Nicole Haddock
Forum Replies Created
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Ok, one last thing to try.
Export from Motion to Animation codec.
Bring that into FCP. Use Easy Setup to make an NTSC, 29.97 (or 23.98, whichever is your frame rate) DV-NTSC track. Bring the quicktime file to the timeline, do not change the settings to match.
Double click on the clip. In the Viewer window go to the Motion tab. Blow the thing up to 102%.
Go to your sequence settings (Apple + 0), in the Video Processing tab, on the Motion Filtering Quality dropdown, choose Best. Leave the other settings ALONE.Export, compress with Compressor, bring it into DVDSP, and see if it persists.
I think you should blame Motion at this point for being it’s predictably weird self. The blowup won’t cause too much blurring or loss of picture. I blow SD footage up to 102 or 103 all the time and it’s not noticeable to 99% of people out there (us being the 1%, maybe!)
This should clear up the hinky 1 pixel edge, keyword should.
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The easy answer is the last part- to lasso a group of clips, hit A for the select tool, go to your timeline and just draw around the area you want. Alternatively, if everything’s in the same track, you could just hit the T for the select track tool and grab everything that way.
Now for the not so easy. I’m assuming you did your subtitles in FCP. If you want to add a drop shadow, easy to do. But you want to change the font and size… well, I just tried and there’s no way to apply it to all.
Since hindsight is 20×20, if you had done the titles in Photoshop and imported them as TIFFs, you could have built an action, applied that to all your files or layers, and the changes would reflect in FCP. Still time intensive, but there’s no ideal fix all solution that I’m aware of at least. Maybe someone else will know?
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I see it now…
Ok, so where are you doing the letterboxing- inside of DVDSP? Are you bringing in the widescreen file and sinking it into a 4×3 timeline? what’s your workflow?
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I just took a look at the video in Quicktime and in DVDSP… and I’m not seeing the 1 pixel wide lines you’re seeing. Have you tried trashing the DVDSP settings with Preferences Manager, or making a new account on the computer and seeing if the pixel lines carry over? Sounds bizarre, and I’ve not seen that particular issue before. That being said, Motion can do some weird things.
If it’s still doing it after prefs and/or new user account, can you post a screen grab?
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Are you saying you have the same title and would like it to reflect in the timeline OR that you want to add, say, a drop shadow or some other effect to all your titles, which are all different?
If A- no, not unless you started the title in Photoshop, but you can copy/paste to your heart’s content.
If B- change one title, right click copy, go to the next title then right click Paste Attributes and choose the attributes you want. If all your titles are on one track, you can lasso and apply the attributes all at once. -
Trashing the preferences solves probably about 90% of the buggy FCP problems I see day in and day out (I’ve worked in 2 academic computer labs with 60+ stations).
Depending on your version, Preferences Manager should work- https://www.digitalrebellion.com/pref_man.htm or good old FCP Rescue- https://fcprescue.andersholck.com/
And don’t try opening your current project, just open the application (after trashing the prefs). It’s possible, although I think unlikely, that your project could be corrupt.
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>You should try a 3 martini breakfast sometime…
Somehow I don’t think my boss would approve… **looks around for Rich** -
A 3 martini dinner makes many people a riot 😀
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Well hoorah it’s not going to the web, but… I would never export an h.264 as my master file. I always do a self contained quicktime and so does everyone I work with. You always want the highest quality contained file you can get as your master, and h.264, while nice, does not cut the cheese. If you think you might end up doing alot of h.264 compressions for preview purposes, you might want to consider an Elgato Turbo, which is a USB dongle and speeds up h.264 compression (I can get a 4:1 ratio sometimes). Just use that self-contained file to make all subsequent work- the h.264, the dvd files, and most importantly, whatever else the client will ask for in 6 months. Clients are like tornadoes- they strike without warning, at any time, and can wreak havok on your work. The self-contained can help manage the damage 😉
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No, not when you export at the sequence settings as a self contained. FCP ingests/works with QT files natively, so there’s no compression going on. (Well, unless you have a weird codec as your Compressor setting in your sequence setup, but that’s another story.)
If you do the self contained (which, fair warning, may very well be HUGE), the chances of it falling out of sync are less, but YMMV.
What exactly are you using the h.264 for? If it’s for viewing on the web, browsers are going to choke at those settings, and Compressor offers more options for compression at least.