FCP REndering Quality question with NESTS

[Scott Sheriff]

Nests are evil.
Looks great on paper. Never seems to work well IRL.

Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

I have a system, it has stuff in it, and stuff hooked to it. I have a camera, it can record stuff. I read the manuals, and know how to use this stuff and lots of other stuff too.
You should be suitably impressed…

[Matt Lyon]

Hi David,

Nests can definitely be a PITA. Have you made sure the quality setting WITHIN the nest is also set to “best”? You can also try opening the nest, then force rendering the material. Does that improve the picture quality in the main timeline? I think the issue is something about FCP not being able to “see” the full resolution of the material within the nest (possibly it is only sampling the resolution of the “sequence setting” of the nest).

My memory is a bit hazy of the last time I had to deal with this, but you may be able to simply force-render the nest in your main timeline and end up with a result that matches un-nested material.

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[David Cooke]

Thanks guys for your help. Yep, I am pretty sure that I double checked all the settings and have
force-rendered the the multi layers within the nest. Yep, bit dissappointed in apple’s quality here,
plus I am also finding similar issues in Motion. The graphics look clean and GREAT in motion and
the .mov I export, but after it goes into FCP and I render it, less that clean like AE.
I even put on “Motion blur” in the render settings in Motion before rendering-takes forever to
render. After waiting a long time, the quality was only slightly better.
Thanks,
DC

D’s Video

[Matt Lyon]

[David Cooke] ” The graphics look clean and GREAT in motion and
the .mov I export, but after it goes into FCP and I render it, less that clean like AE.”

David, this sounds like a different issue than your problem with the quality of nests. How are you monitoring your video? Are you using a broadcast monitor and proper video I/O hardware? Also, if you are rendering a .mov out of Motion, you shouldn’t have to render it again once you bring it into FCP (unless you are applying more effects). Are you sure you are using the correct render settings?

That being said, the motion graphics abilities of FCP will never match Motion or AE. You may be expecting too much from it. But for simple things, I usually find the quality is “good enough.” A tasteful amount of motion blur can improve things a lot. Turn down the number of samples and the strength of the motion blur and you’ll get a much faster render.

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[David Cooke]

Thanks Matt. Will turn down the samples and blur settings.
Dual 3.2 G5, FCP7.03,
Aja LH card, graphics card XT1900 Radeon, Caldigit drives 2.5TB

[Rafael Amador]

When nesting is important to choose a good codec and try high quality rendering.
The stuff on the nested sequence is compressed on the nest, then again in the master sequence.

@ Matt: I have the intuition that when the Nest is not rendered and all is rendered together on the master sequence, FC behaves like when “Sending to Compressor”. The stuff on the Nest would be rendered at 444.
This should be the proper pipeline.
I have no facts to to support this, but in case. when I have a sequence with nests, before exporting, I get rid of all these intermediate renders.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com