many stills in project

[Jeff Kirkland]

FCPX wilmdefinitely slow down if the images are too large so the close toy can get them to your final resolution the better depending on how much you might want to crop/zoom in. I can’t say I’ve done projects that have used more than 20-30 images but I usually just make the narrowest dimension 2160px and go from there. Haven’t had any issues with that.

—-
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Craig Alan]

what codec? I plan to set the aspect ratio before importing if possible. I don’t plan to zoom or crop in FC. In aperture the crop tool gives you the aspect ratio so I will pre crop it. I think I can also set a black crop to fill but haven’t tried it. Though it can be done in FC as well.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Noah Kadner]

PNG is typically a safe bet.

Noah

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[Doug Suiter]

You might want to take a few minutes to watch this – it’s a tutorial I made a few years ago and will give you an idea of the sort of performance that you can expect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkd0l7PtzOg

Note that although the stills are jpeg and that they are not reduced in size at all (around 5k x 3k pixels)

I’ll be updating the for 10.3 shortly, but principle is the same.

DOUG SUITER: FCPTalent
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[Keith Mullin]

FCP X can handle just about any format of still image you can throw at it. There is no “codec” to worry about really. I did a stop animation project that I edited in FCP X 10.2 with thousands of still images, it ran slowly after reaching a certain point, but seriously that was thousands and thousands of individual JPEG’s.

[Craig Alan]

mine might run in the 1000s. What was the resolution of your still exports and/or import from still camera card to FCP X?

Large stills used to really muck up legacy.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

thanks

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Keith Mullin]

The workflow I used (which I would probably alter if I did another stop motion), was to capture 18 megapixel RAW images from a Canon T3i through Dragonframe. I then brought those images into Lightroom for color etc. I then exported them all out to JPEG and imported them into FCPX. I tried doing it with TIFF images instead, but the files were just too massive to work with. I never reduced the resolution of the images, and I ended up with a 3:59:00 animation at 24p, or roughly 5760 individual still images in sequence.

[Craig Alan]

[Keith Mullin] “which I would probably alter if I did another stop motion”

what would be your new work flow?

but thanks for the details. becoming confident that this will be pretty painless.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Roger Poole]

Jpeg is a comressed format and although all camera’s record stills in this format to save space on the card it is not a delivery format and is lossy. If you take a jpeg and alter it in any way then re-save as jpeg, the whole thing gets re-compressed and you loose image quality. It’s far better to save as a tiff or png, both of which are uncompressed formats and also have the advantage of being able to carry tranparency – or alpha, if required. Older versions of FCP didn’t like jpegs, and for good reason. Being a compressed format FCP has to uncompress them to play in the timeline, most often resulting in a crash because of the huge processing overhead required. Although FCPX and Premiere can handle jpegs better jpeg’s still require a lot of processing power. I think it far better, and quicker, to deal with stills outside of the edit, in Photoshop or whatever, for resising etc then saving as tiff or png. The size of your images should match those of your sequence dimensions, i.e. 1920×1080 @72ppi. If you plan on doing pan and scan you can double the resolution to 144 or 150ppi. This will allow you to push in on the image without losing resolution and image quality. Size matters. Pixels are a fixed size. a 1920×1080 frame size is natively 26×15 inches regardless of the tv screen dimensions, the bigger the screen the bigger the pixels are displayed. Most point and shoot still cameras record images that are at least 4ft wide in pixel dimesions, which in this example means that 4ft has to be crammed into 26inches. It’s excess baggage and a much bigger file size than required for video sequence. If not dealt with beforehand will result in massive project size if lot’s of stills are used in the sequence.