-
Workaround for stills that exceed 4000pixels without reanimating them?
I’ve been given a sequence of a lot of animated stills. Many of them exceed the 4000pixel size limit and give me an “out of memory error” while rendering or trying to export an mov. Is there any workaround for this other than manually resizing all the offending stills and reanimating them? I’ve tried to export xdcam mxfs as well and that seems to work in small chunks, but the exports take forever. I’d also have to reassemble them (in Edius) into one file and that might take as long as reanimating. Any ideas, help!
-Christy
2×2.66 GHz Quad Core
6GB 1066 Mhz DDr3
FCP 7.0.3 -
7 Replies
-
Sadly I have never seen a workaround for this other than what you are doing. I have had to deal with similar sequences on occasion. I ended up breaking them up into chunks and just rendering the small bits, which sometimes took ages. Sometimes had to be broken into smaller sections.
To be honest unless you get lucky and it renders without error the time this all takes you may as well resize and reanimate.
Dave’s suggestion of Motion is a good one if you want to keep the large stills but otherwise its pretty much as you have already worked out.
best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv -
The stills are mostly head shots of various sizes soft dissolved and panned around each other. The framing is pretty specific. I would have used AE but I’m coming to this project so late in the game, the original post house is no longer involved. Anyways thanks for the advice, though it’s not what I wanted to hear. I was hoping there was some magic way to allocate more ram/processing power, or whatever is needed through an apple utility, but I guess that’s unrealistic. I’m not tech savy enough to know.
-Christy -
As Dave suggested, you’re using the wrong tool for the job. You might try (on a duplicate sequence) highlighting, right-clicking, and using Send to -> Motion to see if it will send animation keyframes along the way. Not sure if it will, but if it does you’re in business. By the same token you could send an XML into Premiere and move the Premiere project into After Effects.
If you’re stuck in Final Cut, I’m sure you’ll find best results come from working on a ProRes sequence. If you’re working in XDCAM you’re adding math for a long GOP compression onto the transformation.
When going out to MXF I would export a current settings ProRes without recompressing all frames. If you can use the render files on your timeline you can render in chunks, then an out of memory error won’t mess up the whole export. After you have your stable, self-contained QT movie, convert that to MXF/XDCAM inside or outside of Final Cut.
Also, regularly restarting Final Cut can’t hurt. I would suggest hourly if you’re trying to work with large images.
-
I don’t think the “out of memory” error is a literal message about available RAM. FCP can only use something like 4 Gigs tops as it like any other 32 bit app is restricted that way. So no amount of extra RAM or processor power is going to help in any event. 4K is just the limit FCP can handle.
Keeping the images under 4K and 72dpi is the only real way of keeping it happy. I have had sequences where literally 1 still out of hundreds of shots/images is too large and it gets upset.
But yes AE or Motion would have dealt with it easily or just restricting the size to less that 4K in FCP would have been OK
It’s always a pain inheriting things late on. Hope its not too much of a headache.best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv -
Ah, things are becoming clearer. The sequence is a bio piece with a lot of large stills mixed in with talking heads. The stills are already animated in that they are panned around and some graphics are floated over them. I’m going to try the send to Motion method and see if the stills retain their key points. thank you!
-
-
Thanks, my stills cache was set to 10%, increasing it seems to help a lot.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up