Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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I usually just disable the background layer and save it as a .psd or .png (without flattening the layers) then when it’s imported into FCP the background is transparent and the higher layers come through.
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How are you comparing your different versions? There can be a slight change in brightness if you’re changing colour space when making the quicktime (the .png would be RGB and the quicktime would be YUV) so you may have to apply a brightness/contrast filter to get them identical. Trial and error to get the right settings, unless anyone knows suitable numbers.
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I’d use Compressor to change the frames to progressive rather than a filter in FCP. There’s options in the Frame Controls menu to get better quality deinterlacing.
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In principle it ought to be possible to export a sequence as an XML and change the headers so that what’s marked as Shot/Take becomes Master Comments 1 then import that and make the EDL, but I don’t know an XML editor that would do that easily for you.
Otherwise, if you move the columns in your browser so that one you can put in the EDL is next to the one you’ve got the information on, you could copy and paste the information clip by clip, tedious but you’d get there eventually. Good luck.
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I was taught that to maintain the best possible quality for broadcast it’s important to have the least possible number of times that your material is compressed. That’s because recompressing causes what the engineers call concatenation errors (and some broadcasters are still specifying that capture and editing should be uncompressed).
So (I was told) the best path for a compressed material is to either not change the compression for the edit and then export an uncompressed file, or convert it to uncompressed and then edit and export it uncompressed. That’s not always particularly practical, but we can kind of achieve it by editing in a convenient compressed format and then conforming the cut at best quality (the old offline then online workflow).
(My training was a few years ago and various things have changed, including the invention of ProRes, since then.)
When it comes to creating files for specific purposes, I’d export the cut as Current Settings (whatever you end up using) and then use Compressor to make the versions you need, it’s got presets for DVD, Web, etc to get you started. For broadcast, you do really need to get the broadcaster to tell you what file they need as my experience is that second-guessing what they’re going to find acceptable is almost always a waste of time and you end up redoing it.
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Just coming back to the thread to say thanks, that fixed it.
Plus I flipped the resize and deinterlace filter to the quickest settings (as I’m not resizing or deinterlacing) and the processing speed went down to something more reasonable.
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If you’ve got FCP7, take a look at the Timeline Keyframe editor. You can put a keyframe onto a frame then drag it forwards or backwards to a new position and FCP works out what speed it needs be, etc, and you can have mutiple keyframes in a shot so you can do speed ramps much quicker and easier than previous versions of FCP.
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What’s the source for the stills? I remember having some black and white stills (quite a long time ago) which were scans of prints and had severe moiree and it was because the prints were half-tone, so therefore had a grid pattern on them (even though it was invisible to the naked eye). The only way to fix the moiree was to blur the pictures slightly.
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Put your text on video layer 1. Put the pictures on layer 2. Go to Composite mode and select Travel-Matte Luma. That should do what you’re after.
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I agree. I actually use a different computer for downloading stuff and get a bit neurotic over regular backups (by some people’s standards).