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jpeg into NTSC sequence
Please advise how to import photo jpegs into an NTSC sequence – photos are 2816×2112 and look great in the viewer but once put into the sequence they loose tons of quality. In a Photo jpeg sequence they look fine on the time line but require rendering and once that’s done they look even worse than in the NTSC sequence with no rendering…I’m puzzled.
Thanks so much! -
8 Replies
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Are you watching this on an NTSC monitor or just the canvas?
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Hi,
Which codec is your sequence? Is is DV you will never get any good quality.
You better try 8b Unc or so. But I think that with still you will allways have to rende.
If you are down-sizing the images in FC probably you will have to add some blur. Anyway for working with pictures I would always recommend you AE or Shake. Kiping the levels right and exporting a .MOV with a YCrCb codedec if you want to bring it to FC.
Cheers,
Rfael -
on the canvas…
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thanks so much, i’ll try shake.
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You have to watch this on a tv monitor, or you will never know the true quality. Loop through a firewire deck with s video if you have to. You will get a better sense of what you are looking at. You can never ever judge the quality of the canvas as it’s merely a low res representation of the real image.
Jeremy
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Thank you! I should have known!
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I use the DV codec every day to do pristine jpeg image sequences. There are definitely some problems with FCP and dealing with jpegs of large size, but not the DV codec. Sorry I don’t know what you’re doing wrong, but you’re not going to notice a whole lot of difference in an 8 bit uncompressed codec. Not to the naked eye at least.
The key to jpegs in FCP is to make them the smallest size neccessary. In the example in this thread, the jpeg is pushing FCP’s maximum size. It should be scaled back in Photoshop to around 1000×1000 for great results. Ohterwise, FCP can’t handle the scale down. It can handle the scale up much easier.
If you’re working with huge jpegs, they’re going to look better the closer they are to their native pixel size. In other words, 100%.
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I second Bret’s comment about resizing outside FCP. The less processing you have FCP do the better your image quality. This extends to filters as well. For example I had used the Flop and Rotate filters in FCP to fix a slide that had been scanned reversed. This created terrible distortions in my image, particularly if I Ken Burn’s it. By correcting the size and orientation of the image in Photoshop first I completely removed the undesirable distortion.
Another thing I found works well when working in a sequence of only still images is to set Field Dominance to None in the Sequence Settings. I’m assuming this essentially makes for a progressive scan sequence display even though I’m using the DV NTSC codec. I don’t know how technically correct it is, but it does yield very nice images on SD DVDs and deinterlaced webstreams. It could be I’m just seeing every line in the FCP viewer but my impression is that the MPEG2 files look better too. Perhaps someone can tell me if that’s just wishful thinking.
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