[Emma Ella]

I have to REALLY blow it up. No black boxes allowed. The saving grace is that the SD footage is shot to look awful from the get-go. It’s literally a toy camera. We aren’t trying to pretend it’s anything but boxy, grainy, blown out nonsense. So my concern is less about image quality and more about being unable to get a clean conversion that plays perfectly on my 2k timeline. I was able to convert it to 1440×1080 at the new framerate, and it then stretched itself out once it was on my timeline (I still don’t completely understand why it does that). I adjusted in my motion tab, pulling the aspect ratio back to 0 instead of -33, and I’m now in green render zone. This is a massive improvement already.

[Emma Ella]

I just brought all of the footage in with log and transfer and the Red plug-in, and that was the size of the shots. When I let the sequence conform to the first clip, the timeline ended up at that size, too. Is this problematic?

So I know a tiny 4:3 at 30fps and a gargantuan 16:9 at 23.98 don’t play nicely, but is there some sort of ideal way to process the small clips? Sounds like I might have blown it from the get-go on my giant-sized sequence set-up. Green render bars are no big deal, but I can’t seem to get anything better than a red bar, and that’s just a big hassle for editing.

Thanks

[Emma Ella]

Ok, 72 dpi, less than 4000 pixels on the longest side. Great. Is there a maximum still file size that FCP7 can handle gracefully? It seems like even with smaller JPGs or TIFFs, my timeline demands a lot of rendering. But at least it is functional now :).

It really would be great to somehow export these stills in a format that plays nice with my prores timeline. If I did tackle Motion, you’re saying I could basically turn these stills into ProRes video files? That would be fantastic. I’d want to have flexibility in the length of the clip, and I presume a video file wouldn’t be able to ‘stretch’ like a JPG, if we want to hold on it longer. I’m assuming I could set a time limit on the clip that’s long enough to accommodate our needs?

Thanks!

[Emma Ella]

Thanks for the quick responses! What about image resolution? I’ve heard different pieces of advice online. It’s currently at 600dpi. Do we want to scale down to 72? Will it affect our ability to go very tight on the media?

The AE/Motion idea is great, but I’m not proficient in either and I don’t have time for the learning curve at the moment. Deadlines…