Optimal size to prep still images for use in FCP

I am a still photographer and have been producing multimedia features (stills combined with audio, no video yet) for a couple of years now. Until recently I used SoundSlides to build my pieces, but have now finally migrated to FCP. I just went through a rough week troubleshooting various computer and FCP problems. At the end several long discussions with folks at Apple Care, the last guy I spoke with was telling me of the importance of sizing and prepping the stills correctly. He asked me how I was sizing the stills, and I told him I was following the recommends of some colleagues in an FCP manual they had put together. He said that was not a good idea.

Instead he directed me to thoroughly read the info in the FCP manual on Still Images, starting on page 365 of Volume III of the manual. He said that some of my problems in the past week could have been due to incorrect prep and sizing of the still images, and making them too big (i.e., using large files from high res still cameras) could cause FCP to jam up. According to the frame size chart on page 373, since I am using format 1080i or 1080p HD, the video sequence frame size is 1920 x 1080, and the graphics frame size should be 1920 x 1080.

One colleague I know preps her stills at 2000 pixels wide. Another one now goes with 2880 pixels wide to enable enlarging frames for motion effects without losing image quality. The one who does the latter also points out that 2880 pixels is twice the width of the high def TV standard, permitting images to be viewed on an HD monitor without losing fidelity.

My inclination is to go with the 2880 setting. Does anyone have an experience with using 2880 pixels as a standard for stills, and has it caused you any troubles for being too large? The guy at Apple Care's point was that since I'm not using video, that Final Cut takes my data-heavy still and copies it 30 times for each second (to make 30 fps), and that all that data can cause FCP to do funny things. Is it true that 2880 width is too large? Remember, virtually all my content right now is still images, so those of you using mostly video footage with occasional still pics might have a different experience. If anyone on this forum is building audio slide shows and has any insight into this, I'd be most grateful to know about your experience.

Many thanks,

Paula Lerner
[www.lernerphoto.com]

> the video sequence frame size is 1920 x 1080, and the graphics frame size should be 1920 x
> 1080.

Yes and no. You should make the stills larger if you need to zoom into them. Of course, you should always make copies before altering the size of the still-image files, or you won't have a way to go back to your first-level, untouched stills. Always make the images 72dpi.

2880 pixels wide wouldn't be too much if you do need to zoom in as far as double size. However, this is where the processing power of your computer comes into play. How much RAM do you have? What drives are you using to store and access your media?

By the way, Apple people tend to be the last people I trust for video questions. Always trust a video professional over an Apple tech. Apple techs usually don't work with video day to day, and are therefore often inadequate advisors for day-to-day video questions.

> The guy at Apple Care's point was that since I'm not using video, that Final Cut takes my
> data-heavy still and copies it 30 times for each second

That doesn't sound like an accurate assessment to me. If you were to try the amateur editor's way of making a freeze frame -- copying one frame of a video clip or still, and pasting it 30 times per second in the timeline -- you'd notice an astronomically worse slowdown of your system than dragging out an image file to a certain length.


www.derekmok.com

Derek,

Many thanks for your thoughts. For the record, I have a Dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5, with 3.5 GB of RAM. All my images and FCP files are stored on a 1 terabyte external drive (a Mercury Elite Pro made by OWC), which is backed up onto an identical mirrored drive sitting next to it. I always prep my photos in software like Lightroom, and export them at the desired size to a folder on those external drives, so the original raw files are never touched and remain intact.

I think you're right about not trusting the Apple care folks, as just prior to this they gave me some very bad advice. I called them because I kept getting a file error message ("File Error: The specified file is open and in use by this or another application" despite the fact that it was NOT open or in use elsewhere), after which point FCP would not allow me to render and I could not continue my work. After 90 minutes of trouble shooting on the phone, the first Apple care guy concluded that it was an OS problem, and that I needed to wipe my drive, reinstall OS X and then reinstall all my apps (!). It turns out it was a much simpler problem: a friend suggested I do all the basic stuff first, like repair permissions, which I did, and although I still need to do more testing that seems to have done the trick. Don't know how Apple care missed something so obvious. And to think they almost had me wipe my drive and reinstall all... Am glad I didn't follow their plan.

