Scaling down causing quality loss

[Kevin Monahan]

How does it look on your video monitor?
How does it look in the Canvas with it zoomed precisely to 100%?

“Viewing Renders on your Computer Monitor” by me.

All the details here:
https://www.fcpworld.com/fcpworld/news/CC8E5EF3-32B5-4C05-93E6-81F50A8B52C7.html

Kevin Monahan

fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Grahpics and Effects in Final Cut Pro

[Chris Borjis]

set the render quality setting under the sequence setting to best, if that fails try fast. sometimes fast does look better.

The scaler in FCP doesn’t employ bicubic resizing and thus is very low quality.

But do be sure you are judging this on an external monitor since the canvas is dynamic and not to be trusted for absolute accuracy.

[Jeff Coleman]

Has anyone tried a plug-in in FCP that scales better?
Like BCC DVE or something?
Or do you have to completely leave the application in order to get a good scale effect?

[Chris Borjis]

digital anarchy has a “resizer” plugin
thats supposed to be even better than
scaling in after effects.

thats the only solution I’m aware of.

I don’t recall if Nattress made one.

[Rafael Amador]

I know that many people will think that overkilling, but when resizing I set the “Render in High Precision”. I think that FC makes a very good job.

Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17″
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.

[Ian Smith]

I have checked all my settings through and through, and everything is ramped up as high as it gets. Also, I have done my Scaling down within Motion, and I have a quality loss.

The only way I have been able to maintain the highest quality so far is by scaling down within Motion, and exporting the final product straight from Motion as well. Still the picture should not lose quality. That just doesn’t make sense.

If I were to export it from the Final Cut timeline after using Motion to scale down, the quality is the worst.

My boss is, and will not be happy with this as my end result. Please give more suggestions. Thank you everyone for you replies! I really appreciate it!

Ian

[Ian Smith]

I think you may have missed something. That’s exactly what I have been doing, and I still have the quality loss.

I’ll go through my steps:
Import the 720×480 footage into Final Cut Pro. Slap it on the timeline. Control click the clip, and select Edit in Motion.

Once in Motion, I use Motion to scale the video down 20%. Even scaling it down 1%, there is an instant quality loss.

Video should never lose quality when shrinking,… should it?

All my render settings are at Full, Best, etc.

Exporting the video, the video looks exactly as it was in Motion, with the slight quality loss.

Thanks for the reply!

Ian

[Rafael Amador]

Ian,
Another suggestion: Try to render in a better codec than DV. Even if the footage is that. Set the sequence to 8b Uncompressed. Don’t worry about the field order and look how its render.
Another suggestion: If you try again Motion, scale your picture with a filter call “Lanczos Scale Transform” (Image Units> Geometry Adjustments). is a high quality filter mostly for downscaling (comes from Shake).
However I think that everything can work if you change the codec.
And heck again the field order of all your stuff.

Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17″
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.

[Ian Smith]

I’m sorry I didn’t get back to this sooner. I appreciate your reply.

It is a green screen shoot. The background will be keyed, then the video just needs down sized. Then once exported maintaining its alpha channel and converted into an flv… it will be put onto a Flash website in which it finally gets it’s background.

….. so, if you can follow that lengthy step by step, does that give you a better picture? Let me know if I made that entirely too confusing.

Ian