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Compressing Stills Into ProRes Using Compressor
Hello,
I am creating an animatic in Final Cut Pro 7, only using JPEGS and sound effects.
Through research I’ve learned to compress my JPEGS into a RT codec so that Final Cut Pro can play it back without rendering.
My question though, is that when I convert my stills using Compressor, there is no way for me lengthen the duration of the still (which ends up being not even a second long).
Must I do this manually within Final Cut Pro and then have Final Cut Pro do the compression? Is there no way for Compressor to set a default duration to stills?
Thanks,
Conor
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4 Replies
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I don’t think Compressor will take JPEGs, but you might be able to use Final Cut’s batch export tool for this task.
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Jpegs are the worst type of still for RT. It always plays back at a lesser quality, even though FCP reports it plays full quality.
But I’ve never heard of rendering into a video codec. A bit of a waste of time. You could try just parking the playhead on the still and pressing shift+n to make a freeze within FCP. But I would just drop them in the sequence and hit render. That would be te most time effective method, no?
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If it’s an “animatic” I’m imaging a high number of stills involved. Doing freeze frames in Final Cut could take forever. This project is probably a task better fit for Motion. Its’ rendering engine will be happier with the JPEGs than Final Cut’s, and the Keyframe editor’s interpolation controls can really smooth out your animations.
Bret makes a good point – changing the stills to video is an odd workflow. My advice for the project is forget making your clips QT movies and switch to Motion.
Consider changing the default still duration.
https://tinyurl.com/3aq89xt
After making that adjustment import all of your photos into the bin, then put all of those on the timeline in the correct order, then right-click on the sequence and “Send to -> Motion”
In motion you can drag the position and scale attributes from the inspector onto a layer (or multiple selected layers, a group, etc.) in the project pane to quickly give position attributes to another clip. -
In the past I was just rendering in Final Cut Pro and working through it. But I have always wanted to figure out a way for Final Cut Pro to playback without rendering.
The Motion idea is interesting and worth checking out. Thanks for the tip. However, at my computer at work I currently don’t have Motion 🙁 Also, I sometimes have multiple tracks of audio (dialog), something which Motion cannot handle, correct?
Considering which still format Final Cut Pro prefers, what is superior to JPEGS?
And Compressor CAN import JPEGS, I just can’t figure out a way to set their duration.
Thanks all!
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