FCP’s dirty little secret… a challenge for the experts!

[Aaron Neitz]

Wait, did you try setting your NTSC sequence to “none” for field dominance? I’ve found that FCP tends to always muck simple transformations when you have a field dominance set

[Aaron Neitz]

nevermind, I saw your end conclusions. Final verdict: let’s all work in 1080p and forget NTSC forver. Amen.

[Walter Biscardi]

[David Jahns] “Try it! Take a 24frame HD quicktime and drop it into an NTSC 4:3 interlaced timeline, and take the same clip and drop it into an NTSC 24 frame (non-interlaced) timeline, and then look closely. Do they look the same?”

Nope, they won’t. Standard NTSC is 29.97 so that needs to add pull down. 24 NTSC will match the 24 frame HD so it will look better.

[David Jahns] “Yet drop a 1920 x 1080 TIFF into both timelines, and they both look great. (Or drop a 24frame NTSC clip into a 29.97 timeline (without any distortion) – and it looks great, besides the duplicated frame.)”

You’re comparing apples and oranges. A Still graphic should look good in any timeline. A video clip will have to interpolated correctly to work in a given timeline. It’s the same with After Effects.

[David Jahns] “I’m sure many of you have mixed HD footage into an SD Interlaced timeline, right? What did you have to do – shift fields, offset pixels – what? Tell me what works for you.”

Capturing the footage to the native codec I’ll be editing with. That’s why we have AJA Kona boards in all our suites. Hardware Up / Down / Cross-convert is the only way to go when mixing and matching HD and SD.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[David Jahns]

Hi Walter – I appreciate the effort you’re giving to this, but I don’t think I’m talking about Apples & Oranges.

Forget the 24 vs. 30 pulldown issue for a moment. Even in a completely 30 frame world – Why does a series of single images in TIFF format scale better than those same images in a quicktime format?

Let’s say you have 30 frame progressive HD quicktime, which is a series of individual images wrapped into one file, right? And then export that shot as a TIFF image sequence.

If you put the HD quicktime in an NTSC Interlaced timeline, it will look awful. Yet if you import the image sequence as single frame files, then put those same images in TIFF format into the same timeline, they will look good. They are the same images – one format wraps them into a quicktime, the other treats each frame separately. Yet they look quite different dropped into an NTSC world.

Which brings me back to the “dirty little secret” – FCP can not scale quicktimes into an interlaced timeline. This holds true for oversized motion graphics as well. In quicktime format, they don’t downscale well, but Export them as an Image Sequence and re-import them and put them on the exact same timeline as the quicktime, and they look fine.

[Dave Jenkins]

Lee, we had the exact same experience -HDV to DV25 3:4 letterbox and ended up using compressor to re-compress it and it worked for us as well.

[Flavio G. garcía]

Last week I had this Dv Pal anamorphic sequence with Dv clips on my timeline.

I had to edit a HD Prores HQ clip inside that sequence.

I was about to see FCP open timeline doing its job.

What a big dissapoinment!

First: once edited between the Dv clips, the Hd clip had the green bar over. This means that what you see in real time is preview, and it looks awfull. Really…

If you do full render of the clip, the green bar goes away, and the quality is a bit better, but only a bit. The clip still looks a lot worse than the original clip.

I would expect that a higher resolution clip in lower resolution sequence looks really good, interlacing issus apart, but it

[Lee Berger]

Dave,
That’s good (or bad) to know that it’s not just my problem. How disappointing!

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com

[Lee Berger]

[Flavio G. Garc

[Walter Biscardi]

[Lee Berger] “I can live with “Green Bar” preview quality during the edit, but who could live with the image quality after rendering? Not me.”

This is why if multiple format mixing is important to your workflow, you really should own hardware like the AJA Kona series. All format mixing is done in realtime during ingest. We very rarely mix SD and HD together in a timeline as we convert it all to the native codec / format during capture.

Also, keep in mind that this is version 1 of the Open timeline concept in FCP. As with just about everything else in FCP, it takes time for Apple to get it right.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Lee Berger]

[walter biscardi] “Also, keep in mind that this is version 1 of the Open timeline concept in FCP”

Walter, you’re right. There is always room for improvement, but the squeaky wheel get the grease and if Apple monitors this forum (if they don’t, they should) then it’s good feedback (in addition to their feedback page).

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com