[Peter Berdovsky]

All of my work as of late has been for computer monitors – to be distributed on the web. So I actually do need to make it look good on my screen.

I use a Mac Book Pro to edit, same screen to preview my work. I could output it to an external CRT monitor via a standard mac DVI to S-video adapter, but that would defeat my purpose here I think…

[Peter Berdovsky]

Man… This is still driving me crazy… Granted, exported videos don’t look as bad in QT player as they look when paused in Final Cut Pro… but it’s so confusing – unrendered – it looks perfect – https://zebbler.com/intcomp/fcp/x.png
But when I render it – it looks like pixelly madness. And I made triple sure all of the files are not interlaced, the sequence compression is set to AppleProRes, etc: https://zebbler.com/intcomp/fcp/y.png

I wish I could just keep the sharpness I see when it’s unrendered…

Zebbler (Peter B.)

[Peter Berdovsky]

Hi guys.
So – as I mentioned in the posts above, most of my problems were coming from Final Cut Pro misreading the field preference in my clips. I created the clips in question, so I knew what the actual field preference was, and could fix it in FCP.

What if I have a clip that I didn’t create? Is there a surefire 100% way to find out what its field preference is? If FCP is making those mistakes, I would love to find a way to double check anything that looks a little off.

[Peter Berdovsky]

I make most of my work for web or digital projection, so having it look good on a computer monitor is actually a must for me. So I do my previews on the same computer as I use to edit, either in FCP canvas or in QTPro after the export.

[Peter Berdovsky]

Why wouldn’t Final Cut upgrade its scaling mechanism? Aren’t FCP and Motion owned by the same folks?

I kept digging around trying to figure everything out last night – made some interesting discoveries about what went wrong with my edit, would like to share them with you – as knowledge is power. These are from my posts to Boston’s VJ email list (Glitch Night list):

Post 1:
Ok. I totally figured out most or all of my current issues.

What happened was this:

Even though both my sequence and my HD clip were progressive, FCP misinterpreted my HD footage and mislabeled it as “field dominance = upper (odd)”
In reality, it should have been interpreted as “field dominance = none”

After re-interpreting things by hand, it seems to have fixed the problem with the images 100%.

Pheew… I am really glad it got sorted out.
Thanks for your help guys, it was ultimately your prodding that led me to double check all of the format settings in FCP.

Just to let you know what that looked like before the fix, here’s a link to two images – one from FCP sequence (with interlacing misinterpretation), and one from my original file:

https://zebbler.com/intcomp/fcp/source_still.jpg

vs.

https://zebbler.com/intcomp/fcp/fcp_still.jpg

Post 2:
There was another pixellation problem unrelated to the interlacing mislabels.
That one was compression related I think (although probably has something to do with FCP scaling mechanism as well?). I think apple intermediate compression in fcp previews funny (the beforementioned pixely lines):
https://zebbler.com/intcomp/fcp/owls.png (the owl on the right should be more pixely)

To continue making matters more confusing, the video looks better than that if played back… and basically looks bad in FCP when stopped.
When exported with sequence settings, it looks good even when still for some reason.
And when the png still (see link above) was converted to jpg in Preview, the difference between the two sides for the most part disappeared in my Preview app:
https://zebbler.com/intcomp/fcp/owls.jpg

This stuff is painfully confusing on the fringes sometimes, but I guess sometimes someone has to make a ton of mistakes to learn something useful.

Keep keeping on,

Zebbler

[Peter Berdovsky]

I have the same exact problem, but I have just finished installing Motion 2.0 on my mac book pro, went through the tutorials, started the program (made a new file), it took a few seconds to load all the windows – then everything just disappears! It’s so frustrating… I was really looking forward to using this software. What should I do?