Problems with stills in FCP6

[Richard Harrington]

You’re welcome…

sorry about hosptial..

Short answer is this.

1. make ure FCP Motion Filtering is set to best
2. NEver use JPEG
3. If looking for maximum quality… get out of DV space… you can edit in DV… but witch sequence at end to 8-bit or 10-bit and re-render before compressing for DVD
4. Where possible size photos to match screen size.
5. Do Zooms/Pan & Scans in AE… superior for it

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[David Roth weiss]

[Toni Carey] “Does this mean I should start a new project at dv50 and bring everything in there and redo it?”

Toni,

Richard knows all the stuff about scanning and importing and animating stills. You can’t go wrong if you follow his advice and directions implicitly

Meanwhile, try this simple trick…

1. Duplicate your existing timeline.

2. Open the new timeline.

3. In the “Sequence” menu click on “Settings” and you will see an area labeled “Quicktime Compressor Settings.” Change the compressor to either DV50 or ProRes.

4. Now re-render your timeline.

5. Now check out your animated stills and please report back with your findings…

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Toni Carey]

Hi Richard,

Thanks so much for the help. Sorry it took a while to respond — I was just in motion for the last couple of hours learning it and reconstructing the sequence again. I don’t have ae yet but as soon as I learn motion, I’ll graduate to it.

In the meantime, I will definitely give your directions a try.

Best to you!
Toni

Toni Carey
formerly Toni @ TONICK
http://www.tonickproductions.com
2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo IMAC
w/500GB Internal HD
running MAC OS X 10.4.11
(always updated to current version)
1 LaCie 500 GB & 1 LaCie 1TB HD’s firewired to it
Running FCP Studio 2
Use Canon GL2 to shoot and digitize footage

[Toni Carey]

Hi David,

Thanks for the post! I was in motion for the past couple of hours so I just got it.

I took a portion of the timeline and did as you directed. It’s going to take a while to render but I’ll try it both in DV50 and ProRes 1st and then post back to you.

Thanks again! I super appreciate it!
Best,
Toni

Toni Carey
formerly Toni @ TONICK
http://www.tonickproductions.com
2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo IMAC
w/500GB Internal HD
running MAC OS X 10.4.11
(always updated to current version)
1 LaCie 500 GB & 1 LaCie 1TB HD’s firewired to it
Running FCP Studio 2
Use Canon GL2 to shoot and digitize footage

[Toni Carey]

Hi David,

I did follow your instructions on duplicating the timelines and changing the sequence settings. (for DV50 and ProRes regular (not HD)) and re-rendered them out. Unfortunately they don’t look any different from the problem sequences but it was worth a try.

Thanks!
Best to you!
Toni

Toni Carey
formerly Toni @ TONICK
http://www.tonickproductions.com
2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo IMAC
w/500GB Internal HD
running MAC OS X 10.4.11
(always updated to current version)
1 LaCie 500 GB & 1 LaCie 1TB HD’s firewired to it
Running FCP Studio 2
Use Canon GL2 to shoot and digitize footage

[David Roth weiss]

If that didn’t help, then let’s back up a little…

As I recall you have written that you tried delinterlacing and a whole bunch of other things. So, what exactly were you dealing with when you changed the compressor settings at my recommendation? I have a suspicion that, in your attempt to try everything, you have applied incorrect filters and such, as Richard also pointed out earlier.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Jeremy Garchow]

You aren’t being dumb. Don’t worry about it.

2) I think David ‘Lee’ Roth Weiss told you how to change the codec.

3) Follow that same advice and change the field dominance from lower to none. Don’t do this though if you have regular ole interlaced 60i footage in your timeline.

Jeremy

[Richard Pengelly]

Man I can feel your pain. Redoing everything over and over again only to find your problem still not solved. Alas this is why I am getting out of the editing biz. To many issues to many unsolvable problems to much BS.

[David Roth weiss]

Toni,

I have managed to track down a possible issue that might be the source of the ongoing issues you are having with your stills.

Its possible there may be an issue causing certain renders in older projects to render at single-field resolution.

Try the following test please:

1. Close your current project.
2. Open a brand new project
3. Set the Easy Setup to match your previous project (DV NTSC I think you said)
4. Open a new sequence
5. Cut in one of your still images.
6. Animate a simple zoom in the motion tab
7. Now render

Did you find that the results are substancially better than what you were getting in your old project?

Are you by any chance fully updated to the most recent versions of FCP?

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Toni Carey]

Hi David,

I followed your directions and opened a new sequence, etc. and imported a couple of different versions of the picture that was giving me the worst problem. In every case, the pictures scaled without the wavy, watery effect! I don’t get it but I’m glad you told me what to do. I should mention that the photos that I blurred slightly and saved as tifs came out the best.

Also, it turns out I did end up spending 12 hours yesterday redoing the entire thing in Motion (and learning Motion at the same time — not really recommended but it worked). The pictures came out really so much better (quality wise) using motion (as opposed to FCP — which many of you tried to tell me) and then importing them into fcp after rendering them out just in quicktime format (video only).

Also, I should mention that my husband found a great write up on Ken Stone’s site that explained I should have had my canvas set up for 100% picture instead of viewing it as “fit to window” which really makes it look terrible. I suspect that this was the main problem — that at some point, I actually did fix the problem with tifs and blurs but because I was relying on this incorrectly set up canvas window and in my freakage had stopped burning reference dvds to check them on the TV, I didn’t realize I may have fixed the problem.

Yes, everyone, I promise when my income tax check comes in, I’m getting a monitor! I really can’t thank you enough David (and everyone who replied and helped with this insane problem that was a lot of my own unintentional making). God it’s gonna feel good to actually sleep tonight! 🙂

Thank you so much David! And thank you Jeremy Garchow, Richard Harrington (I’m buying his book!) Dave Jenkins, Gordon Gurley, and Richard Pengelly for their help. You guys are seriously the BEST!

Best to you David!
Toni

PS. If anyone reads this later looking for answers you should know that the best quality I got was using tifs with a slight blur on them and then timing the slideshow out in FCP and then duplicating it in Motion and exporting out as a simple quicktime (video only since I imported the music as a reference track in motion) and importing that back into FCP and marrying it up with the music track

Toni Carey
formerly Toni @ TONICK
http://www.tonickproductions.com
2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo IMAC
w/500GB Internal HD
running MAC OS X 10.4.11
(always updated to current version)
1 LaCie 500 GB & 1 LaCie 1TB HD’s firewired to it
Running FCP Studio 2
Use Canon GL2 to shoot and digitize footage