• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  image quality issue

  Posted by Will Pigeon on April 6, 2012 at 11:37 am

  My understanding of FCP is quite low, so feel free to treat me like an idiot in your responses. I won’t take it personally.

  I have been using Handbrake to transfer some DVDs to my macbook pro in m4v format.

  When i open them in FCP they take a very long time to render (minor issue) but the image quality is much as is on the DVD itself. After cutting the section i want and using H.264, best quality compression the final movie’s image quality is much less high. Slightly pixilated and less clear. (major issue).

  Can anyone give me some advice?
  let me know if u need more information.

  many thanks,

  Will

  Will Pigeon replied 14 years, 1 month ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Shane Ross

  April 6, 2012 at 5:43 pm

  FCP doesn’t like working with H.264 nor MP4 files. Or M4V. Those are DELIVERY formats…for final distribution, not meant for editing. You need to use MPEG STREAMCLIP to rip the DVDs, and rip as DVCPRO 50…or ProRes NTSC.

  Shane
  Little Frog Post
  Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def
• 

  Neil Patience

  April 6, 2012 at 10:30 pm

  Just to add to Shane’s very good advice.
  When you re-compress it again to make your H264 for delivery or encode to DVD etc etc you will lose a little quality so it may not look quite as good as your original file. This is normal and nothing you can really do will stop that from happening but the method suggested is going to give as good as you can get with that source.

  best wishes
  Neil
  http://www.patience.tv
• 

  Will Pigeon

  April 8, 2012 at 9:53 am

  thanks for the help!

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