Animated Pix jittery in FCP

OK, I did my research in the FCP FAQ Wiki but didnt' really find my answer...
I am animating some pix in FCP. Nothing crazy: slow zoom in/out, etc...
The pix are between 15 and 40mb.
Some play just fine, but some are just not playing back smoothly....
I found out that cross dissolves between two stills wasn't making things easier. So by having one still on V1 and one on V2 and applying the Cross dissolve on the upper level, it helped a lot.
I've also figured out that disabling and enabling the still again to "forece" a new render helped as well.
However I feel like I am running out of "tricks" to make some the stills look nice.
Any ideas?
BTW I need to be able to zoom in pretty closely on the stills, so resizing them in PS might not help...

Sequence > Render > Full. Also, monitor your work on an external video monitor, not the computer monitor. Optimize your imagery as well, make them no more than twice the native frame size.

Kevin Monahan
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helpful, thanks

Compositing sux / looks cheesy in FCP...period. Use Motion or even better After Effects.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

i tried using Motion but sometimes it gives me a green screen in the timeline, where the pix disappeared. ANd this is pretty unpredictable, which sucks when you are ready to show your cut to your boss.
Or maybe I am doing something wrong...

Green screen in the timeline? When you are animating stills? Chances are yes...you are doing something wrong. I can't tell you what that is without seeing your timeline.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

yeah... instead of the pix I see a weird green frame.
What I usually do is making the still offline and relink.
WHen this doesn't work I reopen the Motion project...

Joey, I can understand that you say it "sucks" if not composited in AE, etc. You are a motion graphics guy and tend to stay away from FCP except for playout. Yes?

Personally, I stay in FCP as long as possible until I am forced to go to AE/Motion. Nowadays, usually Motion. Editors are more apt to behave this way and I see nothing wrong with doing basic fx in FCP (like basic moves on photos). That's why they're there.

Kevin Monahan
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when you get the green and place the scrub bar over that still do you see the pic in the viewer or canvas?

Also. as a work around you can export each still as a QTSC (like baking for color) and reimport then use the replace edit to put them back into the FCP TL.

you can load the pics from the browser with the no keyframes for export. The replace edit will replace the media but allow the keyframes to remain.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

> The replace edit will replace the media but allow the keyframes to remain.

Why would you do that?
If each still is larger than the timeline frame size, then when exported into a movie file, they will only be at the timeline frame size. Which means all keyframes are now obsolete; the motion and resizing will be part of the movie file's picture, locked down as a flat layer.


www.derekmok.com

What size and format are your stills? Also, are they RGB or CMYK? You will get poor results if you're in CMYK up to and including glitchy green frames.

Andy

Quote

You are a motion graphics guy and tend to stay away from FCP except for playout. Yes?

No. I am an Editor / Compositor. I am in FCP more than AE...know why? AE is faster. In & out - back to FCP where the renders go on for days.

I do a lot in FCP including Magic Bullet Looks treatments, Trapcode particle animations, more organic transitions, etc. I am an Editor too, brutha and I know the importance of staying in one program...but FCP has major shortcomings in the compositing / rendering departments.

...not to mention you can do SO MUCH MORE with those pics in Motion / After Effects than in FCP (Z-depth animations / camera & lighting animations / etc).

I know you teach FCP Kev but you HAVE to agree (along with the majority of posters) that the render engine in FCP absolutely blows. If you are under tight deadlines and renders are killing you, FCP is the LAST place an editor should be rendering composites. I take some tasks to AE / Motion simply because I know they will render faster - MUCH FASTER. Hopefully the next rendition of FCP will address the snail-like rendering capabilities and utilize more Pocessing / GPU / RAM power in these 8 core beasts.

Not to start any rumors, but a Mac Tech told me Intel is testing an 8 core processor. Could that means Dual 8 core (16 Core) machines coming up?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

you are right derek.

I thought that replace would only effected the media and not the keyframes.

I was also thinking along the lines of if he exported what what on the TL, he might still have the degradation that he is seeing now. Coming from the browser would seem to be cleaner way to create the media for replacement.

