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FCP user with video quality question.
Hello all,
I’m sure you’ve been getting quite a few fcp-editors-new-to-premiere questions – so I apologize for this, but I can’t figure it out. We cut mainly on FCP (old versions), but I’ve been handed a project recently that needs to be cut in HD, and our only viable machine for HD is running Premiere CS5. Two questions:
1. When I import some AVC-Intra 100 footage into FCP and preview the footage (this is a separate machine that we won’t have access to for the project) it looks great (footage is being converted into Apple ProRes automatically on import). When I import the footage on the PC into Premiere the footage looks terrible (footage is being edited natively from my understanding). The signal is very noisy with lots of visible grain. This is true when previewing in Premiere OR exporting and viewing through Quicktime or any other external player. Why? I don’t get it. I know something has got to be wrong – I don’t believe for a second that all the Premiere users out there are just willing to accept crummy footage like this. This machine is a beast, so it should be giving me the crystal-clear footage that the Macs are giving me.
2. How do I get a pixel-for-pixel preview on my second monitor? I can set the 2nd monitor as my video output (not the best way to do it, I know), but I can’t set it to do a pixel-for-pixel real playback, it scales everything up to fill the monitor regardless of the resolution and I’m having the hardest time telling how good the footage really is or not.
Please don’t misunderstand me – I’m NOT trashing Premiere, I know there’s got to be a way for it to work or it never would’ve survived the professional market this long – I just have no idea what I’m doing and my scrambles for answers (did I mention the deadline?) are turning up dry. Thanks for any light you can shed.
Machine specs:
Antel – Intel – 8-core
12GB RAM
2TB internal media drive for editing
NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800–Nick
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7 Replies
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Is playback resolution set to full? This is from the flyout menu-top right-of the program monitor.
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An excellent point and I’m a little embarrassed I forgot to mention it. Yes, the playback resolution is set to Full.
–Nick
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Technically, making AVCHD footage into ProRes footage won’t “clean” up the quality of grain or sharpness etc.
AVCHD footage doesn’t look so nice when edited natively in anything less than full playback resolution.
When it is in pause the quality set to Full should show the quality of the material.
Export it if you are really concerned it shouldn’t lose any quality at the export stage than that if it was ProRes as the best source for export is always the original material, which PPro uses.
Let us know what it looks like after an export – If its rubbish, chances are the source footage is rubbish and ProRes-ing it wouldn’t “fix” it.
Cheers JB
Jon Barrie
Adobe Video Solutions Consultant ANZ
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter -
Could be your preview file format is set differently. But honestly, we work with the same format. Let the preview files be default to mpeg.
Create your edit Export to a Master, there is will render from the original and maintain quality.
Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC -
If you are importing the ProRes into PPro, make sure in your sequence settings that you have “Max Bit depth” checked as ProRes is 10 bit.
If you are bringing in the AVCHD material itself, and that looks bad…I’d be curious to see what the ProRes footage looks like if you bring that in to PPro for comparison. If ProRes looks better, then there may be some H264 decode issue on the machine…
Keep in mind that the QuadroFX 1800 card is a pretty dainty CUDA component…it’s about as small as you can get and still see some benefit (I believe it has enough RAM to run GPU accelerated…but it’s right on the edge) H264 material including AVCHD and DSLR is a load for even a large machine without a CUDA card(I have a dual hex core here with 24 GB of RAM that chokes on one stream of 5D footage with a three way color corrector on it…)
To see the material pixel-for pixel on one monitor, you can send a full screen video to an interface monitor in the playback settings…just designate the monitor you want. OR, you could just un-nest the program panel and drag it onto that monitor, scale it up to fill the monitor, and save the workspace. If the monitor is not large enough to show the entire frame pixel-for-pixel, 100% size designated in the bottom of the panel will cause the image to be larger than the panel, but for periodic checks of focus or that sort of thing, you can bounce back and forth between 50 and 100% and slide the image around if necessary.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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Nick was talking about AVC-Intra 100, not AVCHD.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
Nick was talking about AVC-Intra 100, not AVCHD.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf
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