editing stills

This is probably a very basic question, but what is the best approach for editing stills with final cut ? When i load in a bunch of jpegs (al the same size) final cut wants to render them before it can play it back. Any way to prep still so it does not do that ? Or do i have to save stills as DV (or other format) quicktime movies out of after effects ? I'm trying to edit storyboards to a sound track but don't want final cut to ask me for rendering every time i shift something...

Thanks for any help in advance.

Think about this for a moment. You load in a single frame and what should appear when viewing it as video? One frame out of 30 in the first second. As a matter of fact one progressive frame in an interlaced 60 frames per second.

Final Cut Pro knows well enough that it will not work in a video context, so it needs to render additional frames of the same image to turn it into video.

As it stands and hopefully will not be much longer, FCP deals with one codec on the active timeline per project. If you introduce ANY other format besides the one that matches the timeline, you will need to render EVERYTHING not matching the codec selected for this project. And if you so much as twitch on the timeline, RENDER AGAIN.

So, to answer your question - the very best way to "edit" stills, is to find a way to turn those stills into video at the same format(codec) as the timeline. One way might be to open another project set to the timeline codec of the finished project and do only the stills to video there. Render that work out, once and then import that work onto the final timeline and there will be no rendering, because of those stills.

There are definitely other ways, but that one stays in FCP.

> So, to answer your question - the very best way to "edit" stills, is to find a way to turn those
> stills into video at the same format(codec) as the timeline.

I don't agree with that one. While you can avoid rendering if you make the stills into video clips, it takes away much of your flexibility when editing because the stills would have a fixed duration. You could get around that by making an FCP Freeze Frame of the video or doing a slow-mo of the clip, but you still won't have flexibility of image size. Also, if you're working on, say, a DV timeline, converting the stills to DV would result in quality loss. If you convert the stills to a higher format like Animation, Photo JPEG or Uncompressed SD, you'd have to render again.

My reaction would be to live with the rendering while editing. If you're done with editing a certain part, then nest that portion into its own sequence, export a movie file, and place that into the timeline. No more rendering from that stage on.


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