Weirdness using JPG and TIFF stills

[Chris Poisson]

Sounds like you need to render the sequence.

[Jack Pitzer]

I rendered, and re-rendered. I even tried killing the render files, and rendering again. I also tried droping the sequence into a new sequence.
I’ve had this same problem from time to time, but it’s not consistant.

[Chris Poisson]

Jack,

Try the following:

First, optimize your stills in Photoshop, make them all no more than twice your frame size at 72 dpi. You can’t add any quality to your jpegs by making them into tiffs, so forget that. Then try using the opacity controls to dissolve your stills with some overlap on each.

Or, get some kind of third party transitions like Boris Continuum Complete or Joe’s filters and see if those don’t work better.

Another thought, are you watching your transitions on an NTSC monitor? You can’t judge quality on the canvas. Short of having a monitor, render the movie out to QT and see what that looks like.

One last thing, try using PanZoomPro from lyric.com to move your stills. Buttery smooth, no keyframes for transitions to push around, simply great.

[Chris Borjis]

moving stuff with the built in motion tool in fcp is pretty useless most of the time if you want it to look good.

I’ve learned 2 important things when it comes to using still photo’s in fcp.

1) always resize them down so they are no bigger than 600 pixels tall. You have to get them very close to standard resolution size. FCP for whatever reason just can’t resize pictures with bicubic quality like most other nle’s out there. I really wish they would simply fix that.

2) make darn sure in your project settings that the rendering quality is set for best. for some stupid reason its defaulted to a lower quality setting.

[Dean Sensui]

Sometimes no matter what you do, doing simulated moves on still images may not look all that great when done with FCP. Same goes for scaling video. Even with rendering set for “best quality” it may not look as good as it should.

I’ve since resorted to doing these things in After Effects.

Regarding image size, you’ll need to size each image so that your pixel representation ends up at 1:1 if you’re zooming in.

For example, if you’re starting off with a wide view, then slowly zooming in to show just half the image, then you’ll need to start off with a JPEG or TIFF that’s 1440 pixels wide in order to end up showing just half the image with a video framing that’s 720 pixels across.

Exact resolution doesn’t matter: 72, 100 or 300 pixels/inch is irrelevant in video. It only matters in print publishing and the web. What counts is the total number of pixels in an image, and a standard definition TV screen is 720 pixels across.

So if you’re scanning a bunch of pictures, keep an eye on the final pixel dimensions of the image and ignore the inch count. Most scanning software should provide this info and can sometimes even be set to display it by default.

Regarding AE with FCP, I’ll lay everything out in FCP, then use Automatic Duck to move it all into AE. Only the portions with the DVE’s are rendered out and added back to the FCP sequence (I keep the original files in place for future reference but position the rendered movie over the top of it all).

Automatic Duck isn’t cheap but it saved me from a lot of anguish when I had to rescue a project earlier this year.

Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii

[Neil Ryan]

[Dean Sensui] “and a standard definition TV screen is 720 pixels across”

That’s in Rectangle pixels – be aware, when you’re playing with your stills in PhotoShop or whatever, whether you are working in square or rectangle pixels. Usually, stills would be received as Square pixels files.
Don’t want circles ending up as eggs. Not sure what you’re doing? – go through your procedure with a test file that has a circle, and make sure it is still a circle once its in your FCP sequence and playing out on your video screen.

[Bob O’brien]

I have a very different experience with oversized stills in FCP (FCS).

I use oversized stills in my programs all the time. I usually resize huge images down to 1500 pixels x whatever x 72dpi(3-5 Mb)… just because that’s almost always plenty big enough to zoom in and pan around. I almost always add the anti-flicker filter to the pix which really help smooth things out. After rendering, it’s as clean as anything I’ve done in After Effects.

Although most of my work is done uncompressed 8-bit, even in DV I have had excellent results with large photos.

Borjis, I would suggest trying this workflow, because it sounds like you’re disappointed with your results, and you don’t have to be. FCS is fantastic.

Best of luck.

Bob

[Neil Ryan]

Bob O’Brien said: “I usually resize huge images down to 1500 pixels x whatever x 72dpi(3-5 Mb)”

Dean is correct in saying the dpi setting is irrelevant. Some of us follow the trend of treating video as 72dpi because it has mattered on some systems in the past. Not so, now, on FCP.
from page 339 of the current Manual:
Video Is Not 72 Dots per Inch
There is a myth in video graphic design: Since some older computer displays used 72 pixels per inch, all video created on a computer must be at this resolution. This is not true or necessary. The dimensions of a video image are dependent only on the number of horizontal and vertical pixels used in the image. Pixel dimensions alone determine the resolution of a video image. You can easily test this yourself by creating two 720 x 480 images in a still graphics program, setting one image to a resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch) and the other to 72 dpi. Import both images into Final Cut Pro and compare the two. They are absolutely identical. This is because video editing software does not use the dpi setting of a graphic image.
Even though the dpi setting for your graphics is irrelevant for working with video, keep in mind that many people may still adhere to a policy that graphics for video must be 72 dpi. To avoid confusion with other graphic designers, you can just as well leave your video graphics at 72 dpi. Just know that there is nothing special about this setting.

[David Heidelberger]

Final Cut may not necessarily be rendering the clip. It sounds like the sort of look you get when FCP thinks it can play something back in realtime. Check the render bar above the clip in the timeline. If it’s any shade of green (bright for “preview”, olive for “full”), Final Cut has not actually rendered your still. Under “Sequence>Render All” make sure that “Preview” and “Full” are both checked. Then hit option-r to render your whole timeline. Hopefully, you’ll be much happier with the results. (You could also check those settings under the “Render Selection” menu and then just be sure to select the appropriate clip and hit command-r to render)

Good luck,
– David