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FCP’s dirty little secret… a challenge for the experts!
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David,
Try going to Sequence-Settings-Video Processing tab and set the Motion Filtering Quality to Best instead of Normal.
Gary
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tried that already – doesn’t help.
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I came to this thread a little late, but I want to thank you guys, especially David, for the helpful information. I had been nesting 1080p30 timelines in NTSC 8-bit interlace timelines (for export to Beta SP) and I just couldn’t figure out why the video looked so bad. Now I know why.
Now my final timeline is NTSC 8-bit progressive, and I let my AJA Kona card do the conversion when exporting to Beta SP. Looks much better.
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Hey Mr, Jahns. A little follow up to this conversation.
I am now doing a huge retrospective for an agency that we work for a bunch. It involves footage and motion graphics from the last couple of decades. I am getting material that is HD, SD, different codecs, frame sizes, frame rates. I am editing in a 10bit Uncompressed SD timeline with filed rendering set to none (i.e. progressive). I have noticed the softness issue as well, but I think I might have found a fix. After rendering, some of the footage looks soft, just like you have pointed out. So I went to the browser and noticed the field dominance of some of the clips was set to lower as they should be, for something like a dv NTSC video. You would think it should be set to lower, right? Well, it appears FCP6 is handling field dominance differently than other versions of FCP. I have found that if I interpret everything with a none dominance, everything clears right up. My instinct tells me that it shouldn’t be this way, but it is.
Don’t know if this helps, but my program looks much much better after turning all my field dominance to none for the actual media files, even though some of them should be set to lower.
Jeremy
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Hi Jeremy – thanks for the follow up.
that’s very interesting… I have tried to fool around a bit with 30 frame Progressive formatting in the timeline, which certainly helps with downscaling HD progressive media, but I don’t think I ever tried changing an interlaced clip’s FD to none.
So, you’re basically telling it “Screw the interlacing” at every stage – even when starting with interlaced footage.
Have you watched the timeline output on an interlaced monitor? I have found that sometimes it will look fine on my FCP monitor, and even on an HD-LCD, but then when looking at a good old fashioned NTSC monitor the field dominance (or lack thereof) can really muck things up.
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[David Jahns] “So, you’re basically telling it “Screw the interlacing” at every stage”
Yes. FCP hasn’t been like this before. Also, like I said, I am working in a progressive SD timeline. I have not tried an interlaced SD timeline.
[David Jahns] “Have you watched the timeline output on an interlaced monitor?”
That’s all I have. It’s a Sony PVM 20L5/1.
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Sweet! That’s great news.
Maybe when you are finished, you could write an article for the Cow to distribute the info as widely as possible.
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I would if it was absolute truth (whatever that is in video land, it’s all kind of a hoax isn’t it?), but as with anything else, these were my findings and it worked for me and hopefully for you. I don’t know the whole in and out of the situation and the dissemination of anything that I find to land in the grey area and perpetuate as law is not something that I like to do. Hopefully someone searching the cow will run across this thread and find what they are looking for. That’s cool enough for me.
Now, if someone sent me a box of chocolates and asked me to write an article for mass distribution as the truth, well, then I could be pushed in that direction. Everyone has their weaknesses, you know?
You know another weird thing I found today? Everyone has been talking about how the render files disappear in FCP6. I worked very late into the evening last night on this crazy project only to find the render files were missing this morning when I came back. Well, it turns out that it was an old trick that someone pointed out on the cow a while ago (whoever posted it I thank you tremendously). It seems that somehow the render files folder got buried in the contents of the actual Final Cut Pro application bundle. I trashed those out of the application and freed up over 120 Gigs of space on my boot drive in trashed render files and the current render files seem to be holding now. Something is awry, there and it is beyond me. If I were a guessing man, it’s a permissions issue but I digress.
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