[Shepherd Laughlin]

I’ve now saved my stills in RGB. I’ve tried messing with the sequence settings for the timeline (each time re-rendering a test clip) and still it looks bad.

My original .mov file is 1280×720. Shouldn’t this mean that the sequence frame size should be HDTV 720p (16:9)? What about pixel aspect ratio?

I’m attaching some screenshots that might be helpful:

.mov file to import into timeline:

Sequence settings

I just can’t find this kind of specific info in the forum so I hope this isn’t a redundant thread.

[Shepherd Laughlin]

Thank you.

Final Cut doesn’t seem to want to work with the mp4 files, it gives me a generic error message when I try to look at them in the viewer. I’ve read that mp4 isn’t meant to be used as in editing programs. So I used MPEG Streamclip to convert them to .mov. There’s some loss of quality, but not much. Is this the best way to go about this?

I’ve now tried using .psd for my stills, but am still getting really bad quality deterioration, despite starting with hi-res files.

Maybe there’s an issue with how I’m exporting the files? I tried Export>Quick Time Movie, which produces a file with pixilated stills. I tried Export>Using QuickTime Conversion, but that takes seemingly forever for a 1.5-minute clip. The Export>Using Compressor option is grayed out. Any idea why this would be?

Thanks again for any help you can offer…