I have a crisis, and need some help.

Finnegan

Finnegan

Well-known member
I've got the final cut of a film that is due tomorrow at 10am for a screening at my film school. The editor finished the cut, send it to sound engineering, and then we all met up to export it a couple hours ago. Now, here is the problem. We exported the finished sequence and it looked terrible, even though the file was exported using the H.264 codec at a resolution of 1920 x 1080. The source footage was shot in HD at this same resolution. I (the DP) originally captured this footage to my computer, then set the editor the raw footage to edit.

I exported two or three full 1080p resolution (and a number of 720p versions) files with no luck of matching the original quality of the source footage on my own computer. I even went back, quickly edited a 1min sequence from the same footage I sent to him, exported it, and it was gorgeous. So I seriously couldn't find out what was wrong. After a couple hours, I told everyone to poo poo it and that I'd take his computer home with me and figure it out.

So here I am. And I think I just figured it out. His sequence/capture settings were set to NTSC, meaning he edited the whole thing on a sequence of NTSC. Now, I'm not an editor but I have edited before. My question to you is this: If my editor edited the whole thing using these sequences, would that affect the quality of the final export? Like I said, I'm exporting the same exact footage using the exact same settings on my own laptop and its gorgeous, but from his, its awful looking.

If I set new sequence settings, create a new sequence, and copy footage from the current sequence into the new sequence (that has new settings) would that help out the footage quality in final export? Or am I SOL?
 
Give it a shot. And you will know. Any composite shots or motion graphics etc created in NTSC will mostlikely not translate without project setting adjustments or starting over. But as long as the master footage has not been downrezzed before being dropped into an NTSC timeline, I'd imagine it would work. Never tried.
 
I gave it a shot, and it seemed to work until I rendered the edited footage in the newly created timeline sequence. Now, the footage looks small inside a huge black box. Adjusting the size (fit to window) doesn't help. I am so boned!
 
first i'd like to say, it's a very simple mistake and it's common practice to check all ur sequence settings and so on before u even start cutting, your editor deserves a bludgeoning.

try all these tactics.

always duplicate ur timeline before u start messing with it so ur have a original source to go back to.

1. ctrl click or right click the sequence and go into sequence properties. there you can reset the codec, resolution size etc, also before u do that dump all your render files, clean it ALL out. the timeline did NOT change your original footage (if he didn't capture it that way of course) it's all rendered down to be like that. so when u dump all ur renders ur entire timeline render wise should go red. then reset teh sequence to match the resolution, framerate, and codec of the footage.

2. also look at ur clips make sure he didn't transcode or capture the footage as ntsc/dv.

3. this isn't a perfect science, this is actually where fcp gets clunky and it might screw with ur resolutions, u might have to tweak clip by clip.

4. all else fails. copy and past ur whole timeline in a sequence that matches all your clip settings. then relink each clip one by one to the original source file. if the source files were captured in dv also u'll have to recapture them all or re l&t depending on what u shot on. hopefully he was smart enough NOT to change the file names of the original source files if it was p2 or ex1 or whateve, the camera creates unique file names and u should only be changing the file names in the bins. this is the most pain staking way of doing it, but it works too.

hope that helps
 
Thanks a lot xmephestox, I'm in the process of rendering the entire edit in a newly created sequence which has what I believe to be the proper settings for the source footage - but its taking a good hour or so. The settings I used for the new sequence are HDV 1440 x 1080 23.98 Apple ProRes, the last bit being recommended by someone from dvinfo.net and I'm just hoping that they're right or else I'll have to repeat this process and I'm rapidly running out of time.

As for my editor, yeah, I'm never having him touch another project I do again.
 
did u shoot in hdv or full 1080p? if u shot 1920x1080 and render to 1440x1080 it's gonna be smushed looking. and you can restretch but it won't look the same. pro res is also a way to go, it's kind of a fall back nowadays with codecs. but make sure u trash ur renders, or it will be sampling from that folder and not ur source clips for ur re-render. go into ur render manager and purge everything
 
I shot HDV so the source footage resolution is actually 1440 x 1080. Glad to hear that Apple ProRes is the way to go as well. There's about 19 minutes left on my render, but I think I might have forgotten to trash my previous renders. I've been up all night fixing my editors mistakes and I'm kind of going crazy. Will trashing the renders after this new render completes screw stuff up? Am I going to have to trash the old renders, and then render again?
 
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