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Losing the Grain through compression – why???
I have made a short film with a Magic Bullet Looks filter that creates a grainy look to the film. However as soon as I compress it through FCP Compressor it disappears. It’s like the compressor as smoothed it all over!
I am running FCP 7 and the clips were PRORES422(LT)
Any help on this would be great as it’s very frustrating
Gavin
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6 Replies
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What are you outputting from Compressor? If you highly compress then grain and resolution in general is affected by compression blocking.
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Hi Michael
I am compressing to h.264 with a 8mb data rate – a 3 minute film coming out at 155mb in size for youtube
Do you need any other info?
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That’s quite a lot of compression. You might need to increase the grain to compensate.
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Hi Michael
How do I go about reducing the amount of compression if I wanted to go that route? What particular settings should I look at?
Thanks
Gavin
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When you say disappears, do you mean you can’t see even the faintest hint of the effect? Are you sending straight to compressor from FCP or are you exporting a Pro Res then compressing?
It’s hard to say without seeing how subtle the effect is, but I’d export a Pro Res then compress to H.264 to double check. Otherwise, like Micheal mentioned, increase the gain on the effect to compensate.
Best
Paddy
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Grain and today’s compressed distribution don’t work well together. Take a look at AMC’s the Walking Dead which is shot in 16mm film. I’ve seen many shots where close ups have visible posteration due to the compressor’s bandwidth being gobbled up reproducing the grain.
Tread carefully with grain and compression. That aspect of “the film look” is hopefully fading away… literally.
John
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