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Working with stills- going from SD to HD
I’m editing a feature doc with a lot of stills in it. Working in FCP 5.1.4. The majority of footage was shot in 24p and so I’m working in a 720×480 timeline but we are going to have this footage Taranex’ed. So when working with the stills, I have reduced the resolution for editing in my SD timeline (will be doing pan and scan movements on the stills), and will later have the post house reconnect to the high res tif or targa file. In my experience, I have found that when you reconnect to a higher res file (1920×1080), because of the scale difference, the movements are all out of proportion and I would have to recreate the movements. Is that correct? or is there a simpler way to reconnect and preserve the movements already created?
Also, how do I handle the fact that stills have square pixel aspect? -
4 Replies
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I am actually in a similar boat here. I have a program that is all high res stills that I edited at SD resolution in final cut so that I could edit it without rendering, but now I need to render the sequence at a high resolution (portrait oriented HD), and preserve the relative placement and movement of the stills. I discovered that when I change the sequence settings, it is analogous to changing canvas size in Photoshop. I would like to change the sequence settings as if I was changing “image size.” I tried nesting the sequence in a higher res sequence and scaling up the low res sequence, but it just looked like a SD res scaled to HD when rendered. In After Effects there is an option to preserve the resolution of footage within a nested clip when rendering, even if that clip is scaled up. Is there a similar thing for Final Cut? Another trick I might try in AE would be to parent all my stills in the original sequence to a solid, and scale the solid up. I couldn’t find a way to do that in FC either.
Any help?
Thanks
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Eureka!
I figured it out!
The trick that worked is to use Apple Motion. Select the sequence in final cut and choose “send to > Motion Project” This creates a motion timeline with all of the linked images from final cut.
In motion, the images all appear as subclips of one layer. I then rotated and scaled that layer to the size I needed. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to preserve the resolution of the source images. They still looked as if they had been scaled up.
As a last resort, I dragged the images out of my rotated and scaled layer into the motion timeline to create their own layers, and suddenly Voila! The images popped into full quality, and retained all the rotation and movement data from the original final cut sequence!
Magic! A bit of a convoluted workflow, but it works and saves me a lot of headache.
Hope that works for you alw0311
-Matt
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Thanks for the idea. I’m not sure we are going about switching from SD to HD in the same way. The way I was doing it is that I have my still pics each saved as two different files-a high res and a low res. And I’m looking to reconnect the clip to the high res when I’m finished editing, but then the scaling and motion of the picture is all out of proportion. I tried bringing it into motion and reconnecting to the higher res file but it doesn’t seem to work either. Can you tell me how to reconnect to my file to its higher res version in Motion or am I going about the workflow wrong? Should I not work with separate high and low res files? I’m not sure how you were doing yours with low and then high quality rendering.
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Hmmm… that is a different case… in my case I was editing using the full res stills (2134×3200) which edited fine in real time in an sd timeline… You might try reconnecting the files to the full res images before sending it to Motion. You might also try playing with the Media manager to designate your existing stills as an offline resolution… I am more of an AE person that a Final Cut person though so I can’t give you a precise solution. I stumbled my way into mine.
Good luck,
-matt
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