HELP! On Deadline! - slideshow in FCP with motion/render issues

Oh man......making a slideshow for my son's rehearsal dinner which is tomorrow evening. Have to leave early in the morning to get there. Here's the issue - seems like a rendering issue, but I'm open to any and all ideas ....

FCP 6.04 QT 7.5
Octo Core (Jan 2008) Mac Pro - 10GB RAM - 256MB video card

1) Building a slideshow with about 130 scanned photos.
2) All slides scanned with same scanner (Epson V200) at same settings
3) Each slide is on screen for 6 total seconds with a 2 sec fade in, 2 sec display and 2 sec fade out. 4) Slides overlap by 1 sec on each end
5) Each slide has some motion keyframed manually (ala 'Ken Burns Effect')

Previewing the timeline BEFORE rendering (running UNLIMITED RT), all slides look crisp and sharp, with slight artifacts across the overlapped fades - no problem here, would expect this should go away after rendering.

THE ISSUE

After rendering the entire timeline (11 minutes long - 3 songs), around 10-15% of the slides DEGRADE in quality quite noticeably. It looks kind of like an interlacing effect, turning a sharp picture into an 'interlaced', blurry mess. No apparent rhyme or reason as to which ones.

WHAT I'VE TRIED

1) Changed Sequence to render in RGB instead of YUV ? no effect
2) Tried adding a slug under the affected slide, then created a nest of the two layers and applied the opacity fades on the nest - no effect
3) Copied an offending slide into it's own sequence - interestingly, after playing with sizing of the slide image (w/ motion applied), got this to render properly, but it took about 4 tries.

Any ideas? If all the input images are of the same quality (scanned at 600 dpi), why would most render properly, and some not?

Thanks!

Jeff Elliott

Jeff Elliott
ESVNSports
Your Games ~ Your Memories
www.esvnsports.com

First read this:

[www.lafcpug.org]

Also, did you scan the images very large? Too large can look just as bad as too small. And your 600dpi pictures, I'm guessing, are so large that they're slowing your FCP operations down to a crawl as well. You may need to resize them to something more manageable -- generally we recommend no larger than twice your Sequence frame size, unless you really need to zoom in farther.


www.derekmok.com

Derek,

Thanks for your quick response! I've just tried taking one of the 'problem' scan files into Photoshop and reducing the image size, then plugging it back into my timeline - seems to have done the trick!

Still wondering why the majority of the scanned photos rendered perfectly, even though they are 'too big' as well .... but that will have to wait for another day. Have a number of re-sizes to work through if I want to have any prayer of sleeping tonight .....

Jeff Elliott

Jeff Elliott
ESVNSports
Your Games ~ Your Memories
www.esvnsports.com

I spoke too quickly - downsizing the image files in Photoshop is NOT resolving the issue. Don't have time to rescan. I'll keep playing with it, but man, this is REALLY annoying.

Jeff

Jeff Elliott
ESVNSports
Your Games ~ Your Memories
www.esvnsports.com

Before you do anything...are you watching on an external monitor? And if you exported one of the problematic stills as a full-quality self-contained QuickTime movie, does it play back right on QuickTime Player at High Quality?


www.derekmok.com

Derek,

Did not export the problem sequence to QT for playback .... will try shortly. However, I've spent the past half hour and gone ahead and burned what I have ? worst case, I have SOMETHING to show at the rehearsal dinner, and as I said, about 95% of the slides are perfect. It's getting late here on the East Coast!

I am viewing on my second LCD monitor (have a two-monitor set up here), but I don't think that's the issue.

Can tell you that viewing the compressed MPEG2 in DVD Studio Pro on my main LCD monitor (23" Apple Cinema Display), the problems are still there. Will pop the resulting DVD into commercial DVD player now and see if it looks any different, but I doubt it will.

What is maddening is that all the photos were scanned with exactly the same settings, yet FCP seems to screw up on a certain percentage of them.

Jeff Elliott
ESVNSports
Your Games ~ Your Memories
www.esvnsports.com

> What is maddening is that all the photos were scanned with exactly the same settings, yet FCP
> seems to screw up on a certain percentage of them.

Did you read that FAQ link? If you did, you'd see that different Motion parameters can cause differences in quality. As can plain old different content (colours, lines, patterns, brightness etc.) on the stills themselves. Bottom line: You can only judge on a broadcast monitor.


www.derekmok.com

Derek,

Really appreciate your comments and expeditious replies - I've been following LAFCP since way back when in 1999-2000, and still find this is the go-to place when I need help. Fortunately, that hasn't been very often over the years ...... most everything I've needed to do in FCP/DVDSP has worked as expected, or I've been able to find a work-around.

I had read the FAQ link you sent - after the wedding is over, I'll have a bit more time to really troubleshoot this issue. I'm not doing anything that sophisticated in this timeline, but yeah, it may just be that certain keyframed motions affect specific photos.

Very weird ..... I'll try to remember to post when I've come to a conclusion as to what's going on.

Jeff Elliott
ESVNSports
Your Games ~ Your Memories
www.esvnsports.com

Don't know if you have time to try this, but there's a faster way than rescanning the images. Set up a batch action in Photoshop to open, resize (reduce the DPI, not the physical size) and re-save with the same file name. It might take a while with that many images but let it run. Open up your FCP project and when the media re-links it should be to the smaller image files that would hopefully be less CPU intensive.

HTH,
JK

_______________________________________
SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Quote

Don't know if you have time to try this, but there's a faster way than rescanning the images. Set up a batch action in Photoshop to open, resize (reduce the DPI, not the physical size) and re-save with the same file name. It might take a while with that many images but let it run. Open up your FCP project and when the media re-links it should be to the smaller image files that would hopefully be less CPU intensive.

WOAH!

Sorry to correct you John no offence is meant by this - but before anyone wastes loads of time and effort!

Changing the dpi and not the pixel size of the files DOES NOT change the filesize!!!!

PLEASE READ THIS: [www.lafcpug.org]

You will need to resize the actual pixel dimensions if you want to reduce the file size - although John is right about using a batch action in PS, it would be the best way to do this

However the downside to this is that you will have to resize the clips in FCP again.

? Save the resized copies in a different folder with the same file names

? Move all the originals into another folder

? Then move your copies into the original folder and load your project


For future reference you should decide on what size you need your clips and try to process to a more manageable PIXEL size before you import them.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Re-reading your post Jeff...

Any chance you can export a screenshot of the whole FCP interface on the rendered bit so we can see this "interlace" artifacting you are seeing?

Better still would be to export a couple of seconds of material so we can see it...



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Whoops, you're right Ben. I was thinking PRINT, not video there. That's what i get for chiming in late at night...

JK

_______________________________________
SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

hehe no problem John - I just camp out in full camouflage with my megaphone for tired people making the DPI mistake...



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

I have a similar question regarding image quality.

I have several times wanted to take a JPG from a professional photographer and use it in my HDV timeline, and it looks fantastic...until....

What I have tried doing the last two projects is having the JPG and scaling it down a little bit and putting a 30 pixel white border on it, and rotating it -3 degrees. When I look at the image on the screen (with scrub high quality on), it looks great, but once I render it, the white border becomes jagged.

How come that is?

Thanks,

Casey Petersen
www.unitedvideoinc.com