It was the second guy I spoke with who mentioned the sizing issue. I'm thinking 2880 will give me enough room to move around if I want, but shouldn't be so big as to bog things down.

Thanks again.

Paula Lerner
[www.lernerphoto.com]

> ("File Error: The specified file is open and in use by this or another application" despite the fact
> that it was NOT open or in use elsewhere), after which point FCP would not allow me to render
> and I could not continue my work. After 90 minutes of trouble shooting on the phone, the first
> Apple care guy concluded that it was an OS problem, and that I needed to wipe my drive,
> reinstall OS X and then reinstall all my apps

Yeah, that's completely unnecessary.
Although I've never found a permanent fix for this problem -- it will come back sooner or later -- it is a fleeting bug. All you need to do is keep rendering, and at times you may need to render audio using only Audio Mixdown, not Render Selection or Render All. More a nuisance than a real problem.


www.derekmok.com

Paula Lerner wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> > ("File Error: The specified file is open and in
> use by this or another application" despite the
> fact
> > that it was NOT open or in use elsewhere), after
> which point FCP would not allow me to render
> > and I could not continue my work.
>
derekmok Wrote:
> Yeah, that's completely unnecessary.
> Although I've never found a permanent fix for this
> problem -- it will come back sooner or later -- it
> is a fleeting bug. All you need to do is keep
> rendering, and at times you may need to render
> audio using only Audio Mixdown, not Render
> Selection or Render All. More a nuisance than a
> real problem.

Uh oh, that's disheartening. You mean I could be haunted by this File Error again? I did notice that it was an intermittent problem, which is most irritating. But if I couldn't render I couldn't see the flow of the piece and keep working. One weird thing was that if I left the machine running and went to get coffee, the auto render would usually but not always render it by the time I came back. Sometimes I would find a dialog box on my screen that said "auto render complete" and I'd click okay, only to find the same File Error message underneath it. Sometimes it would be completely rendered and done, other times the Error prevented the render from going through...

Paula Lerner
[www.lernerphoto.com]

> other times the Error prevented the render from going through...

When that happens, just order the render again. If it doesn't restart the render, chances are your effects are already rendered when the error appeared.


www.derekmok.com

derekmok Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When that happens, just order the render again.
> If it doesn't restart the render, chances are your
> effects are already rendered when the error
> appeared.

You're right, sometimes I think this was the case. Other times, though, the render had clearly not occurred because you could see on the notice on the image "not rendered" when you tried to play it. Those were the occasions when it completely stopped me from continuing to work.

Paula Lerner
[www.lernerphoto.com]

There is a theory about this that we have posited on the Wiki here : This file in in use

Give it a shot and let us know if it solves your issue.

Also, your files are RGB right? And what format?

> There is a theory about this that we have posited on the Wiki here

Interesting theory, Jude, though I don't think that's the only cause. I'm fairly certain (not completely) this problem's been there since FCP4.5, OS10.3 Panther -- when Spotlight didn't exist.

I gotta try it on my current system, though.


www.derekmok.com

Yeah, I'm still testing, but so far I haven't had that error on any machine I've changed the spotlight prefs in, sooo. Very happy to get confirmation or denial from anyone else.

Thanks for pointing me to this. Jude, you wrote:

> File Error: The specified file is open and in use by this or another application
>From Jude Cotter
>We believe that this error may be caused by Mac OSX's 'Spotlight' trying to access files at the >same time as FCP is trying to render them.

I saw the rest of the posting about how to work around this, and had a question. Is Spotlight a separate function/program from clicking on your desktop and hitting command F for find? Because I often do searches looking for files, and I wouldn't want them to be hidden. Although, I also don't want this file error problem to repeat.

For the moment I think I will leave the Spotlight prefs as is, and should the File Error rear its ugly head then I will follow this suggestion.

To answer your question about my photo files, yes, my files are RGB. I prep them in Lightroom in the ProPhoto color space and export them as TIFFS. Once exported, I run a Photoshop action to convert the color to the Apple color space (as I was instructed in two separate FCP classes). They are about 16 MB for each TIFF.

