Making me crazy: importing stills into anamporphic timeline

evolvnyc

evolvnyc

Well-known member
My FCP book is useless and the manual is too specific without being helpful either... All I'm trying to do is get decent looking stills into this anamorphic timeline and I can't seem to do it. I have tried .tiff and .jpeg at sizes from 60k to 5mb and they're always either stretched the wrong way, totally pixellated, or even sometimes, interlaced? What am I missing here? They appear differently in preview, the viewer, and the canvas, both before and after render. Can anyone provide a simple step-by step to get full screen images into an anamorphic timeline? It woudl be humbly appreciated. I understand that I'll have to crop a square photo and even re-size in photoshop, and this is no problem, I am totally competent in photoshop... not so much so, apparently in fcp 5... Thanks!
 
i'm confused... i mean bringing a photo into fcp, not the other way around. do you mean export a psd from photoshop into fcp? save as what? how big should they be? what's the best way to place them in the timeline so they don't appear completely messed up?
 
If you double click on the photo - that becomes a clip, it will open in the top left window (viewer) . Use the Motion tab to change the aspect. You may want 0 or 33.33 depending on you goal. The photos are probably set to Anamorphic and shouldn't be. You can correct this in the browser (amongst other ways) by scrolling along the browser to the right and unticking the anamorphic box. If there is no tick, try ticking it - I'm not clear which way round you are having the problem.

It may be worth resizing the photos in PS first. If they are static just use 720x480 and save as a TIFF or PNG or just .psd (JPEG is more lossy). If you are animating around the photos, keep them higher res so that the res isn't lost when you add the animation. The problem with high res photos is it can cause interlace flicker with the detail that lies between fields (er... not sure if my lingo is right).
 
hmmm, so when i make them the same as that only wider, at 72 dpi (wider to account for the anamorphic) and then put them on the timeline and render them, (they're .tiffs now) they still appear soft and out of focus in the canvas... am i missing something?
 
evolvnyc said:
hmmm, so when i make them the same as that only wider, at 72 dpi (wider to account for the anamorphic) and then put them on the timeline and render them, (they're .tiffs now) they still appear soft and out of focus in the canvas... am i missing something?
Click to expand...

they may just look soft because SD video is very soft compared to the 5MP image you are used to... it is hard to tell without being there. I have always found images to be no problem in FCP.
 
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