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jpg vs psd
Is there any reason to convert a jpg to a psd before importing into FCP5.1.4?
Andrea Stewart
Producer/Editor/Director – Owner
Germane Creative LLC -
7 Replies
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Andrea,
No. Changing to PSD will not add quality. Only reason I can think of for doing it is if you want to add some transparency to any areas, then it will come into FCP as a sequence and the layer inside it will have whatever transparency you add.
Have a wonderful day.
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I am having a wonderful day, and thanks for wishing one for me.
I was thinking more in terms of application stability/media management/rendering, etc. Any thoughts there?
Andrea Stewart
Producer/Editor/Director – Owner
Germane Creative LLC -
Andrea, your idea dose have some merit. That idea DOES work for some media. Converting MP3s to AIF or WAV files is a good idea because Final Cut works with them easier than it does with MP3s.
So I can see where you’d get the idea.
But JPEGs are pretty easy on the system. I wouldn’t worry about converting them as Final Cut has no problem dealing with them.
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Andrea,
I did not mean to poo-poo your idea, please don’t misunderstand. Jeff is right about jpegs in FCP, but unless it is a fresh one from a camera, jpegs are not the best quality.
Regarding the render time issue, funny you should ask, last year I started the following thread, it will take you a few minutes to read it all, but you will see it started with a query very similar to yours. I did a methodical test on the render times of various still formats.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/936800#937050
Have a wonderful day.
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Chris and Jeff,
Thank you both for your input. Very interesting thread Chris and thanks for being scientific about it. I guess I’ll stick to jpg then. BTW, I’m not converting them to jpg. That’s they way they originate from the stock image library. Any move that requires more than doubling the size I guess I’ll take to After Effects to save on taxing FCP.
One last thought… Anyone output an EDL with jpgs? I’ve had issues with any media that doesn’t have timecode in the past when making an EDL. Just wondering if image codec makes a difference here.
-AndreaAndrea Stewart
Producer/Editor/Director – Owner
Germane Creative LLC -
Andrea,
FYI jpegs from stock houses, like digital camera originals are pretty darn good. You can more than double the size for use in FCP, 2-3 times at 72 dpi is no sweat. BTW there’s a GREAT program called PhotoZoomPro which will blow them up and create new pixels, it’s amazing, do it all the time.
Have a wonderful day.
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I don’t like working with JPEG at all, but PSDs aren’t always the answer because sometimes they show up as nested sequences. You double click on a PSD and it stays on the timeline and won’t open above. I’ve had this happen even when the PSD has only one layer.
A really nice alternative for me has been using PNG files. You can choose to interlace or not on save, and I’ve found them to be much cleaner than JPGS, plus they preserve transparency better, I think. PNGs are single layer files – don’t flatten them in Photoshop because you’ll get the background. Rather, merge all open layers and kill the rest, make sure your mode in RGB – FCP doesn’t like CMYK. They’re small files too, so you can play and render without the normal swearing.
KC Allen
Allen Film & Video“Who’s the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows?”
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