[www.lernerphoto.com]

I think you're wasting time by messing around with color spaces. Final Cut Pro ignores them. All RGB material is assumed to be in the generic kRGB219 color space, which is ordinary RGB with a limited dynamic range for compatibility with FCP's native YUV. All embedded color profiles are just plain ignored by Final Cut.

As for Spotlight, it's a background service that's part of the Mac operating system. The "this file is in use" thing is just a simple race condition, wherein one part of the system has a file open, then closes it, but Final Cut tries to gain exclusive access to that file before the close operation can be completed. That's why the error is seemingly random, and seemingly transient: It depends on several things all happening in just the right order.

As to why it would happen on your system more frequently than, say for example, mine ? that I don't know. That one's a mystery.

Jeff Harrell Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think you're wasting time by messing around with
> color spaces. Final Cut Pro ignores them.

Jeff: I work in a color managed environment for all my still photo work. If I don't convert the still photos to Apple color space before I import them into FCP, then the images will look like dog meat when they're open in Final Cut on my monitor. Apple color space (or even sRGB) seems to ameliorate that, even if its just to please my aesthetic sense while I'm working on them. If I'm not mistaken, I believe that getting color right in Final Cut and its various export products is a whole field of knowledge unto itself, which I have only begun to explore (I know the Color program comes with the Studio suite, but I haven't opened it yet). For now, I'm still trying to get the basic functions of the program up and running for producing audio slide shows. Still, getting the color somewhere in the right ballpark is pretty important, and I'm just following the "recipe" from my training.


>That's why the error
> is seemingly random, and seemingly transient: It
> depends on several things all happening in just
> the right order.
>
> As to why it would happen on your system more
> frequently than, say for example, mine ? that I
> don't know. That one's a mystery.

For whatever reason, the several things happening in just the right order kept happening every time I tried to rotate an image, and got so bad that it was stopping me from rendering (and hence playing my sequence) at all, which basically meant I had to stop working. For now, repairing permissions seems to have helped. If it shows up again I will try Jude's fix, and see if that makes a difference.

But thanks for the input, its all helpful.

Paula Lerner

[www.lerneprhoto.com]

Paula Lerner Wrote:
>For now, repairing permissions
> seems to have helped. If it shows up again I will
> try Jude's fix, and see if that makes a
> difference.


Sigh. Well I guess I didn't have to wait too long for the demon File Error to reappear. I just followed the recommend about changing the Spotlight prefs, and have restarted my computer. I will report back to let you know if this helps.

Thanks to all.

Paula

[www.lernerphoto.com]

Paula Lerner Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> I will report back to let you know if this helps.

Rats. No such luck. I followed the following instructions in the wiki:

* From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
* From the View menu, choose Spotlight.
* Click the Privacy tab to reveal the areas that Spotlight will not index.
* In the Finder, open your "Final Cut Pro Documents" folder.
* Drag the Capture Scratch folder into Spotlight's list.
* Restart the computer.

I'm still getting the "File Error: The specified file is open and in use by this or another application." It will not let me render anything.

Am having some other weird things happening too. The pixel aspect ratio went haywire randomly on one of my stills. I couldn't get it to view correctly. I had to delete the file, reimport it, and replace it on the timeline.

Could it be that the Apple care guy was right...? Is it time for me to wipe my hard drive and reinstall all apps? (Or maybe upgrade to an intel machine?)

Paula

[www.lernerphoto.com]

[The guy at Apple Care's point was that since I'm not using video, that Final Cut takes my data-heavy still and copies it 30 times for each second (to make 30 fps), and that all that data can cause FCP to do funny things. ]

Well, like Derek said, not entirely accurate-- but it is replicating the image in memory during play-- there'd be no other way except to create a copy on scratch disk and play form it-- and it doesn;t do that with stills.

Your color space is critical! CMYK and 1 bit images don't behave well in FCP. The rule of thumb is RGB 8-bit (24 bit total of three channels), ideally TIFF, native PSD, or PNG. Folks have decent luck with high end JPG's but they're not recommended. You appear to be right on the nose in your format.

