Vector Art in Final Cut Pro 7

Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

Vector Art in Final Cut Pro 7

Posted by David Rabinowitz on November 2, 2009 at 10:03 pm

Creative Cow Folks,

I’ve seen this addressed elsewhere but none of the posts quite answered my question.

Sometimes when I import vector art as jpeg/png/tiff files from a site like Shutterstock into Final Cut it works very smoothly but often with the simplest images I get the worst distortions.

I have tried saving jpegs as tiff or png files before import. I’ve tried importing into Motion, putting the graphics together there and then importing into final cut. We are working in DV NTSC and I’ve tried changing the sequence compression settings to Prores. I have already resized for video (720 X 480) to (720 X 540).

I still can’t get a simple smiley face from BigStockPhoto which is 72 dpi to import without bad pixelation. Am I doing something wrong?

Any help would be much appreciated. The graphic looks great in the viewer and terrible in the canvas.

John Fishback
replied 16 years, 10 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Bj Ahlen
November 2, 2009 at 11:51 pm

The distortion comes from your JPEGs etc. using square pixels, but NTSC uses a Pixel Aspect Ratio of 0.9091, so your circle will come across as an ellipse, etc.

Use Photoshop (or similar program) to do the rasterization, selecting NTSC for your raster image if you have a recent version of Photoshop.

DPI doesn’t matter in video, that’s only for print. An 100×200 graphic at 72 dpi will come across identically to a 100×200 graphic at 1200 dpi.

The DPI is actually just meta data that specifies at what size the pixels should be printed.
David Roth weiss
November 3, 2009 at 12:05 am

Are you editing in a DV timeline? if so, time to read what I’ve written below about DV compression.

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1011833

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
John Fishback
November 5, 2009 at 5:42 pm

Also, check the Scale parameter in the Motion tab. FCP will sometimes size images to fit the screen. Make sure that Scale is set to 100.

John

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