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Making jpeg brochure photos look crisp
I know this may seem elemental but…I scanned in brochure pages with photos at 300 dpi into my system (OSX 10.3.4) and imported them into FCP 4.5 (I know, I know. I’m going to break down and upgrade when I replace my G4). The scanned images look great in preview but when they are rendered on the timeline they go soft, somewhat wavy and fuzzy in still shots and vibrate in addition when I add moves. It seems to me I remember something about pixel aspect (these are square in jpeg) and about frame size (these are 2532 X 3544). No field dominance is set and no alpha channels. Please help me fix this problem. I’ve got a big presentation with a potential client next week riding on a solution. Thank you in advance.
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5 Replies
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Among other suggestions that others will have, you have way too much pixel information that FCP has to throw away but is costing you rendering resources in the process. Find some way to down-rez these pics outside of FCP. Do it in Photoshop or if you don’t have P’shop, download and install the open source Gimp Shop (Google for it) and bring pics down to a useable size that you can still pan (if that’s your plan).
Be sure that you render JPEGs with Shift+R beyond the normal rendering Command+R.
Greg Golden
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Yeah, your images are way too big. Are you zooming in on them? If so, only make the image size as big as it needs to be on your closest zoom. Make sense?
example: I work in 720×486 at 72dpi. If I have an image and I know that I am going to zoom into it at a scale of 200%, then in photoshop, I make sure that the image size is doubled to 1440×972 at 72dpi. This ensures quality of image without going overboard.
Another tip I would give you is to apply a little bit of a blur to the image. Since you’re scaling it from such a large image, you might experience buzz from the small lines. Just a dab of blur will do, but not too much or the image will go soft.
My 2 cents,
Reins -
What format are you working in?
Scott Davis
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Scott has asked the important question here. Most likely, you are trying to do this job on a DV timeline and that’s your big problem.
Try the same still in 8-bit uncompressed timeline, add a 1 or 2 pixel vertical directional blur for good measure, and see if that fixes your issues.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles -
Thanks for your tip about the 8-bit uncompressed but that doesn’t seem to work. I’ll see what reducing the pic size does to the issue.
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