Would Final Cut be a solution to my animation project?

Question

Hello,
I am looking to purchase movie editing software and was wondering how Final Cut works with animation techniques, both traditional 2-D and digital morphing.
For instance; say I filmed a doll and then wanted to animate it's lips and synch the lip movements up with sound. How difficult (or easy) would it be to do this? Could I utilize 2-D animation effects (think Superfriends and other cartoons) of several drawings of lips in different positions and then compositing them onto several keyframes of the movie? Would I remove the mouth on the doll first before filming and then add the mouth frame by frame or could I overlay a frame of mouth with fleshtones to match the "skin" of the doll on top of the doll's scuplted mouth?
Or is there a way to actually morph the movement of the doll's actual mouth in Final Cut? What do you experienced animators/editors think is the best technique to animate mouth movements on a figure? And are we talking serious crunching and rendering time?
Thanks for any help! I've been told Final Cut is a great editing program but I want to know if it can do what I need and the demos I've watched haven't convinced me yet. Thanks!

Answer 1

Your questions are really about how you are going to approach your stop motion, not about how you will edit it. Although FCP has the usual VFX tools and there are ways you can use these to create 'animation', it's not what you're looking to do, I don't believe. FCP could indeed be used to storyboard, cut, rearrange and edit your animation sequences, add multitrack audio to the sequence, and master output. But it is NOT an animation system. Although as mentioned, you could prep layers and lay these over characters layers, where are you going to prepare those layers? Stop thinking about FCP and look to what you want to do to create the frames for your movie - FCP will come later if you need it.
Take a look at Boinx iStopMotion (at http://www.istopmotion.com), a very nice stop motion package for digital cameras. And think more about the steps and stages you will go through to produce your animation. No software package can create your animation for you (unless you're going down the CG road, in which case look to Maya, XSI, 3DS Max or similar). Remember, as with all animation - AUDIO COMES FIRST!