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five screens
Hi,
I’m fairly new to FCP, but I love it.
I’m cutting a film that is to be shown simultaneously over five screens – the idea being that one soundbite is shown on two screens, the next on two different ones – while rostrum stills play in the others. I’m at the stage where I’ve cut the interviews up, and I want to experiment with placement – resizing and placing interviews to fit all five on one screen.
I have two questions:
(1) why is it that the ‘shrunk’ pictures look so cruddy? I’m offlining at DV res, when I shrink to 20% they become horribly pixelated
(2) Anyone recommend an elegant workflow? ideally, I want to have one sequence with five continuous layers that links back to the original cut, but editing in a 5-video track to a new sequence ‘nests’ all the layers down to just one.
thanks
Robbie
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4 Replies
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1.) Several points:
A.) Are you viewing on your canvas, or on a NTSC (or PAL) monitor connected through firewire? Your canvas is designed as a content monitor, not a quality control monitor. Firewire is better, but
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thanks Tom. In response:
1a viewing on a mac LCD monitor, from a dual-head DVI card.
1b QC only matters in terms of the video having to look sensible on one SD DVD for the client.
1c. I’ve made an HD sequence (and painstakingly calculated the aspect ratio difference: 11.2) to put all five in, it’s looking much better. I’ll need to run off a test DVD to make sure that quality is kept all the way.2. It’s actually much simpler than I’ve made it sound: there’s never going to be more than two different images on the screens – ie interview on centre three, rostrum on outer two, etc etc. No lower thirds either. So, I’m going to cut it as two screens: Interview and Other, copy those out 5x each to a ten-layer timeline, paste attributes for the scaling, and chop out the unwanted bits.
Thanks for your help
Robbie -
You are going to take a quality hit when you encode the DVD – but you knew that.
If you haven’t done much mpeg-2 encoding and you are picky about quality, it is going to take some experimentation and some reading to get a handle on what works best for your project.
Pick a representative section of your video that is several minutes long and encode the clip in with a variety of settings in Compressor, Bit Vice, Squeeze, or whatever program(s) you decide to test, based on the reading you have done. Burn the results to a disk and watch it on the monitor your cllient will view the video on.
Make critical judgements, and if necessary, try again.
To paraphrase a frequent poster on Apple’s Discussions, “Video encoding is a dark art.”
Good luck.
Tom
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When doing multi screen…. I use a track per screen….
if you need to repeat an item.. option drag it up to clone….
Richard M. Harrington, PMP
Author: Photoshop CS for Nonlinear Editors, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork
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