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Low quality on export of movie created by stills
Hi Dear X Men,
I have a question, that puzzles me a bit.
Hopefully any of you has an answer:
I had to finish a film for a theatre show yesterday, that actually was done by another editor, who worked on PPro.
The editor went on vacation, and the choreographer wanted some changes in the film.
Unfortunately, the PPro projects were corrupted and I could not open them on my system.
So, since it was just several images of statues, on music, I rebuild the sequence in FCPX.
Since the the final projection is on a normal Beamer, I made a SD project. After finishing, I exported it as SD QT movie Apple ProRes 25p.
When I compared the result to the MP4, very compressed, reference film, that the other editor exported from PPro, I was in shock.
The FCPX export looked a lot less crispy and sharp – even though my export was a 2 GB ProRes file, and hers was a highly compressed 100MB MP4 file.
So, I set the project to 720p, rendered again to ProRes and still the resolution was less sharp and way softer than the PPro export.
The images where PNGs, PSDs and a view JPEGs.
What can be the reason for this?
Any idea, why X delivers so much worse than PPro here?Thanx a lot for any thoughts.
Greetings,
Sascha.
Sascha Engel
TIME BANDITZ Productions
http://www.youtube.com/taikang -
20 Replies
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Was her project 720P or 1080P? I edit a lot of 720P footage. I noticed a while back that if I built graphics in AE at 720P, they appeared soft in FCPX. When I built the graphics in a 1080P composition, then the graphics were crisp. Maybe something similar is happening to you. Maybe edit in an HD project and export to SD. Or, maybe better would be to export the HD movie and the make the SD from that using AE, Compressor, Squeeze or whatever encoder you use.
John
MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz, 16 GB RAM, OS 10.9.4, QT10.1, Kona 3, Dual Cinema 23, ATI Radeon HD 5870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCP-X 10.1.3, Motion 5.0.7, Compressor 4.0.7
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.3, Motion 4.0.3, Comp 3.5.3, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.3)Pro Tools HD 10 w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec DSP Monitors, Prima CDQ120 ISDN
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Hi John,
As I wrote before, it was HiRes images, either original or treated in PS without resizing and then I worked on a SD TL in FCPX.
After I realised it was much softer, I actually redid it in 720p TL, exported HD, and then scaled it in AE to SD and exported again,
but still, even then the AE export in ProRes was softer and a lot less sharp than the previous export from this project in PPro, even though this export was MP4 and only 100MB and only 640on480.Greetings,
Sascha Engel
TIME BANDITZ Productions
http://www.youtube.com/taikang -
I take it you don’t actually have the project data from the other person? Can you say for sure that he/she didn’t in fact use some additional filters or the likes (a sharpener)? Because I can’t think of anything that would cause what you’re seeing. At least I’ve never experienced it myself, nor have I heard of it otherwise. In fact, at least in the area of H.264, my experience has been that Adobe’s encoder, if anything, is noticeably WORSE than that from Apple/FCP.
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No, unfortunately, the PPro project is corrupted, that i why I had to rebuild it in FCPX.
But I can say almost for 100% sure that no sharpening filter was used.
That is why I am so confused, since the original images are super crispy and the export is a lot more soft. -
Any chance you could post a frame of each for comparison?
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When you Reveal IN Finder one one of the stills, where does it take you?
In the inspector, what is your spatial conform set to?
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[Jeremy Garchow] “When you Reveal IN Finder one one of the stills, where does it take you?”
Good point. Did you choose to make optimised or even proxy media on import??
[Jeremy Garchow] “In the inspector, what is your spatial conform set to?”
That shouldn’t affect the overall quality.
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[Robin S. Kurz] “That shouldn’t affect the overall quality.”
Not unless it’s conformed AND scaled, then essentially, it’s a double scale.
This probably isn’t the issue, but it’s worth exploring, no?
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[Jeremy Garchow] “but it’s worth exploring, no?”
Sure. Only if it’s on “Fill” why would you want/need to scale it? And if it’s on “None” then scaling it wouldn’t make things worse. But then I haven’t tried every possible combination and (scientifically) compared, so sure… give it a look. Who knows. 🙂
But I did in fact compare “fitting” then scaling and “none-ing” and scaling on a *video* (both “raw” and in a compound) and saw no perceivable difference. Who knows if matters are different with stills. Certainly a worthwhile possibility to exclude.
Proceed. 😉
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