What amazes me is how many folks still apply a "blanket resolution" for all images for video. This only makes sense if you've pre-processed everything to one size-- and expect to treat them all with the same enlargement factor. Otherwise it can be an extreme waste or unecessary load on your workstation.

Here's a simple systems approach for ideal resolution for each photo you intend to present, in the chosen video format you're working in. It works for scanning DPI and for resizing PPI of digital images based on your creative needs:

Photo scanning and digital prep

In addition, because large photos are so processor *and* memory intensive, I recommend after animating a few to taste, that you then export these sections out in the native sequence format--that you then reimport these as clips and replace the original keyframed stills with the imports. Store the stills safely in a bin, not in a timeline.

Another alternative is to use Motion for photomotion, which allows you more control, and to export a clip you can import.

Good luck!

- 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

Sorry to be making post after post, but I just realized something and wanted to try it. I am now testing the following: since I store my project files in an external disk, it occurred to me that I needed to drag those folders to the Privacy section of Spotlight, and not just the Capture Scratch in the Final Cut Pro Docs file (since I don't set my scratch disks there anyway). My initial test seems to indicate that this helps, but I will post more results soon.

Paula

[www.lernerphoto.com]

I just wanted to follow up about my previous posts regarding the "File Error: The specified file is open and in use by this or another application." I've done some more testing, and have discovered the following. The Wiki info Jude Cotter posted here is generally correct. BUT, I marked the whole Final Cut Pro Documents folder as private, which diminished but did not eliminate the problem. I then realized I was storing some of my project FCP files elsewhere (I have the current project folders on an external drive). When I put that entire project folder (including all the project Capture Scratch, Autosave Vault, Audio Render Files, etc.) in the Spotlight Privacy column, the File Error and the inability to render disappeared. At least till now, but I've been working on this project all afternoon without a glitch yet. Hope this helps with testing for others.

Paula Lerner

[www.lernerphoto.com]

Unfortunately, Paula, your information isn't verified yet. The problem you describe can happen eight times in one day, and it can disappear for weeks on end. Just because it hasn't happened for 48 hours (or however long) doesn't mean it's gone.

Check back in 12 weeks and you'd get a more accurate picture.

The only thing this issue really mangles is overnight rendering. For longer renders during your work hours, you really shouldn't be rendering for two hours straight anyway; you should be cancelling every 30 to 45 minutes, saving the project file, and then resuming.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks Derek, I'm sorry to hear that I'm not in the clear yet, but I appreciate your insight.

As for overnight rendering, if you mean auto render when you walk away from your machine for awhile or at the end of the day, that has mostly not been an issue. In fact, when I haven't been able to render while I'm working and I give up in frustration and walk away for awhile, I'll come back to find it done. Its just when I want to render transitions, rotate a frame, or add type with an overlaid PSD file, then want to play it to check to see what it looks like but can't because the change isn't rendered, that I seem to have the problem.

Am not sure what "cancelling" means. Would you be so kind as to explain the terminology? Sorry for a basic question coming from a newbie.

In any case, I'm VERY glad I didn't wipe my drive as per the recommendation of Apple care. And I greatly appreciate the information available on this forum. Just finding and reading the wiki is a huge help.

Best,

Paula

[www.lernerphoto.com]

> Am not sure what "cancelling" means. Would you be so kind as to explain the terminology?
> Sorry for a basic question coming from a newbie.

It's exactly what it says. Cancelling the render, stopping it midway through.

When a long render happens, render files are being created -- but the project file does not link your timeline to those files until the entire render is done, and that link is saved as part of the project file.

This means, if you leave a render going for six hours and the computer crashes at the 5:55 mark, when you re-open the project file, the entire six hours of renders would be missing and you'd have to redo the whole thing.

However, if you render just 30 minutes, cancel the render, the project will remember all the renders done in the 30 minutes. If you then save the project file, that saved project file will have the links to those render files preserved. At that point, you just restart the render -- it won't redo the 30 minutes that are already done, either.


www.derekmok.com

[When a long render happens, render files are being created -- but the project file does not link your timeline to those files until the entire render is done, and that link is saved as part of the project file.]

