FCP6 has to render a JPEG on the timeline before you can preview?!

[Richard Harrington]

[Jarvis Smerd] “My project is configured as a “lightweight” 640×480 30p resolution setup.
“

There is NO such setup in FCP…

DO NOT DO NOT Roll your own setups…

Use the presets. And conform to your footage…

Besides that… DO NOT USE JPEGs in video timelines EVER

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[Walter Biscardi]

[Richard Harrington] “Besides that… DO NOT USE JPEGs in video timelines EVER”

Why? We use them all the time for SD, HD, broadcast, corporate, music videos, you name it. what’s wrong with JPEG’s? Sure, it would be nice to get all TIF’s and PNG’s, but high quality JPEG’s work just fine.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Walter Biscardi]

[Jarvis Smerd] “I’m running on an 8-core 2.8GHz MacPro with 12GB of RAM. Did I make a mistake in thinking that the open timeline-capable, industry-standard FCP6 could handle playing back a still-image JPEG or a solid-color matte in real-time?!”

You made a mistake of not setting up your system properly. Since you don’t describe a media array I’m assuming you have all your photos on the internal drive instead of a fast media array. FCP requires a fast media array for more realtime, even for stills.

350 – 400 stills is going to be a slow project.

[Jarvis Smerd] “My project is configured as a “lightweight” 640×480 30p resolution setup.”

There’s no such preset in FCP. Use a standard Easy Setup preset for whatever you want to output. Using a non-standard setup will require more rendering.

Probably Uncompressed 8bit 720×486 with the Field Order set to None is what I would use.

[Jarvis Smerd] “Please tell me that the investment in FCS2 was not a waste… I can’t believe that FCP6 won’t preview JPEGs and solid-color clips in real-time, yet it will happily convert HDV PAL to NTSC DV (and many other motion formats) without any rendering?!”

It can? I didn’t realize FCP could perform format conversions from PAL to NTSC in realtime. I don’t think it can.

If your system is properly set up, you can get all kinds of realtime. If all you did was purchase a Mac and FCP, then you’re not going to get very much performance at all.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Richard Harrington]

Many reasons not to use JPEGs

1. Everytime you open and modify the file, it applies additional compression when saving.
2. They don’t support layers, non-destructive filters, etc.
3. They take longer to render.
4. The are more prone to artificating in the timeline.

Use the Image Processor Sctipt in Photoshop and convert JPEG to TIFF… get out of JPEG…

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[Jarvis Smerd]

[Richard Harrington] “There is NO such setup in FCP…

DO NOT DO NOT Roll your own setups… “

Why? The montage is not intended to be exported out to video — it is meant for computer display.

I understand that “Easy Setups” are there for “common formats”, but FCP6 does let you create your own Easy Setups… are there “official” warnings about not creating your own Easy Setups?

If creating my own Easy Setup is that wrong, then my bad! What Easy Setup should I start with so that I can drop stills on the timeline (in .tif format, if that’s what it takes) such that they won’t need to be rendered and that I’ll be able to export a correct-looking (non-distorted) 640×480 file?

I do appreciate the insight.

(And for what it’s worth, the stills are not on the System drive — I do have a separate RAID volume for FCP data…)

[Rich Rubasch]

Is there a chance your JPEGs are CMYK color space? just throwing in another possibility.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Richard Harrington]

The RT performance is tied to certain codecs, etc.

You can always resize during the compression stage

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[David Roth weiss]

[Jarvis Smerd] “Why? The montage is not intended to be exported out to video — it is meant for computer display.”

Jarvis,

You opened this thread by stating you had just switched to FCP and you wondered why things weren’t working. Richard gave you the answer, but now you’re questioning his respose as though you doubt him? Your expertise on other systems is certainly valuable, but you’re going to have to read the FCP manual and learn many new things before mastering FCP. And, let me suggest that you take the advice you get here and run with it, at least for a while, before questioning its veracity.

In answer to your question above, FCP was designed first and foremost as a professional non-linear editor for those creating broadcast video. Good Web video has hardly even been practical until the last few years, and while FCP was a Web video leader in terms of its integration of export modules and apps into its suite of apps, it has never changed the basic roots of what it was designed for. FCP operates under the assumption that users will input and output video to certain existing video standards. Web video, without standards, is not its primary funtion, and you’ll have to learn how to deal with that instead of questioning it.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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[Jarvis Smerd]

[David Roth Weiss] “Richard gave you the answer, but now you’re questioning his respose as though you doubt him?”

My apologies to Richard if the tone of my reply came off the wrong way; that certainly wasn’t my intention. I submitted my original post when I was in a frustrated state of mind… but the real intention of my post was to hopefully get me to understand the issues at hand, and your explanation about FCP being “a professional non-linear editor for those creating broadcast video” helps a lot. I was under the (apparently incorrect) assumption that the FCP timeline could also be configured for and used to create and edit content in non-broadcast-video formats (such as straight, 640×480 30p stuff designed for “multimedia”, like podcasts and web-based training videos) and still take advantage of the Extreme RT engine for real-time previews.

So I guess now my question becomes:

What can I do in FCP to make this photo montage project easier? Is there an “Easy Setup” I can use to start a new project where I can drop stills (and mattes created by the “Color Solid” generator) onto the timeline and not have to render them? I’m still hoping that there is some setup that will allow the RT Extreme engine and my Mac Pro deal with (what I perceive to be “simple”) stills and solid color mattes without having to resort to rendering everything all the time.

Thanks in advance for any insight!

P.S. Rich, I checked and the JPEG files are indeed standard RGB and not CMYK. 🙁