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Using Jpegs in DV timeline
I was given a bunch of jpeg photos to cut into a 1 hr DV/NTSC sequence as the opening which will be about 1 minute 30 secs long. I remember reading advice from a few people on the subject, to prep them with photoshop. Well I dont have photoshop and I have about 80-100 jpegs that are 72dpi with an aspect ratio of 2304 x 1728. My plan is to do some pan and scan, dissolves, motion moves etc. Should I create a new sequence and use a different setting and then export that as a quicktime and re-import into my main sequence or….? Should I open them in preview and export them as something else besides jpeg before I start? What’s the downside of leaving them as jpeg and working in the DV/NTSC timeline? Final destination is DVD.
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7 Replies
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Frank,
Frankly, I have never understood all the problems reported on this forum with regard to importing and animating stills. I do it all the time and never have problems other than the occasional scan line flicker that invariably happens in both line art and photos with crisp horizontal lines. I have dedicated programs on the PC side for animation of stills, such as the wonderful DigiRostrum, but FCP does such a fine job that I hardly ever use it anymore. Although JPEGs are not the ideal still format, because they use a somewhat lossy compression, I am using many JPEGs in a DV show right now that were delivered to me in that format, and they are fine. I would suggest that yu import a few and test them, but I thnk you’ll encounter no problems.
DRW
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You can use the photos as is. Their size is great for pans and zooms. Create the sequece for the way you will export it to tape and import the photos to your browser. You may need to render the photos in the timeline but that’s the way it goes.
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Most advice I’ve seen about using JPEGs in FCP is…….don’t use that image format becuse it’s a lossy codec. I think the trouble starts when encoding to MPEG2 for your DVD. That’s when you’ll see the decrease in quality with regard to your JPEGs. The reason for running them through Photoshop is to convert them into a Photoshop document, or .psd file. But if you have another program that can convert your JPEGs into a Tiff or a Gif file, that wouuld also work. I’m pretty sure that the program “Graphic Converter” is still a free app and it can easily convert JPEG to the Tiff format, which would be the next best thing to a .psd file.
Just Google it and it should come up.
– Don
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Graphic Converter is still free with MacOS. You should have it in your Applications folder.
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Thanks for the input guys. I do have Graphics Converter, however I was hoping I wouldn’t have to go through the process of converting all these stills. Being that this project is not for broadcast I may just put up with the loss I will get in the mpeg2 compression for DVDSP.
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Use them as is for the best quality. Converting them to something else just adds another step of processing. You can’t improve the quality of something by converting to something else.
If you’re using FCP 5 make sure the motion settings in prefs are set to the best so that you get less flicker, etc.
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If you haven’t yet, bump up the ‘Still Cache’ [in the ‘Memory & Cache’ tab under ‘System Settings’] – that’s why it’s there.
If you’ve never done this, try 30-50% and see if that makes a noticeable difference – you’ll know.
Good luck.
pvw
Phil Van West
Terra Nova Productions LLC
Denver, CO
Video Production/Post-ProductionG5 DP 2.5GHz / 4.5 GB RAM / 2x250GB SATA / OS 10.4.2 / FCP 5.0.3 / QT 7.0.3
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