Is that true? How is it I'm able to play a partially rendered clip which, after interrupting rendering, eliminates the redline for that section?

- 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

It's what Derek said: If you interrupt a render, Final Cut "remembers" the bits that were rendered before you interrupted it. But if Final Cut crashes or errors out in the middle of a render, it doesn't have a chance to make its little notes ? "okay, frames 699 through 7326 were rendered and saved in such-n-such file." Interrupting Final Cut still gives it that chance, which is why you can stop a render partway through without losing any of the work that was done during the time it was rendering.

Hi,

FYI, I get the "This file is in use by another application" error periodically with normal use of Mac OS X (not connected to FCP). This occurs on many different systems I've used.

What I've noticed is that Mac OS X applications can take a while to "let go" of previously opened files, or this can happen (as Jeff and others may have stated) when an application "locks" its use of a file as exclusive (read or write). The latter is normal/expected behavior (well, at least the error dialog would be appropriate).

As Jeff and Loren may have mentioned, Spotlight can come into play, as it actively indexes files. There may be something to do with applications that store a "recent files" list (and maybe don't properly "release" the file after it has been closed, leaving the OS to clean up things at a later time). There could be an sporadic issue with the OS, depending on how applications open or close files, whether an application is a Cocoa or a Carbon application, PPC or Intel, etc. (how these operations are manifested in function calls in the OS). FCP is an "old" Carbon-based app...

One example is where I have opened a file in an application, say a QT movie file in QT Player. I may or may not change some movie properties, etc., and play through the movie file. I then close the file and try to open it in another application and sometimes get the same error dialog that Paula mentioned. In some cases (not sure if it's always), if I quit QT Player when this happens, I can then open the file in the other application.

Sorry to ramble on and to dive a bit into more technical Mac OS X behavior (and I am sure I am not being precisely correct in my explanation, but rather trying to paraphrase things to make them simpler (?) for most of us to follow --- my programmer friends would probably laugh at me).

Just trying to let Paula know that this behavior isn't related only to using FCP, or necessarily indicative of a Mac OS X problem.


-Dave

> FYI, I get the "This file is in use by another application" error periodically with normal use of Mac
> OS X (not connected to FCP). This occurs on many different systems I've used.

OSX will refuse to empty a file from the Trash if it's being referenced by an open application. The message you get is "...cannot be completed because [file] is in use."

FCP's render bug is as Paula described: "File Error: The specified file is open and in use by this or another application". This message only appears in Final Cut Pro.

I think they're similar, but not identical issues.

I think your OSX issue is more related to another peeve I've had since Tiger. When you save a file, often the OS file list will show the file as being absurdly small, leading the user to believe that the file is incomplete. If you close the folder and then re-open it, then you'll see the file is actually much larger. There is a lull in OSX's ability to update file information -- something to do with the directory, maybe?


www.derekmok.com

I haven't seen that problem since Leopard came out, Derek. The Finder was changed between 10.4 and 10.5 to use the same event-subscription mechanism that Spotlight uses to update its windows asynchronously. Maybe it's just not updating asynchronously enough for Mr. Impatient Guy.

(Bye-bye, original topic. Sorry.)

Thanks Derek and Jeff!

I should have kept my "mouth" shut...

I still notice the non-FCP "version" of this error every once in a while (in the latest Leopard versions). It seems to be linked to a few applications only...

Luckily, for me, I have never encountered the FCP "version" of the error (the one Paula mentioned)...

That's what I get for trying to help out...


-Dave

P.S. - Let me try to offer something that may help answer Paula's original question... well, at least offer a workflow alternative... I have been using PhotoMotion for a few days now... It seems to work fairly well and eliminates the need to worry about pixel aspect ratio and overall image dimensions (it hasn't cause me any issues in FCP, as far as I can tell... yet!)... I'd be curious to hear about other's experience with this plugin (in a new topic?)... Check out PhotoMotion here:

PhotoMotion

(I have nothing to do with this company.)