High Res image import

[Shane Ross]

What timeline setting are you using? DV will make them look cruddy, as it is compressed 5:1.

And FYI, DPI is meaningless in video. Pixel DImensions are what count. A 4000×2000 picture at 72DPI will look far better than a 400×200 picture at 300DPI. Make sure the dimensions are big.

Shane

Alokut Productions
http://www.lfhd.net

[Kevin Monahan]

You will want to optimize your images in Photoshop before importing them into FCP. Make them twice the size of your DV frame: 1440 x 960 at 72 DPI. 72 is the target resolution of raster graphics. Anything above 72 DPI will just make the frame bigger, which can make FCP choke.

Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com
Pres. SF Cutters

[Cannx0]

Thanks for the help, guys. I switched to the Animation codec, and that seems to do the job
Angus

[Kevin Monahan]

The Animation Codec should not be used for editing, my friend. It’s an intermediary codec like None and Microcosm and should only be used for preserving quality on renders. The Animation codec hogs up so much bandwidth, that I’m surprised your drives would play it back w/o dropping frames, if at all.

What is the eventual output for this piece? That is the question of the day.

My feeling is that you are not monitoring your images properly in an external video monitor, not the Canvas. If you don’t want to use an external monitor or don’t have one, then the only way you can approximate the quality of your output is to stretch out the Canvas to precisely 100% and uncheck “Show as Sq. Pixels” in the Zoom pop up menu. My suggestion is that if you don’t have a video monitor, hook up a TV set so that you can at least see what you are getting.

Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com
Pres. SF Cutters

[Chris Borjis]

Ok this brings up a good question I keep forgetting to bring up here.

In my meager 6 months of experience with fcp 5 (used to operate a *smoke)
I have never been able to get it to properly downsize hi resolution photo’s
so that they look great on an ntsc sony crt pro monitor.

It seems like the downsizing operation in FCP is not Bi-cubic as it should be, since any other method tends to look REALLY bad (aliasing and such)

As a post house we always operate at 10-bit no matter how small or large or what source the footage came from. It’s just the way we do things here.

The blackmagic 10-bit codec was the easy setup for these projects with photo’s in them.

Ultimately we ended up downsizing in photo shop to as close to 800 x 600 as possible and that made the images completely acceptable.

so how do you get FCP to take a 2,000 pixel digital image and just drop it in the timeline for output to digibeta and not have it look like amateur hour?

[Kevin Jones]

In the motion tab, try rotating the image any increment, like .01.
See if this clears-up your image.

Kevin Jones

[Arnie Schlissel]

try a little gaussan blur. maybe .5 or 1. high res photos will often have fine details that make the image buzz.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[Chris Borjis]

none of those suggestions work.

Its not something a small twist or small blur will fix.

It’s horrible anti-aliased looking garbage.

Try resizing a picture in photoshop or paint shop pro.
Use whatever the crappiest downsizing method is available
so that you see bad aliasing.

Thats what FCP does.

on the other hand, after effects handles it properly.

[Marcus Lyall]

I’d second the comments there. I’m just trying to do the same thing with moving footage.
The scaling in FCP seems to be pretty much unusable for broadcast work, unless there’s some setting I haven’t seen.

And if there is a setting, why the hell doesn’t it DEFAULT to best quality, instead of to crap quality?

I was editing the other day, doing a lot of resizing down to 70% and 80% , and there was huge amounts of artefacting. Like it was doing a bad ‘nearest neighbour’ interpolation. It would just repeat pixels.

?????

And then when you dissolved between clips, you’d get this weird ‘jump’ thing where it would move the picture up by a pixel or so during the dissolve.

Spent the next two hours looking for the magic button I had missed. Couldn’t find it. The only thing you can do is make your edit, then export the project to After Effects through automatic duck.

Can someone tell me I’m wrong here? I’m in the middle of a project that needs lots of resizing done. I’d love someone to point out the little switch that I’ve missed.