check the Project setting in the Inspector. Make sure that Background is set to be Transparent. If it's not, the export settings won't help.

I think you may have misunderstood - there is an alpha channel out of Motion because it shows up in quicklook, but it is not recognised in FCPX. If you run it through compressor the alpha is then recognised in FCPX