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Strange Compression Within FCP
I’m working on a project currently, and I’m seeing something very odd happening to the quality of the video I’m working with. Within Final Cut, the image has what appears to be some kind of heavy compression. However, when I open the source clip in quicktime, it looks fine, as seen in this screen cap:
https://www.warpedwindow.com/images/picture2.png
It also looks good on my external monitor and when I lay it off to tape. It’s only within FCP and when exported that it looks like garbage. It wouldn’t be an issue, except that I need to deliver the project as a series of mp4 videos.
Making it even stranger, it was a three camera shoot, and the problem only appears to manifest on the footage from one of the cameras. The other two are fine. The camera is an HDV camera, but it was shooting SD on miniDV.
I’ve wracked my brain and played with every setting I can think of, but nothing has helped. I did recently have to reinstall OSX, but the project is on an external drive, and it doesn’t change the fact that the video looks fine when viewed in quicktime. Has anyone encountered an issue like this before?
Thanks in advance.
-Dan
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4 Replies
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#2 Blurry Playback
Shane’s Stock Answer #2: Blurry/Low Quality playback
ONLY JUDGE THE QUALITY OF YOUR MATERIAL ON AN EXTERNAL BROADCAST MONITOR, OR AT LEAST A TV.
The Canvas shows you what happens after the codec you are working with has been applied. The Viewer shows you the material in its native format. Once you drop the footage from the Viewer into the timeline, it inherits the attributes of the sequence. If it is a DV sequence, the footage will render out as DV.
1. Disable overlays on the Canvas.
2. Make sure you’ve rendered everything (no green bars at the top of the timeline).
Video playback requires large amounts of data and many computations. In order to maintain frame rate and be viewable at a normal size, only about one-fourth of the DV data is used in displaying the movie to the screen. However, the DV footage is still at full quality, and is best viewed thru a TV or broadcast monitor routed thru your camera or deck.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Normally, I’d agree. Where it becomes an issue is when I export, and the mp4 is displaying the same problem. Also, I can’t figure out why it’s only happening to the footage from one out of three cameras.
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Well then, it isn’t an FCP issue, it is an issue with the camera and/or the tape. Can you try to recapture the footage and see if it happens again? To rule out a slightly corrupt QT file. If it STILL does that, then it is an issue with the footage from that camera.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I’ve tried recapturing the footage, and it has the same issue. What I don’t understand is why the source file would look fine when viewed in Quicktime, but degraded when exported from Final Cut.
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