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Best sequence settings for working with stop motion stills in FCP?
I am currently editing a project which involves sequencing about 600 stills into a faux-stop-motion movie — the final framerate will be about 5fps. The stills are JPEGs with a resolution of 640×480. I’m trying to figure out what the best sequence settings for the project will be. So, my questions:
1) If possible, I’d like to be able to work with the sequence without rendering. A standard NTSC DV sequence produces green (“Preview”) render bars on my G5. My best attempt to get the sequence to match the source images — 640×480 square pixel, Photo-JPEG compression, 30 frames a second, produces magenta render bars, though the sequence plays at full speed without displaying “Unrendered” frames. Is there a combination of sequence settings that will allow me to work with these stills “natively”? (i.e., with no rendering?)
2) The final medium of the project will be online video, and since the final framerate of the project will be 5 fps, it seems like it would make sense to work with and output the video at that framerate, instead of holding on each still for 6 frames. (The main advantage being that I can reduce the filesize, as there will be less total frames to compress.) Is this advisable? We publish our videos as H264 quicktime movies, as well as uploading them to YouTube and etc., so I’m curious to know if such a low-framerate movie would work on iPods, etc.
If anyone has worked on a similar project, I’d also be interested in any other tips you might have, of course.
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3 Replies
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What the — sorry, I have no idea how that got posted twice. (The first time I tried with an older username which I was told was deactivated.)
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Actually, let me revise this question — what’s happening is, that when I put these stills in a sequence that uses default NTSC DV settings — 720×480 pixels, non-square pixels, etc — FCP doesn’t need to render the clips. However, when I set the sequence settings to the same as the stills — 640×480, square pixels, non-interlaced — it needs to render them before display. What am I doing wrong here? I’d rather not use the default DV settings because a) the final product is never going to be displayed on an NTSC device, only on a computer, so I’d rather not convert it to non-square pixels and then back again and b) whenever I move my clips in the NTSC DV sequence, Final Cut has to take a few seconds to “prepare video for display”, which slows down my editing quite a bit. Any thoughts?
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Adam,
You’re basing your entire project on a false premise. When using stills on the timeline rendering cannot be avoided. You can delay rendering by using a codec that supports RT playback and effects, but you will have to render eventually. Even exporting an unrendered timeline will take longer than normal because its rendering during the export process.
And, using the DV codec will compress your stills at about 5:1 with 4:1:1 chroma subsampling. That might be okay if you’re not terribly picky and if your expectations are not to produce work at the highest quality, but if you want to preserve the best quality you may want to consider editing on a DV50 or even an 8-bit uncompressed timeline.
Hope this helps…
DRW
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