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Quality of playout from FCP HD much superior to Quicktime Pro?
G’day folks..
I was wondering if anybody here might have an idea why I’m seeing this:
Playing out from a G5 on a Blackmagic Decklink card via FCP HD the quality on a broadcast monitor is great, pin-sharp and jitter-free! When I take the file, export it to a quicktime self contained movie, then play it via FCP again it looks the same.. just lovely.
However – when I take the exact same file, and play it out via the standalone quicktime pro it looks awful! Jittery, artefacts everywhere and interlacing errors too!
Any ideas folks? It’s been driving me mad!
Thanks
-charlie
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3 Replies
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Open up the movie in QuickTime, choose Window->Show Movie Properties (Apple-J), select the Video Track and click on the Visual Settings tab. At the bottom right is a checkbox for High Quality; just make sure it’s checked.
Back in the old Powermac G3 days, machines weren’t so hot at playing video so this option allowed real-time preview. Why it’s STILL the default is beyond me.
There’s also a handy droplet called HiQual that does it for you automatically.
Hope that helped,
Tom
Split Image
http://www.split-image.co.uk -
Amazing how much this trips people up. Hi-Qual? Cool! Now you can do a batch of movies instead of setting the flag one at a time. Thanks Tom. Here’s an article I wrote about the topic.
https://web.mac.com/sfcutters/iWeb/fcpworld/news/D4363B62-EFF5-4F30-B719-9A5E93AE4C92.html
Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com -
Thanks for that guys – unfortunately that’s one of the first things we tried.
It’s actually a small part of a larger issue – I should probably make this a separate post but I’ll do it here first:
Essentially we’re trying to find a quick way of compressing a DV file at a remote site, then sending it up to the central location for playout. We were hoping that by compressing using H264 we could change the timeline in FCP to be native H264 and play it out directly when received – but it doesn’t play out at all from FCP (thru the blackmagic decklink card) to the broadcast monitor, and the only option is to render it back to native DV!
The Quicktime prob is part of that – we decided to see if we could play out the 264 file from it – and we can by presenting the video. It looks rubbish tho, even with high quality set, but as a comparison we presented the native DV file and it also looks rubbish! As we can compare directly with the FCP DV playout we did and the quality is beyond comparison. As it’s exactly the same file, we’re unsure why presenting video on Quicktime looks so bad?
The main issue is that FCP won’t play out 264 compressed video on a native 264 timeline at all!
Any ideas?
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