[Greg Newman]

Hi Shane – thanks for this tip. Turns out this doesn’t help because the camera doesn’t see anything wrong with the clip.

We’ve discovered something of a workaround, though we haven’t full sorted out the problem. The audio and video of the original media each live in their own folders prior to importing. If we identify the problem clips in these folders and simply drag the video file into FCP it will successfully import it after an error warning. An assistant of mine then imported the audio into Quicktime and saved it, then brought that into FCP and lined it up with the imported video clip and it matched perfectly.

I don’t have the media in front of me, so I haven’t yet been able to see if this process can be more efficient, but so far I’ve seen it work. This then points to some kind of discrepancy between the video and audio files that is creating the problem in the first place. No insight into this yet, but at least we can get the problem clips into the system.

I’ll keep troubleshooting this and report back further findings. I’m surprised to not find anyone else out here who’s had this problem.

Thanks, more to come.

Greg

[Greg Newman]

Affirmative. High quality is checked.

[Greg Newman]

I’ve just sent you an email with links to some files for testing. Thank you!

[Greg Newman]

Why Motion or After Effects? Why not Quicktime? Everything indicates that QT merely saves the images as a movie file without compressing them – other posts on this board speak of this workflow too. But even just opening an image in quicktime makes it look bad, and this is what perplexes me…

[Greg Newman]

Yes, thanks for this and your earlier answers. As you mentioned earlier, FCP can indeed import image sequences as individual files to be made into a sequence within FCP. I’ve avoided that step because I have 117 minutes of 1280×720 material and I don’t trust FCP to handle folders full of many thousand individual files.

The FCP manual suggests importing the sequence into Quicktime and choosing SAVE, which it says will create an uncompressed movie with no compression applied. It also says you can choose EXPORT, as you suggested, to convert the quicktime to another codec. However, it emphasizes that saving the file creates this uncompressed version, which is why I chose this route.

In looking at this more closely, I’m discovering this problem: The targa files look fine in Photoshop. As soon as I import them into Quicktime, even before I save or export, they look like crap. Instantly, even a single frame is blocky as hell. Then no matter what I do – save, export, convert, whatever – it looks like crap. I’ve done a test burning of a DVD and it’s horrible.

So regardless of the quicktime process, I can’t even view the targa files in QT without them looking bad. Something is going wrong somewhere.

Any further insight? Many thanks.

[Greg Newman]

Because I have to combine my final audio with final picture, I have to use QT to convert the image sequences to QT just to bring them into FCP. Rather than export that image sequence as Animation at this stage, I’m simply letting QT make a TGA QT, bringing that into FCP and dropping it into a TGA timeline, editing in the audio, and THEN exporting my Animation QT.

And because I have 117 minutes of material, I really don’t trust FCP to handle bins with thousands and thousands of image files, or sequences with thousands of single frame clips. So I see no way around the extra QT step above, again because of the huge amount of media I’m working with.

And yet another step I have to take – I can’t play either a TGA or Animation quicktime on my system, so I will be exporting out of FCP another set of quicktimes, probably DVCProHD, just so I can sit back and watch the 117 minutes for QC.

I am officially married to my computer for the next, oh, seven days…

[Greg Newman]

Yes, this is all true.

I’ve confirmed that I will be delivering Animation Quicktimes to the DVD house. This was always going to be a time-consuming export stage at the end of this project for me, so I was prepared.

Also, the decision to export Targa sequences for color correction was based on quality. We used an AVID Nitris for color correction, and targa sequences were the most “raw” means for transferring media to that system. Then, coming back out of the Nitris, it made sense to make new targa sequences so that we always had the most un-affected image as our master master.

What then surprised me was that while FCP can export to targa sequence it can’t import it back. So I have to do this extra stage of importing the image sequence into Quicktime, exporting a quicktime, then using that in FCP to lay in the final audio elements, and then exporting back out to Animation.

All this would be one thing if this were a 30 second spot, but it’s a serious hassle with a two hour project broken down into 22 segments. More progress bars than you can shake a stick at.

The woes of high quality HD and poor planning…

[Greg Newman]

Actually, I’ve now discovered this is more complex than I thought…

FCP (5.1 at least) does not support importing of an image sequence. I have to load it into Quicktime Pro and save it as a self contained QT, then bring that into FCP. That QT lists TGA as its compressor, since the image sequence is TARGA.

So, my best bet is to create a sequence with TGA as the compressor. That way nothing has to be rendered. I can’t play it back without stuttering, but I can marry the audio and then do my export from there.

The catch in this is that I have 23 image sequences totaling 117 minutes of material. Importing into QT and creating self contained QT’s is going to take a day or more. Then exporting out of FCP is another potential day long process.

I think my workflow plan was far from ideal. I should have just stuck with DVCProHD all the way through.

If anyone sees a shortcut to what I’m trying to do here, please let me know…

Many thanks.

G

[Greg Newman]

Right. That’s the path to follow for exporting an individual sequence.

Batch exporting provides a different path of windows for settings, hence my question…

[Greg Newman]

It does appear to be Sorenson related. I just made a test quicktime using H.264 and it plays back in sync. So as long as my audio mixer can playback H.264 reference QT’s I’m in the clear.

I’ll have to check on my current version of Sorenson – it’s probably old…