slideshow advice

[Jeremy Garchow]

If you want to remove interlace flicker, simply set your timeline to render without fields in the sequence settings (Apple-Zero, then change field dominance to none).

Jeremy

[Russell Lasson]

[Rick Neely] “Images resized in photoshop at 720×486 (300 dpi)”

It’s my understanding that FCP doesn’t utilize extra dpi (more than 72 dpi). So if your image is resized to 720×486 and you start zooming in, then you will be loosing quality. I’d resize your photos to a higher resolution and a lower dpi.

Rule of thumb: when you’re zoomed in as far as you want to go, your photo shouldn’t scale higher than 100.

Exception to the rule of thumb: zoom in more than 100 if there is no other option.

Some one let me know if I’m wrong with the dpi thing please.

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

One more thing, viewing your photos on a broadcast monitor (or at least any CRT monitor) is a must. Photos have a tendency to have buzz in them (or flicker), especially when there are fine detailed lines that are close together. I often times end up opening the photos in photoshop and blurring those areas.

Jeremy, are you saying that changing the field dominace fixes this problem? (If so, I guess I’ve been doing things the hard way for about 5 years. Dang.)

-Russ

[Eskatonia]

Hi there,

I’ve just released a pack of plugins which might be very useful for your job. It creates slideshows from a folder of images on the timeline in FCP or motion.

You can download the free 14 day demo from here:
https://www.coremelt.com

There is no watermark or any other restriction for the first 14 days, so you can probably do the job with this.

I would recommend to rescale your images to just above your project resolution eg 800×600 72dpi. The plugin reads in the files outside of FCP so it can use the full file resolution but if you don’t need a super zoom then this will be fine.

If interlace flicker is a problem, render progressive as others have mentioned, but it depends on the speed of your move on the images, you may not need to do this.

Hope you find these useful, the plugins are $99US to buy the pack with ten different animation styles of slideshows.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Russell Lasson] “Jeremy, are you saying that changing the field dominance fixes this problem?”

Yep, usually. If there’s no other interlace video in your timeline, setting a progressive render works well. If there’s interlace video in your timeline, then you have to do it the way you have been doing and that’s blur the image a bit.

Jeremy

[Russell Lasson]

[JeremyG] “Yep, usually. If there’s no other interlace video in your timeline, setting a progressive render works well. If there’s interlace video in your timeline, then you have to do it the way you have been doing and that’s blur the image a bit.”

Then I haven’t wasted 5 years doing that… just 3 🙂

-Russ

[13]

Check out fotomagico, it makes creating photo slideshows a snap, super easy, super fast. With the pro version you have custom export options and can even export HD slideshows. You can easily create your slideshow and then export it and bring it into final cut and combine with other video assets.

https://boinx.com/fotomagico/overview/

[David Mcgiffert]

I’ve been working with Fotomagico for a few years now.
It’s stunning rendition of stills is unmatched in any
other slideshow program I’ve seen…now that you can actually
export that quality – something that had been missing up til
now – it is indispensible. (not associated with them in any way).

David

[Chris Poisson]

Third endorsement here for Fotomagico, and my own take on image optimazation (Frame size/resolution recipe.)

For SD projects, this formula ALWAYS works: Tiff files at roughly twice your frame size at 72 dpi, period. Forget technical rationale, it will just work. You will minimize flicker and what you do get can easily be corrected with a little gaussian or vertical blur and//or the flicker filter. I have used this recipe on literally thousands of photos from every imaginable source and it always works.

If you notice, the poster with the new slideshow app above, his recipe for stills seems to be similar, will give his a try, but Fotomagico will be hard to beat for this.

BTW, one other thing if time and quality are an issue, I just shoot my stills with a digital camera, it’s days faster than any scanner and the quality is superb.

[Eskatonia]

fotomagico is a great product undoubtably. The ImageFlow plugins have the advantage of being usable on the timeline in Final Cut Pro or Motion. No need to go to an external application.

I also believe that ImageFlow has several animation styles which are not possible in fotomagico, its designed to be usable to generate quite complicated motion graphics animations from stills, not just slideshows.

You can try out imageflow for free anyway, so you having nothing to lost my giving it a shot. Please do send feedback.

Roger
CoreMelt
https://www.coremelt.com