And i do not know his settings so i am just taking it to be an fcp native. I don't know his still media size. It was a guess since i had seen this poster a few times in the forum, he might have at least that.

By the way if he can zoom so well the stills might be larger than 2500 pixels. Maybe Kinda.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

15mb to 40mb is HUGE for png or jpeg or even tiff.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

A few things might help

1 - the 15 to 40 meg size doesn't say anything about the actual pixel sizes you are using - there are a lot of great already calculated sizes for picture size in pixels for the type of project you are working on search the forums for the proper blow up sizes to give you enough headroom for zooming in on an image. Don't have them in front of me but a simple Google search will reveal them. You can make these the proper pixel size and bring the actual physical (40 megs) size of picture way down -- less overhead on FCP and often a smoother move.

2 - Jittery-ness - can come from many things -- fine lines or reflective objects in picture getting caught between scan lines (a slight Gaussian blur on the troublesome parts of the photo in photoshop can help eliminate that)

3 - this is an odd one but I've found it works -- check in your motion tab the beginning and ending scale sizes as well as center and rotation numbers -- and make them all even numbers (no 208.5 or 209.3 -- make them 208 or 210) For some reason (and it may have to do with the getting caught between scan lines issues) the even numbers will eliminate a jittery move. This reason may be entirely wrong - but it's fixed a number of troublesome picture moves for us



Best - Andy

Quote

I don't know his still media size. It was a guess

If you want to help someone, please ask the appropriate questions or PM the person to find out the specs before posting advice. If you are guessing, please offer it up as "I am guessing" and not straight "you can do this..." advice. That tends to just make a confused poster even more confused because the information is steering then in a different direction.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Both Andys have good observations here-- file format and image size appropriate to your creative needs but observing physical limits. When I read about the dayglo green screen issue I'm guessing you have a format issue.

My favorite stills recipe remains RGB TIFF 8-bits per channel (AKA "8-bit", or if you intend to animate layers, bring it in as a native RGB PSD file. I get the least trouble with these. CMYK as mentioned could very well foul up as a dayglo green screen. Totally wrong colorspace.

All this should be prepped in Photoshop (or GraphicConverter) before you import to FCP.

Part of video image prep involves sizing images intelligently-- whether scanned or already digital, for your desired zoom factor:

Intelligent photo scanning

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:

Cycle Image to Image & Wireframe to Wireframe with W !

Final Cut Studio 2 KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

No sarcasm at all Joe. That was goods advice. I should have said that it was a guess up front.

I did want to say that I was totally unaware of the tweaks to files to make the file size large but actual size not that large.

Normally, i just do tiff, png, and jpeg with no file size tweaking. In this when i see a file exceeding 10 mb it is normally pretty big.

1280 x 1024 jpeg = roughly 510kb
638 x 1088 tiff (no compression) = 2.8 from PS

So thats why i started thinking it was the size of the pics.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

I don't have PS on my machine so I don't have any control over the type and specs of stills I bring into FCP.
Is there a free application somewhere that would let me tweak the stills?

iPhoto will let you export different types, and you can size photos down. You can't change color modes though.

Andy

iPhoto....
I think I need to have control over the color modes.
Thx

J.Corbett Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Also. as a work around you can export each still
> as a QTSC (like baking for color) eyframes to
>
What is QTSC?

quicktime self contained

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Once again, idiosyncratic jargon leads to confusion.

OMG!
(sorry, "Oh My God"
That simple!!


Thx!

or leads to a solution by accident. lol

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Quote

Once again, idiosyncratic jargon leads to confusion.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

> Once again, idiosyncratic jargon leads to confusion.

D.U.H.


www.derekmok.com

If you don't have Photoshop - and you do any still work - budget to buy it!

It should be a standard piece of software for any editor. I-photo doesn't even scratch the surface of what Photoshop can do to help a professional editor.

Best - Andy

I am talking about a work place situation.
PS isn't installed on the machines.
Graphics designers take handle everything graphic.
I'll send the stills their way and ask them to reformat to 8-bit RGB then