[Gordon Monro]

Hello Krystallia and everyone,

Yes, FCP is expensive, which is why I am still using an old version. (I don’t make any money out of this.)

My current project is my first attempt at HD (I am doing 720p as the projector I have access to has 720p as its native resolution – this is for an art show). Export is another problem I would like advice on. I don’t have a Blu-Ray burner, or Blu-Ray authoring software. I am using Compressor to export in MPEG-2 format. This gives me a .m2v file that QuickTime cannot play (unless I buy some plug-in, it seems). However I will be using a small Western Digital media player that will play .m2v files, so that’s the way I’m going.

I’m assembling my project in HDV (which as a bonus doesn’t need rendering in FCP5). I saw a comment somewhere that HDV is not a good codec for frame-by-frame work, but at least for 720p it has square pixels and 720p24 seems to avoid the 25/30 or 50/60 problem (and I’ve had enough of the NTSC/PAL hassles – I live in a PAL country). FCP 7 would give me the ProRes codecs – I haven’t seen Final Cut Express (which would be a lot cheaper) but I don’t think it has the ProRes codecs?

BTW I’m doing animation, but not stop-motion with a camera – I have written a computer program that generates my still frames. That seems to have been the easy part.

Gordon Monro

[Gordon Monro]

I am doing the same thing, working in 1280 x 720 HD. I have Final Cut Pro 5 (somewhat old). I also needed QuickTime 7 Pro, but installing QuickTime 7 (non-pro) and Final Cut Pro upgraded QuickTime 7 to Pro.

Here is what I have been doing.

(1) Have the stills with consecutively numbered file names, like picture0000.tiff, picture0001.tiff, etc. I was able to make the images at a size of 1280 x 720.

(2) Open QuickTime7 (which turned up in the Utilities subfolder of Applications under the name “QuickTime Player 7.app”).

(3) Select File -> Open Image Sequence, and select the first image of your sequence. This actually brings in the whole sequence.

(4) It may take a while to load the images. The playback from inside QuickTime 7 was terrible on my machine, but that’s OK.

(5) Select File ->Export. I chose “Movie to QuickTime Movie”, and then there are a lot of options. I chose 720p24, which is what I had for my Final Cut Pro project.

(6) Import the resulting movie into Final Cut Pro, and it behaves like any other clip.

QuickTime 7 may have a limit of 5000 image file in a single sequence, but none of my sequences are that long.

For the experts out there: Is there a better way to do it? I have Final Cut 5 – have things changed in Final Cut 7? Is it still necessary to go via QuickTime 7?

Cheers,

Gordon Monro