Quality of imported stills in FCP

I have taken the digital image of a product shot in JPEG (300 dpi) and imported into FCP 3.0 with a view to including the shot in an SD sequence. The JPEG flickers, especially the part of the product with text. I have used deflicker, deinterlace (upper, then lower) and image stabilizer. The still image continues to flicker.

What can I do to get rid of the flicker? What should be the minimum res I bring the pictures in at, and should I be importing using another format (PNG, TIFF, etc.) instead of JPEG?

Read this

[www.lafcpug.org]

Make sure you are looking at image on a broadcast monitor not your computer. Add a 1 px Gaussian blur if necessary

Michael Horton
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Thanks for the recommendation.

I am looking at the still on the broadcast monitor, not on the computer. Per your suggestion, I will add the gaussian, but I tried that a while back with scrolling text and it didn't make any difference, there was still too much flickering. What surprised me is that sections of the entire image (not just text) flicker.

A still image that's too large can flicker. Save a copy of the JPEG that's 72dpi and no larger than double your sequence frame size or, if you don't need to do any zooming, just use your sequence frame size.


www.derekmok.com

flickering scrolling text and flickering stills are completely different things. One involves math and the other simply involves prep.

Michael Horton
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You have an image sequence made of jpeg stills?
Try to export same sequence from QT in mov with animation codec.
Maybe will help.

Jupi
www.kreativni.hr
www.youtube.com/KreativniOdjel

I am having an issue with imported 72dpi jpeg images in FCP. They have a soft blur when I look at the Full-screen (Apple-F12), though they look fine on the small canvas window. Should my image be 720X486? Thanks.

One more time. If you are making a video to show on a TV, that is, if it is in a video codec like DV, the picture has been changed to work on a TV and it will no longer look right on a computer monitor. You have to judge the real quality using an external monitor.

Your image should be the same size as your canvas unless you need to zoom into or out of it. DPI makes no difference, except in terms of file size.

Hi,

Thanks for your response. I modified the image size to match the
canvas and the quality is still poor/pixelated/blurry. In thinking
the monitor is affecting the quality, I exported the picture as a
quicktime and still blur. Then, I tried using the Stagetools: Moving
picture plug-in and the quality is still poor...

Stephon

You didn't give specifics as to how large your original stills were and how large you made them after conversion. If you were taking a small still (eg. 320x240) and resizing it to the video frame size (eg. 720x486), you would have gained no quality -- it'd be just a blowup done at a different stage in the process.

Give us more details. What codec are you editing in? What frame size? How large were the original JPEGs? And when you exported a QuickTime movie, was "High Quality" enabled?


www.derekmok.com

As far as you've told us, the answer is because you are putting them in a video timeline and then trying to judge the quality on a computer monitor. It will never look right on your canvas. Not ever, no matter what you do, if you are prepping for video.

If you want to release on the web, then you need to change the codec of your timeline to somthing that is designed to be displayed on a computer screen, like the 'animation' codec, or even photojpeg.