noise from animation render to FCP

[Brendan Coots]

You didn’t say whether these quality problems also appear when you do a high resolution render out of Final Cut Pro. Without that info, I will assume you are talking about what you see in the FCP timeline.

FCP has a real-time rendering function called RT that will reduce the quality of the footage as much as it needs to in order to play the video back at full speed. Since the Animation codec has a very high bitrate, FCP will make your footage look pretty bad in order to play back smoothly unless you have a very fast machine. You can temporarily disable the real-time function by using the little drop down box on the far left of the FCP timeline marked “RT.” Just tick off the following options:

– Unlimited RT
– Playback Video Quality – HIGH
– Playback Frame Rate – Dynamic

Another possible issue is that you set up a DV-based timeline in FCP, but the footage you are using is in the Animation Codec. Unless the majority of your timeline uses actual DV footage, you might want to change your FCP project/sequence to be Animation codec based instead.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Rob Castilla]

I did render out of AE using animation and uncompressed 8bit to try a couple out. My FCP project is DV in settings but it’s my reel so various types of footage, dv, hd(24p at 720), and this AE footage. It sounds like from the post that and another past post I read in archive I can set my FCP project to animation preference and it will function fine. Is that correct?

Also thanks for pointing out the monitor vs. screen issue. Since posting this problem I read up on you past post of the monitor importance for quality standards. I won’t be able to work on this until tonight but I will do I dvdstudio dvd burn test and see what it plays like on tv.

Thanks for the replies.

[Rob Castilla]

thanks for the info Brandon, actually only five seconds of a minute long project is the AE footage I;m talking about. This rest if DV footage as well as HD 24p720 footage but from posts in the archive it sounds like all of this will work in the FCP with animation settings. That sound right to you?

[Makanoy]

Hi there,

I just read this post, since I’m experiencing exactly the same problem. Working with some Animations rendered by AE (Animation Codec) and imported the footage into my FC project (DV PAL). I’ve plugged on two reference monitors, one LCD, one TRC. It all looks really crappy on every screen. Thin Lines are not shown smoothly – they are full of “stairs”.

My question now is, may this have something to do with interlacing. I’ve tested various settings, such as lower first, upper first and none in the rendersettings of AE, but none of the clips turned out to be shown smoothly on my monitors (in FC). The strange thing about it, when i check the preferences on each clip in FC, it shows for all clips the same interlacing: lower first. After putting the clips on the timeline, the clip rendered with option “lower first” in AE, automatically adds a “move fields”-filter to it. This one also looks the nicest on my monitors, but i’m seriously confused with this issue now.

Also when I render the clips from AE into DV PAL, it looks crappy. I really don’t know what to do now, please help! I just need to know what rendersettings I need in AE for best quality import to FC DV PAL Project.

Thanks in advance

remo