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Horrible image quality when using image sequences exported with quicktime.
I’ve run into this a few times working on jobs that are sourced from P2 media. Basically, after the footage is captured into Final Cut Pro it is in a kind of locked in state with the DVCPro HD codec in Quicktime whereby an image sequence will suffer extreme quality degradation if the sequence is output using Final Cut or Quicktime Pro. The resolution is cut by at least a third with some terrible blocky pixelated looking artifacts everywhere. Image sequences are needed for visual effects work with software that does not read the quicktimes, like Autodesk Inferno systems.
The solution in the past was a complicated procedure where you had to export the footage desired with Final Cut as a Qucktime Movie (formerly the “Final Cut Pro” movie export option) so that the footage is not recompressed. Then you had to open up the quicktime, uncheck then recheck the “High Quality” option in the movie properties, then save the movie and quit Quicktime Pro. Then open it again and export to the desired format. Thus the “High Quality” flag seemed to be the culprit.
I had not dealt with this for serveral months and recently found the problem to be slightly easier to deal with. I had tried rendering out image sequences with After Effects before and found the same image degradation but this time (using AE 6.5 OSX) it rendered out fine.
Has anyone else seen this serious image degradation? This comes up when image sequences are needed from FCP DVCPro HD projects, and heard about it happening in multiple visual effects companies.
What are your experiences?
-K
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2 Replies
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I’ve had similar experiences with AE 7 and it’s not there in AE 6.5 (which doesn’t even know the format!).
Strange quirk, but I didn’t have the time to further look into this. One thing you could try, though:Set up a new sequence in FCP to 1280 x 720 (or whatever format you use) with square pixels and motion quality set to best, put your edited timeline into this and render. Might help.
Regards,
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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For our DVCPROHD transfer to film customers we recommend they export a 10-bit 4:2:2 (YUV) quicktime, and we then convert that to RGB frames or other format for the film recorder. If you have further image processing it may still require chroma smoothing and you have watch out for gamma changes which are possible.
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