Using Stills In FCP

[Rafael Amador]

A couple of ideas;
Never use more definition than the one you really gonna need: Bigger is not better.
So if you are animating the stills make them just big enough to do the job.
If you won’t animate the stills, make them the size of the project.
Avoid JPEG when possible. No because any quality matter, but because the compression scheme makes rendering harder than with any BM format.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Frank Giardina]

Thanks Rafael!!!

Frank Giardina
17 Video Production

[Zeke Meginsky]

Hi, Rafael. I had to respond because I’m working with animating stills in my project. So you’re saying an image’s quality could suffer from it being too detailed?

Because now I feel like I should downconvert some of my big images to only as big as they need to be. What’s the best way of doing that, just evenly dividing both numbers the same? In half?

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Zeke,
Picture can’t ever look better than when displayed at 100% size.
Even using the best means, any up/downscaling degrades de image and FC doesn’t exactly shines on this field. And the bigger the resizing, the higher the degradation. Too much info end up being a disadvantage.
That and the extra burden on rendering for FC.
Is better to prepare the pictures before in Photoshop, that makes a much better job (try the different Interpolation options).
As you point, making the size 1/2, 1/4/ 1/8..probably will make calculations easier for Photoshop (same idea than working with blocks and macroblocks), but shouldn’t affect the quality.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Zeke Meginsky]

That left me a little confused. So too high a resolution WILL negatively affect image quality because Final Cut Pro isn’t great at rendering it? What if it’s rendered and created in another program and the high quality render is imported into FCP?

The final answer seems to be that it’s safest to just take the picture into another program like Motion or After Effects . I’m doing that already, but I was just curious to know if I should have been making the REALLY high res pictures I have smaller if I’m not going in that tight..

[Zeke Meginsky]

“As you point, making the size 1/2, 1/4/ 1/8..probably will make calculations easier for Photoshop (same idea than working with blocks and macroblocks), but shouldn’t affect the quality. “.

Well, it will affect the quality positively in the long run, rather than keeping them at the more detailed size. Is that what you mean?