• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  FCP jittery movies

  Posted by Richard Chenoweth on April 21, 2008 at 1:11 pm

  Hi all,

  I am relatively new to FCP (5.0.4) but am learning very fast.

  I have made some 720×480 (YouTube) movies of old super eight film and so
  on and am happy with results.

  I started experimenting with HD, however, and am getting very jittery compressions.
  When I look at these compressed movies (.mov and .mp4 etc) using various things
  like Apple Compressor, Sorenson 3, H.264, etc, I see something strange going on.

  When I playback these movies in QT going one frame at a time, the subject matter (a simple pan movement) seems to step forward three frames with some motion blur, followed by stepping backwards two frames with motion blur… then forward again three frames, and so on. The overall effect, of course is “very jittery” look to the video.

  When I scrub forward one frame at a time in FCP the video seems to always being stepping forward (no backward stepping).

  I am using 29.97 fps with lower field selected. The video is coming out of camera as 1080i
  (Canon HV30). I have it set up in FCP to capture video as HDV 1080i in Easy Setup.

  Any suggestions? Anyone know a place to find out more about all this?

  Many thanks!!!

  Richard

  Richard Chenoweth replied 18 years ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Steve Eisen

  April 21, 2008 at 2:03 pm

  Do a search on the highly compressed format of long GOP HDV.

  Steve Eisen
  Eisen Video Productions
  Board of Directors
  Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group
• 

  Mark Maness

  April 21, 2008 at 4:00 pm

  A couple of things could be going wrong…

  First, HD is upper field dominant, not lower like SD video. The Compressor settings don’t always get this right. Besides, its best to de-interlace while compressing. Video for the web doesn’t like interlaced video.

  The other is amount of fps (frames per second). Most video for the web is 12-15 fsp. This will cause the jittery effect that you see. You can set your Compressor settings to anything you want such as 29.97 if you like.

  _______________________________

  Wayne Carey
  Schazam Productions
  http://www.schazamproductions.com
  https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey
• 

  Richard Chenoweth

  April 23, 2008 at 11:46 pm

  Wayne and Steve,

  Thank you very much for responding… I have gotten some decent exports now.

  I used the compression called “HDV1080i60” inside FCP and set the dominant field to Upper. It seems as though this Canon HV30 wants to use this native (?) compression setting. I tried a few exports with the Apple Compressor and it didn’t seem to work as well.

  In the “Settings” I set it to 1440 x 1080 as there is not a 1920 x 1080 setting available. Is this because of the fact that HDV is already “compressed” a bit?

  Thanks again!!

  Richard

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