FCP 6.0.2 Still Export is now 640×480 not 720×480?

[Sean Oneil]

Open them up in Photoshop and confirm the actual size. I’ll bet it really is 720×480.

The last few versions of QT have had this problem. It reports playback size as 640×480 (which is correct) but it says 640 for actual size as well (even though it’s really 720).

[Jeff Carpenter]

Nope, the exported images are really 640 now.

I kind of like it. Now I don’t have to re-size them myself to correct the distortion.

If you really need a distorted 720×480 image, I guess set the canvas to 100% size and do a screen capture. Maybe? That’s kind of inelegant but it should work.

It would be nice if it was an option. Even though the new way is nice it would be useful to change it back if I needed it.

[Sean Oneil]

I absolutely do not like this if it’s true. What happens if you export from the viewer?

[Chris Poisson]

Wait a minute, isn’t the difference between 640×480 and 720×480 a square pixel issue? If that’s true, then which is truly distorted? Cameras shoot at 720, isn’t 640 the square pixel representation of this? Hate to seem dopey, but I never really paid attention to this issue before. Everything I’ve worked with has been 720.

Can someone offer a technical explanation?

Have a wonderful day.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Cameras shoot DV tape as 720×480 with rectangular pixels. When displayed on a television it is correct. When put on a computer (square pixels) the ratio is not correct and the image is distorted.

Many media player know this and squeeze DV down to 640×480 when playing it back. Final Cut does this in the canvas, so everything looks correct. (As does Quicktime.) It does NOT do it when you’re printing to tape, which is why the video looks a little funky on the computer screen when printing to tape, but ends up fine on tape.

That’s all just the way it displays, however, nothing is altered in the video.

So, as for image exports, the old Final Cut would export a still at 720×480 which, when looked at on a computer, is the wrong ratio. You needed to take it into photoshop and re-size it to 640×480 in order to get the proper ratio. (Newer versions of Photoshop also let you alter the image so that it did the same thing Final Cut does. By setting ‘pixel aspect’ to “DV” you could make Photoshop display the image as 640×480 even though it was still actually 720×480.) So you could either re-size it or alter the display method to make it work.

The new Final Cut simply re-sizes the image as you export it. So you get a 640×480 image with square pixels. Perfect for computer use, and you save a step since you don’t have to re-size.

BUT, some people aren’t exporting for computer-use. Sometimes you might want to export a still and just put it right back in Final Cut on a DV timeline. In that case you WANT a 720×480 image with rectangular pixels. Since Final Cut no longer does that, you have to take the square-pixel image and stretch it back out to fit the timeline, thus losing some resolution! Hardly ideal in that case, so it would be nice if it asked you which way you want to export the still. I like that the new export method exists, but they shouldn’t have gotten rid of the old one! I’d also love to hear that it exists somewhere and we just don’t know where to look.

[Dan Shott]

That is exactly the problem we have run into. We export these stills so we can work with them in Photoshop (where they do come in at 640×480) and then bring the psd files back into Final Cut. If you use Photoshop to stretch them out to 720×480 they look pretty close to what they should be but that doesn’t seem to be the ideal solution, plus its a pain to have that extra step.

To earlier posts, it happens when exported from both the viewer and the canvas, and unfortunately a screen capture wouldn’t work as we need these to be accurate pretty much to the pixel.

It seems like Apple tried to fix something that wasn’t broken for people who use these stills in video.