JPegs stills are choking uo my FCP timeline.

Hi BB here,

I'm an FCP user from 2000 and occasionally I have a real problem with stills bogging down my FCP time lines.

Lots of slow rendering and spinning rainbow & mini time wheels.

Also I cant seem to drag the image very far in the canvas before it stops & the render wheels start spinning. Every action I do is SUPER SLOW. The sam thing happens in Motion too.

8core with 12G ram & GForce 285 Turbo card.

Thanks in advance!
BB

Two things that disturb FCP quite a bit.

1. Photos that are massively overlarge.
Try to keep them not more than 2 times your frame size, and then only if you need the space to move them around or zoom in a lot. Even better still is to conform them to your frame size before import. DPI is not important (except where it makes the file size ridiculously large), just the actual dimensions of the document.

2. Photos that are not RGB.
Greyscale, CMYK and so on give FCP the willies. Convert them in Photoshop to RGB before import.

Sounds like large stills as Jude mentioned. Scale it down to the size you need. Preferably, make them small and reconnect it to full rez still when you are onlining.

For the issue with dragging the duration, hit enter on the clip in the timeline and load it in the viewer and enter a large number like 20:00:00 or something in the duration column.



www.strypesinpost.com

This does not sound like your problem, but a related issue. Don't use movies made of sequential stills. FCP treats every asset as a separate file. If you are doing something like a timelapse or are working with say a targa sequence of hundreds or thousands of still it will just kill performance. Instead import them into QT Pro or Motion and render a movie in your edit codec.

What others say about file formats-- 8-bits per channel RGB TIFF, PSD top choices. Check that colorspace! Anything richer clogs in 8-bit FCP.

Scan or downsample only to the DPI you need, to deliver PPI which keeps your enlargements sharp. If you don't need more than 2X enlargement in SD 16:9 NTSC don't fill a scan with more than 1728 DPI, double the frame width of 864, which I got from Trish and Chris Meyer's great After Effects book, although some will correct me and say it's 853 and they're probably right.

DPI is relevant, but *only* in terms of scanrate, as most scanner software speaks "DPI" and not PPI- pixels per inch, which is the onscreen equivalent. Photoshop, for downsampling of digital camera stills, speaks PPI.

Even better, handle your actual photomotion in Motion and export in your sequence codec. That way you can return to tweak, while keeping your timeline free of actual scans or digital camera downsamples.

- Loren
Photo scan rates demystified!
ScanGuide? Pro compact reference now at
the LAFCPUG Store!

>Don't use movies made of sequential stills

It doesn't sound like image sequences. If you are on FCP 7, you can convert them in Compressor.



www.strypesinpost.com