Quicktime qaulity

I exported a Quicktime movie from the FCP timeline using current settings etc, and I unchecked the "make movie self contained", but the result is less than satisfactory.
There is significant loss in qaulity when opened in Quicktime viewer, pictures are pixelated, the text is soft and ropy, and the video is lower qaulity. Basically unusuable to burn to a DVD, or anything for that matter. Way lower than the timeline original. And after 6 weeks editing!!!!

Best way to describe it is Digi beta reduced to DV, almost.

What am I doing wrong or is this the best I can expect?
What do you suggest?

Graham

Did you enable High Quality playback in QuickTime Player? APPLE-J, select Video Track.

You understand a non stand-alone or not self contained movie is just a pointer to other clips and files on your hard drive. If the system does not have really good access to those files, the picture will look terrible if it plays at all.

That's the good part of having a self contained movie. It's all there in one piece and it doesn't depend on anything else in the machine.

The downside, of course, is the self contained movie is huge compared to the non self contained or Reference Movie. The actual movie video is very large compared to a laundry list of clips.

Koz

The problem here is in the quicktime player not in your file. Selfcontained or not, a quicktime PAL will look like crap when played in a quicktime player, especially text and graphics.

To test, open the file that look like crap in QT PRO and export it again as animation.
You will find that it is now perfectly sharp.

Alternatively, render it out as selfcontained and then bring it back into FCP, and it looks perfect again.



Johan Polhem
Motion Graphics
www.johanpolhem.com

<<<a quicktime PAL will look like crap when played in a quicktime player>>>

Well that a new one. When did that pop up?

I swear we've played PAL clips before in QT and they've looked just fine--you couldn't tell which standard you were in.

Can you fill that out a little?

Koz

Koz.

Its very easy to check.

Just render out something that has text on it from the timeline as a selfcontained quicktime movie.
Then render the same file out as Asnimation via QT conversion

Open them both in quicktime and put them next to eachother.
The difference is obvious.

Then take the file with low quality you rendered from the timeline and export it directly from Quicktime as an animation.
Voila! -Perfect quality.

This proves that the file was always perfect, it only looks like crap in quicktime.

Dont ask me why, its confusing.
An educated guess would be that QT always displays movies in square pixels whcih would distort a PAL movie file slightly.



Johan Polhem
Motion Graphics
www.johanpolhem.com

Yes this is just the "High Quality" ON SCREEN PLAYBACK flag not being enabled, and does not affect any exports or compression to MPEG-2 that you may do to the file.

However, the latest version of QuickTime Player finally seems to select "High Quality" by default for movies which use DV codecs.

Martin Baker
www.digital-heaven.co.uk
Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps

QT is not a codec. It is just a container.

1) The DV codec is built to degrade video quality in order to maintain frame rate when playing back. With a G5 that's no longer necessary. Those of you with a G3 will remember when it was.

2) You are seeing an interlaced output on a progressive display. You are not going to see any antialiasing or other intra-frame smoothing. Animation codec is progressive - so you will see all info -thus the "crisper" look.

Playing back animation codec on a G3 was UGLY. cccaaaaannn y-y-you say st st stutterrrr?

Ian

Plus, the animation codec doesn't automatically disable the High Quality flag, as the DV file does, so Johan, I think you are wasting time and a bit of quality (YUV > RGB) by exporting the file to animation.

Graham,
Merely enable the High Quality flag as Derek suggests and all will be well. Better yet, use a video monitor as you work so you can see what the real quality is of your rendered graphics at all times.



Kevin Monahan
Social Support Lead, DV Products
Adobe
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro Community Blog
Follow Me on Twitter!

Kevin.

Doh...

That was my whole point.
It was just an example to illustrate that even though the quality looks **** in QT its not ****.



Johan Polhem
Motion Graphics
www.johanpolhem.com