Pixelated JPGs in FCP

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ehg219

Member
Recently I've been doing a lot of animations using a digital SLR and importing the photos into final cut with each photo lasting 2 frames. It works great and in the small fcp window it looks fine. But if I try to watch it full screen, or export to a quicktime it gets really ugly and pixelated. I've changed my sequence settings to photo-JPG at 100% quality. Do I also have to change something in the pixel aspect ratio or frame size? I've experimented with some different combinations, but nothing seems to fix it.

Any suggestions?

-Ethan
 
When you take your photo and bring it into your comptuer its likely some nice 300, 600, or whatever DPI shot. Looks great, nice and crisp and clean. When you take this to the video world it actually becomes 72 dpi, that's what video is. So if you look at it on your computer monitor, it will look noticeabely degraded from your raw image.

The test you want to give it is to compare it to the rest of your footage. If you view your final product on broadcast monitor (or TV if you're in a pinch), then everything should look the same and blend well together. The image again might not be quite as crisp, but as long as its blending with everything else and looks like your footage, then you are fine. So make sure to do your QC using a broadcast monitor or a TV set, not your computer monitor.

cheers.
 
make sure you are seeing the rendered image (no green, red, or orange bar above it). A lot of large graphics when you bring them into the time line will need to be rendered to see full quality. it might playbacl close to real time and look crappy but it needs to be rendered also.

I think I would suggest just editing in a NTSC 29.97 timeline with like 8 bit umcompressed for the codec of choice. You will have to render to see full res playback though but you can still work with the images just fine. I haven't had any experience with having the timeline set a photo jpeg but I think if you want to go out to DVD or animation export anyway might as well go with a video codec. That might be the issue as well. If you are bringing in these high res pics it might be rendereing them down when it renders to photo jpeg 100%.

I have had good luck with Tiff files, wether it be pictures or graphics. I think they hold up a little better and can also have alpha channels. Just my experience I guess.
 
I always resize my images to final FCP resolution before importing them. Never had a problem with quality doing that. I use jpgs at quality level 12.
 
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