Importing JPEGs / change import settings?

I have been editing on a Quantel system which allows stills to be imported high resolution ie the full size of image. This means you see only part of the image in the editing window if viewed at video resolution. You need to zoom-out to see full frame - but this system allows you to zoom-in a long way and do rostrum-type moves within the image without reducing output quality.

Can this be done in FCP?

To some extent. FCP has frame resolution limits of 4000 pixels. You might be better off using Motion or a plugin like Photomotion.

All the best,

Tom

I would do that in After Effects, which is a better environment for animating stills than in Final Cut Pro. That or Motion, but I recall Motion has a size limit.



www.strypesinpost.com

But it sort of *is* done in FCP, given the 4000 upper limit, it's just that FCP tends to default to making the image fit the canvas when it is dropped in the timeline.

You can turn this off in your preferences, or just double click the clip in the timeline to load it into the viewer (or, if it's a layered .psd for eg, single click and hit return to load it into the viewer) then go to the 'motion' tab and reset the scale to 100. This will display the pic at full size in your canvas, allowing you to move around the frame.

By the way - is 4000 still the upper limit? I'm sure I had some pics at 14,000 the other day which I resized, but still managed to load into FCP before I realised how big they were.

Not sure if that's still the case. A while ago, I had some pretty large tiffs (credit rolls), which I tried animating in Motion/FCP, and it scaled the image down to something much smaller, resulting in a loss of resolution.



www.strypesinpost.com

I just did a test with a 10k image and it worked fine. Here is how it came into fcp


and here it is scaled to 100% and rendered

Cool. I'll try a tiff file later. They could have fixed the frame limitation in an earlier FCP version.



www.strypesinpost.com

i say, Jude, that's a rather quiet font for someone from Perth.
must be what you'd use on the evening news over there?


yeah, i'm not sure if FCP ever had a hard limit on the frame size of imported stills.
maybe, but not for a long time: i did my first FCP end title roller with a 10,000 pix tall PSD file more than 5 years ago.

it does have an upper frame-size limit of 4096 pixels on SEQUENCES.
i could be wrong about this, but didn't that upper limit used to be 4000?
4000 is a dumb limit seeing as 4k is 4096, so maybe they stretched the limit a tiny bit,
or maybe i remember wrong.

regarding image sizes, the manual doesn't seem to mention an upper limit,
but slightly confusingly has this graphic:



and on the next page they say

Quote

If you?re creating graphics for camera motion effects in an HD sequence, the image
dimensions will have to be quite high. For example, doubling 1920 x 1080 results in a
graphic that is 3840 x 2160.

so no mention of a limit, but no mention of anything over 4000, either


nick

Yes well, we're all hard of hearing over here.

I googled around a bit. I guess the 2048x2048 rendering message was caused by a slow graphics card I was working on.



www.strypesinpost.com

2048x2048 is the drop dead max for both my FCP and Motion.

Apple G5 Dual 2.5Ghz with 2G Ram OSx 10.411 FCP 6.02 Motion 6.02
Graphics card stock 9800


strypes Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I googled around a bit. I guess the 2048x2048
> rendering message was caused by a slow graphics
> card I was working on.

I believe it's your graphics card (or perhaps limitations due to the AGP slot). I resized Jude's image to 15k (for some reason the one on the link is 1k), but I am able to import it into FCP, but I can't render in high precision without getting an out of memory message. Even with 10K, I can only render in 8 bits. It's pretty slow, though, and beach balls a lot.



www.strypesinpost.com

Yeah the one on the link is just a screencap of what I was doing, not the original file.