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Best practice using large stills
Don’t you just love high quality stills?
However I have a 1080 project with 100s of stills, many of them about 4000 pixels across.
Editing isn’t a problem, however I find that rendering and exporting takes forever.
If I’m just fitting the entire photo into my frame, I can save considerable render time by resizing the still in photoshop, but what a pain that is for 100s of photos.
What’s your best practice? Seems like I could use photoshop automation to create two versions of each still. One for “fit” and a larger one for zooming in. That’s one form of pain.
Or I could just suck it up and take the hours to render the large files. That’s another form of pain.
By the way, this pain becomes compounded when FCPX tells me I need to render something I’ve already rendered. Grrrr.What’s your best practice for dealing with high resolution photos?
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Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA -
7 Replies
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The Preview app along with many paid applications can batch process multiple images in one go. I generally recommend resizing so that the resolution of the image is equivalent to 100% of the zoom factor you intend to use for optimal performance.
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
FCP Exchange – FCPX Workshops
XinTwo – FCPX Training -
Thanks Noah…. great tip about Preview. I didn’t know it could batch conform my pictures to 1920×1080.
Feels like there’s no easy answer to the workflow. I like to make realtime decisions while I edit, and I don’t necessarily want to decide in advance if I want a 1080 version of a photo, or a full res. I’ll need to decide in the future if I want to have both sizes available, or wait until I’m ready to render to go through my timeline and make one by one decisions about which stills to resize based on how I’m using it in my timeline.
I wish FCPX had a smarter way to deal with oversized stills. Seems like it could have it’s own version of a smart proxy.
-Mark
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Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA -
This is where CPU and RAM power come into play- your system specs will determine your mileage.
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
FCP Exchange – FCPX Workshops
XinTwo – FCPX Training -
Yes that’s right. I’m constantly amazed how much work I can get done on a 2013 MBP without a lot of difficulty.
Generally, my video effects and composites render fairly quickly.This changes significantly when I’m using large jpgs. These renders seem to chug quite slowly, even if I’m not applying any scaling or movement to the stills, the percents tick by super slowly.
This is why I think I need to rescale selective stills in Photoshop, to make the rendering go more quickly, even though I may not know which stills I’ll want to zoom into, which means I may need two versions of most of my stills… a 1080 version that will fill the frame and render quickly, or a 3000 pixel version that I can Ken Burns to my hearts content.
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Mark Morache
Evening Magazine, Seattle, WA -
You may have a look at ScriptEditor & Image Events.
With a little AppleScript you can scale, crop etc. 100s of images within a few seconds and save them to another file.If you’re “XML safe” you even convert your FCPX timeline to be optimized.
– Andreas
Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil -
[Mark Morache] “However I have a 1080 project with 100s of stills, many of them about 4000 pixels across.”
Seems kinda weird.
I edit 4K video in 1080 timelines routinely and don’t notice that large of a slow down.
What else are you doing to the photos in terms of added filters? Where are the photos stored?
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