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big stills are not so good
Hi
I am posting this as both a point of info and an inquiry to see if my situation is unique
I was having an issue with reconnecting TIFF stills. When i would go to reconnect some stills, FCP would unexpectedly quit. Usually it occured after i had searched and found but before i hit “connect”.
At first i thought it was that I was trying to connect to too many at once, but i still observed the quit when i tried one at a time. After searching this forum i found a post warning about big stills slowing down the system, so i suspected that the size of the tiffs i was trying to reconnect could have been the issue, like between 30 to 50mB each.
I went into photoshop and resized them all, basically from 300 pixels/inch to 200 pixels/inch. This left them big enough to still do moves on, bust small enough to reconnect successfully
I guess wahts puzzling me is that size was not a critical issue when i first imported the tiffs (it did slow down things a bit), but became an issue when i tries to reconnect.
I hope this helps someone, and i welcome any comments or suggestions
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
6 Replies
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[Bob Flood] “I went into photoshop and resized them all, basically from 300 pixels/inch to 200 pixels/inch. This left them big enough to still do moves on, bust small enough to reconnect successfully
“Hard to believe, but
DPI has no meaning in video.
Only the dimensions affect the quality.
When you reduced the DPI, you also cut the dimensions by about 30%.
That is what you really need to know.For instance, a 720 x 540 image at 72 dpi is the same video quality as a 720 x 540 image at 300 dpi.
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Bob,
The way stills are used in FCP is very RAM intensive, and depending on how much RAM you’ve got installed, they can easlily bring all kinds of things to a standstill. On the timeline once those big stills are rendered they are the same as whatever codec you’re using, but until then, they are what they are, so a bunch of big ones can easliy sap all of your available RAM.
To see the effects on realtime in the timeline, take one really huge still file and throw it on the timeline. It will play in realtime and without showing any color in the render indicator. Now keep adding copies of that same still on the timeline. You will see the render indicator change to green and ultimately to red as the number of instances of your still adds up and saps away all available RAM and completely eats up the buffer that give you realtime performance.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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DRW
thanx. I can see that now, because when i did scale them down it was easier to navigate them around (and I remeber when I was first doing this project how the larger stills would take a while to refresh and such
And i can deal with that kind of performance drop, and once rendered even static images play better.
What frosts me is how I can import them OK, but the system blows up if i try and reconnect! I mean, if they are too big, it would be nice to have an error message,
oh well, now i know betta!
and i have to disgree with thax, as when i reduced the dpi to 72, the imgaes did not have enough resolution to do moves, so whe you drop the dpi in Photoshop, you must be reducing the resolution.
(of course, if i had 4mB ram instead of the measly 2 i have now no doubt this would be a non issue)
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
[Bob Flood] “and i have to disgree with thax, as when i reduced the dpi to 72, the imgaes did not have enough resolution to do moves, so whe you drop the dpi in Photoshop, you must be reducing the resolution.
“Try it.
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Depending on your settings in the photoshop image size panel, you may or may not be resampling the image. In the dialog, it shows what your dimensions are and what your dpi is . Depending if you have resampling checked or not, one will or will not affect the other. You can change DPI for example, without affecting the dimensions of the image. And as others have pointed out, FCP could give a crap about dpi. There’s no crying in baseball, and there’s no inches in video. So, by changing it to 72dpi, he very well could’ve changed the dimensions. Potentially from a very large 300dpi image, to a smaller than video 72dpi still.
DPI, meaningless. So just watch the dimensions. I generally use 1000×1000 for SD work to do slow creeps, but if something needs to be enlarged then you’re probably getting into the thousands of pixels wide.
FCP sucks at scaling something down btw. In other words, if your image is 3000×3000 and you want to see all 3000 pixels wide, you’re scaling it down to 15 or 20%. FCP doesn’t do this well and you’ll see all sorts of flickering. Flicker filter helps, but it’s better to resize beforehand.
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Also worth noting that the TIFF files you are using are designed for Print, which uses a YMCK colourspace, so you would be better to convert to TGA or PICT which use RGB. I found it made a difference to the image quality.
CheersDavid Scott,
Senior Editor,
GOD TV (UK)
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