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I’m losing quality from AE to FCP!
How do I mantain image quality when exporting footage from After Effects to Final Cut Pro?
Here’s a little background:
I’m dealing with an actor that was shot in front of a green screen on DV25. The footage was captured in Final Cut Pro and imported into After Effects. I made sure that the ‘make self-contained movie’ box was left unchecked in FCP so that I wouldn’t suffer any loss from further compression. I’ve successfully keyed the footage and moved it slightly to make room for an accompanying graphic. Yet when I export the footage back into Final Cut Pro, the image is noticeably soft! What am I doing wrong!
Thanks for your help ahead of time!
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5 Replies
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you may want to post this in the FCP forum as well, but many times its simply a matter of checking your playback settings in fcp. also, are you looking at the footage on an ntsc monitor or your computer screen? if it’s the computer monitor only, don’t judge the final fcp output by that.
again, cross-posting in the fcp forum may help if these tips don’t do the trick.
Dan
PrEditors.net -
THanks for the response. I just posted the question in the FCP forum as well.
I checked my playback settings as you said, and they’re set to High and Full quality. I do have an NTSC monitor and its actually after checking the footage on the NTSC that the softness began most evident.
Thanks for the help, but do you have any other suggestions?
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did you separate fields?
did you reintroduce them with the render?
did you move the image up say 1 pixel or an odd number of pixels without separating fields?
what codec did you render to?I do this kind of stuff almost every day and have never noticed any quality loss.
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To answer your questions, I added my answer to the end of your question.
Q: did you separate fields? A: I interpreted my footage as ‘lower field first’
Q: did you reintroduce them with the render? A: I rendered my footage as ‘lower field first’
Q: did you move the image up say 1 pixel or an odd number of pixels without separating fields? A: I made sure that the footage fell on an even number on the Y cooridinate. For instance, 242 or 290.
Q: what codec did you render to? I rendered as ‘Quicktime DV NTSC 48kHz’ (I had originally render as lossless. Walter Bicardi on the FCP forum helped my out by recommending I render to the same codec. Thanks Walter! The softness issue improved but its still a little soft. Is it field order problem now?)
What would really be helpful is if you would outline the procedure from import to export that you would do to maintain top quality using DV footage.
Already I am very thankful for the help that I’ve received from both the AE and FCP forums. Thanks Creative Cow!
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Just an addendum. Walter’s name is Walter Biscardi, not Bicardi. Sorry Walter.
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