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‘Basic Motion’ fx degrade image quality?!? Question and Answer!
While I was typing this question, I discovered the answer – but instead of not posting, i thought I’d post the question with my found answer in case anyone else has been confronted by the same issue….
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Hi, I’m fairly new to FCP, I am using HD 4.5, and editing miniDV footage for a short film.
I’ve just noticed a problem, when applying a ‘Basic Motion’ effect on a clip, in this instance i wanted the clip to sit further down on the screen (i.e. i was adjusting the ‘y’ value on the ‘Center’ option) – this seemingly simple task seemed to degrade the quality of the image, softening it, almost as if it was out of focus. Why on earth is this happening? I have all the settings I can find pumped to the max for image quality, no colour correction or filters on the clip, it’s a dual 2.5 g5 in full quality playback mode….can anyone help?
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________So I was frantically fiddling around in FCP as I was typing and searching through past posts on COW, but i found one setting which fixed it all up..
A:
It turned out that in the ‘sequence settings’, the ‘Field Dominance’ (under the ‘general’ tab) had been incorrectly set (in my case it was on Upper (Odd), when it should have been on Lower (Even)). I assume that when moving the video image with the wrong field set, effectively renders confused and “mis-interlaced” footage, giving it the soft focus look that was driving me mad. By fixing this setting I once again I was viewing crisp quality footage after applying a ‘Basic Motion’ effect.…so…crisis over.
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4 Replies
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Thanks for deciding to post anyway…this may be the answer to an isssue I had to work around for the moment and am curious to check when back at the ofice. But, I still don’t understand how field dominance can get changed without the editor changing it, which is why I never even thought to look at that.
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Hmm…Well, in an interesting turn of events, I am once again encountering this strange problem, and I’ve defintely got the Field Dominance set correctly for this sequence, so I am not sure why whenever I attempt to apply a Basic Motion effect I experience this ‘soft focus’ image degradation reprecussion. Dave you mentioned you had a similar issue, with a work around, could you perhaps expand on that? Or indeed if anyone else has noted this problem and found a solution please do help.
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Sorry I can’t help more, but my work-around was simply to manipulate the raw footage in After Effects and bring the AE render back into FCP…obviously not practical for any more than an occasional short clip.
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Ah yes, that’s what I suspected I would have to do. It’s a bit bizzarre though…
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