Why does this image look so bad…

[Chris Messineo]

Arnie,

I tried your first suggestion, making a still frame and exporting from there and it worked perfectly.

Any idea, why this works and why the normal way doesn’t?

Chris

[David Roth weiss]

[Chris Messineo] “I tried your first suggestion, making a still frame and exporting from there and it worked perfectly.

Any idea, why this works and why the normal way doesn’t?”

Chris,

Please describe your “normal way” in detail please.

thnx,
David

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

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Chris Messineo]

My normal way was simply having the payhead over the frame in the timeline that I wanted to export.

I then select file – export – quicktime conversion then choose still image.

I did this hundreds of times in the past and it always worked – unitl 6.02

For some reason, Arnie’s method works, but I’m wondering why. Especially, why my “normal” way stopped working.

I haven’t tried exporting a movie with quicktime conversion yet, but I suspect I am going to run into the same issue with blotchy looking compression.

[Thorgnyr]

Not that this’ll fix any problems, but if you need that screen badly, thought of taking a screenshot of it? 🙂

CMD-SHIFT-4, then drag selection and voil

[Jeremy Garchow]

DOn’t use QT conversion.

Export a ref movie, like I said, then export a still form that movie out of QT.

Or use Arnie’s much more simple method.

The viewer is an uncompressed timeline of sorts, the canvas uses compression from whatever your timeline is set to. Does this happen if you have no filters on your clips?

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Chris Messineo] “Any idea, why this works and why the normal way doesn’t?”

This is one of those arcane non-square pixels to square pixel things. The freeze fame in the viewer thinks it’s an uncompressed, full raster 1280X720 with square pixels, and that’s how it exports to QT. When you export from your DVCPro HD timeline, it’s exporting from a timeline that’s 960X720 anamorphic pixels, and it exports to QT as 960X720 square pixels, but without squeezing it, causing the jaggies.

This is something I noticed when I started working with DVCPro HD last year. If I tried to render a shot out of Motion or Shake using native DVCPro 720 settings, I got the same exact jaggie artifacts. When I switched all these project settings to square pixel, 1280X720 and rendered to the DVCPro 720 codec, I got perfect results.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Chris,
Are trying to export still from a 16×9 time-line?
FC6 has changed the way to manage the still (don’t know why).
Before when you exported a still from a PAL time-line, you always got a 720×576 still, whatever the aspect ratio of your time-line.
Now when you export from a 4×3 time-line you get the 720×576, BUT if you export from a 16×9 sequence now you get 1024×576. So QT is converting the pixels to square anyway.
In NTSC things get worst. If you export from a 4×3 NTSC time-line you get a 640×480 (?) still.
And if you export from a 16×9 NTSC time line you get a 853×480 picture.
All this is a real problen when you want to send a still to Photoshop and back to FC. The picture is unnecessarily resampled twice: Video Pixels>Square pixels> back to video pixels.
What I doing now is to set my 16×9 clips in 4×3 mode and export. Like that keeps the original 720×576 pixels. In NTSC I don’t figure how to do it because even in 4×3 mode convert the 720×480 in 640×480.
Big mess.
Rafael

PPC G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM/BlackMagic SD/PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM
JVC DTV-17″/FCS2/AE CS3/COMBUSTION/SHAKE

[Chris Messineo]

Does that mean my export of the film (not just the stills) will be blotchy as well?

This is a nightmare.

Is there a better way to work with DVCPro HD and FCP?

[Jeremy Garchow]

DO NOT USE QUICKTIME CONVERSION TO EXPORT ANYTHING.

Sorry, I have said this twice already. When you go to export use Quicktime Movie and you won’t see it.

Jeremy

[Chris Messineo]

I use QuickTime conversion for two reasons:

– to compress the movies size for web use

– to resize the film

Are there better ways to do this?

BTW, thanks everyone for all of the help. I really do appreciate it.

Chris