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animation codec previews fine but won’t render sharply
I imported a Motion QT movie (lossless+alpha) into FCP5.
Things look nice and sharp in the viewer, but putting it in the timeline is another story… very blocky.
The sequence settings in FCP seem to match those of the QT movie from Motion (720×480, pixel ratio .9, etc).
But for some reason it just doesn’t want to render cleanly. Any suggestions welcome and greatly appreciated!
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8 Replies
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What are your timeline settings? The Animation codec is a lossless codec, and no doubt some compression will occur when you drop it into a compressed (even uncompressed 10-bit) timeline.
Are you looking at this and judging it on an external monitor?
Shane
Alokut Productions
http://www.lfhd.net -
What are your timeline settings? The Animation codec is a lossless codec, and no doubt some compression will occur when you drop it into a compressed (even uncompressed 10-bit) timeline.
Are you looking at this and judging it on an external monitor?
Shane
Alokut Productions
http://www.lfhd.net -
Hi Shane,
The sequence settings are
720×480 NTSC DV
NTSC DV (3:2) aspect ratio
CCIR 601 DV
Lower (even) field dom.
29.97 fps
compressor: DV/DVCPRO-NTSC (quality 100%)The same settings were used in the Motion project from which the lossless+alpha animation codec movie was exported. The motion project is an animated, 5 layer photoshop file with transparency. The movie looks nice and crisp in the QT player, as well as the FCP viewer. It is only when I put it in the timeline that it gets very jagged (and I mean VERY).
I have an external Sony ref monitor which only looks slightly better than what’s referenced from the FCP canvas.
I dumped my FCP prefs and wonder if it’s something that’s been reset, b/c this type thing (animation codec movies from Motion) hasn’t given me trouble in this timeline in the past.
Mike
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Make sure the Motion movie is not 720 x 486 (SD). If it is, it will mess up your field order. You can fix it by bumping it up by one line in FCP.
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Read this post as I had a similar problem, it may be your sequence settings > My footage was looking great until it was rendered, these solutions have helped:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=8&postid=893519
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What you are witnessing is DV compression. you should always judge final quality on an NTSC/PAL monitor, but do this for me as a test to show you the information that is being thrown out when render to dv. Render 5 seconds of your motion project to the lossless setting. Then render that same five seconds to the dv codec. Open the two files in quicktime and spread them out so you can see both. Set the playback to loop (apple-L) then hit apple-return. Your movies will now play simultaneously and loop. You should see the loss of of quality mainly in resolution and color rendition between the Animation file and the dv file (provided that you have created the graphics in Motion and you are not simply crunching out existing dv footage from your motion timeline).
Working at a higher bit rate codec should fix this, but your system has to have a few extra add ons to make this work, namely a capture card and a fast enough disk array to support the higher data rate and file sizes.
Jeremy
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Use a video monitor NOT the computer monitor
Set the Canvas to 100%
Set the Timeline to Safe RT
Render with the Dark Green “Full” bar checked in the Sequence>Render menus.A lot of gotchas here, but I bet your graphic is just fine.
You just aren’t monitoring it properly.A FCP system not set up to spec is the root of 90% of all confusion you’ll have with FCP.
FCP is more than an app, it’s a system.Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com -
Thanks everyone – all your advice has been helpful.
I’ve had this problem only twice… both times involved importing a layered Photoshop file (with transparency) into Motion and animating them.
All other exported Motion movies have worked crisply in FCP.
all the best,
Mike
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