stuttering stills

I am working with many stills images [tiff files] and when I bring them into photo to movie to create motion paths and then export them for FCP many of them flicker and have jaggies. I have already tried the deflickerator but it was no help. any other suggestions? I hav resized the pixels and saved the images at 72 dpi. Each image is around 4 megs. Suggestions?

Tony

This kind of problem has a long and storied past on this forum. The first question anyone here will ask (as will I) is: Are you viewing the stills on an NTSC or other external monitor, or on the Canvas of your computer?

Andy

are these stills made from video? - if so, you might be seeing the two fields in the frame and that's why it's stuttering. -

Arod -

Yes, I am viewing the still on an NTSC monitor. The photos are from a digital camera, recorded as tiff files. I resized them in photoshop and imported them into photo to movie [as tiffs] and then exported them for import to fcp. They look terrible, jaggies and flicker on most of the images. Freeze frame video stills of the artwork looks better than these pictures. Any other suggestions?

Thank you,
Tony

Did you De-Interlace?

Hi Derek, ...sorry, I didn't know that was a step in the process. Is this done in Photoshop, before Photo to Movie, or in FCP?

Thank you,
Tony

In Final Cut Pro. Effects - Video Filters - Video - De-Interlace. Under the De-Interlace filter there are different settings -- try all three of Upper Field, Lower Field and Flicker Filter.

If the stills are from a digital camera you don't need to de-interlace because there are no fields. However, I feel as if I'm missing something. What is "Photo to Movie"? Is that some kind of program?

If you are resizing in Photoshop, then that's all you need to do before importing them into FCP. Something tells me that your intervening steps are what is giving you problems.

To what size are you resizing your photos? FCP can handle pretty large photo sizes but I wouldn't go above 2000 pixels a side unless absolutely necessary. I think the max FCP can handle is 4000 but that may have changed with 5.0. Still, I've never needed to have a still that large in my projects so I've never pushed it that far.

If the files off the camera are tiffs, then technically speaking you don't even need the Photoshop step although it's usually a good idea to crop and prep the photos there before bringing them into FCP.

Andy

[ "Photo to Movie"? Is that some kind of program?]

Yes, a small app dedicated to photo animation. Can't vouch for it, never used it, but saw t demo'd at macWorld, looked kind of cute and cool. There's yet another called Still Life I saw at a user group awhile back. Both these outside solutions have one advanatge-- you never mport the actual photo into FCP and you avoid taxing the timeline with tons of oversized still imports, which cna be load on your CPU. It's one reason I try to scan as little data as possible when geerating digital photos from scanning.

The problem must be how it's exported from the app as a QuickTime. If your timeline is ntsc DV, then the export should use that QuickTime codec. Sound s like the wrong codec was selected to generate the movie clip.

Whenever I can I try to import the photo, and use FCP's moco controls and stay inside FCP, but as Tom Wolsky has stated many times, the scaling algorithm is off in versions below 5.x, which sends your zooms sailing as you pull out, and other uncontrollable effects.

It begs the question, would Motion be a better place to moco stills, doing a round trip? I just mailed out my upgrade to Studio so I'm not in it yet.

- Loren
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