Using Web Pages in a FCP DV Timeline?

[John Pale]

Try saving the webpages as PDF files (File/Print/Save as PDF). The quality may be better. Open in Photoshop and enter a large dpi (300) in the import dialog. This should result in a document over 2000 pixels wide.

[Colin Mcquillan]

Try using the “Grab” utility. It’s a great little program that ships with OSX, so you should have it in your utilities folder in your application list.

It captures screens, windows, and user designated selections in the .tiff format.
There are many other free-ware, shareware, and pay programs that do this aswell, and will allow capture to other formats,, but I use Grab all the time and i’ve had great results with it.

Then, assuming you have either FCS or FCS2, animate the web page ‘grab’ in motion. It does a far better job of zooming in and out of images than Final Cut.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver BC

MacPro Octo 3.2 6gig
Dual 23″ ACD
2TB G-Speed eS
MBP 2.4 4gig
Lacie Quadra 500gig

[Tom Brooks]

Those are some great tips. Going to “Print” directly from the web page doesn’t get you the operating system and browser-supplied parts of the screen, so that is something to consider, but printing to PDF is a brilliant idea.

If you’re using “Grab”, your screen resolution settings might affect how large your page is. On my Dell 24″, the page sizes were bigger than the original post reported, but still not big enough for a really extreme zoom in. For that, I got the best results by printing to PDF and then “placing” that PDF into a large (2000 pixels plus) Photoshop document. The fonts came in as vectors, so they stayed nice and clean. No JPEG mosquito noise!