Jpeg stills in timeline

Hi, I think I?ve read every forum there is on this and yet my brain seems to have collapsed.

First, I had a deadline to meet showing a fine cut (on a DVD for preview) for an hour doco. We?ve done it on little or no budget I should mention. Shot in HDV and edited native. (Yes I know, and I?ll never do it again.) I have my sequence set to render in Prores and export as Prores before going to Compressor and onto DVD to show.

I was cutting it in 3, 20 minute sequences, not too many problems. BUT?At the last moment when I joined the three sequences everything began crashing (of course). I bought FCS Maintenance and it found 2 corrupted jpegs. Trouble was these two photos were sent to me after months of trouble and I couldn?t easily get them again.

I tried all sorts of things and finally, in frustration, I tried converting them to AIC. Bingo, no corrupt file alert. The shots looked perfect and the crashing every 2 minutes stopped.

I?ve sent a DVD copy this cut on and now have time to fix any problems surrounding jpeg stills, I have about 20 all up in the program.

1st Question. Is doing this (converting these 2 to AIC) going to cause me future headaches and should I use another method?

2nd Question. I have a 10 more jpegs of my own (and 6 emailed to me) and the 1 hour on the timeline is very sensitive to any new renders. Still crashing occasionally. I continually read jpegs can cause crashing. I?ve used the Larry Jordan ? convert to png or tiff, size to 1920 -1080. My stills end up stretched on the HDV timeline.

If you could point me to a definitive article on this I?d appreciate it. I don?t normally put stills into my work and I?m a bit of a newby at Photoshop.

Cheers, Howard

AIC...? I don't really get the logic behind that. I would have converted them to TIFFs. Unless no still format would work, I don't get why you had to convert the JPEGs to a video format.

And if I did have to convert them to video, I'd convert them to ProRes or ProRes HQ. AIC was what you'd use before you had ProRes.

> I continually read jpegs can cause crashing.

If they're, say, 30000x20000 pixels, maybe. But if your JPEG sizes were reasonable, FCP hasn't had problems dealing with JPEGs for a good seven, eight years now.


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Hi thanks for the quick reply. When I converted them to TIFFs FCS still found them to be corrupt, same for other formats, I just tried to think outside the square (no pun intended) and tried AIC. As I said it fixed the corrupt file problem. Go figure.

On the jpegs, when I was scouring the forums on FCP continualy crashing, jpegs came up a lot. I was also referring to Larry Jordan's article "Technique: Prepping Still Images for Final Cut Pro". A lot of forums and articles suggested that not prepping stills correctly could cause headaches. Not so?

As I said.I've got time now to fix any potential bugs before doing my final cut. So I making sure these wont come back to bite me when I start doing the last, render heavy, touches.

Cheers, Howard

Put them in Photoshop and check that they are the correct size, and that they are RGB. Then resave and reimport the new copies. Jpegs that are very large or CMYK or greyscale can be a problem.

Corrupt Clip Finder not only finds corrupt files but also searches for things that could potentially cause problems (such as if they're in a CMYK colorspace or they're very large). If you hover the cursor over the filename in Corrupt Clip Finder it will tell you why it flagged it up.

My software:
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Once again thanks for the speedy replies. I'll go back to FCS and check. It was a lifesaver in this urgent situation.

Just quickly, what is the correct size? I've searched the manual but maybe after blowing my brain on that deadline I'm incapable of seeing what's right in front of my eyes.

Thanks

Stills greater than 4000px in width or height can cause problems.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
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Thank you Jon. I trashed the offending pics from my work computer but kept them on a seperate pocket drive for future referance. Yep, 4752 X 3456.

Could you advise on what I would resize them to? I'm doing motion one shot, the other is simply a still.

thanks again.

The size doesn't matter as long as it's below 4000px in both width and height. But if one of them is a still, you may as well make it the same size as your sequence codec (after compensating for non-square pixels - see here for more details: [www.larryjordan.biz]).

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Hi Jon, I'm back to where I started on my second question in my original post. After reading Larry Jordan's articles to begin with I resized to, 1920x1080 square pixels, but the pic is stretched. Funny how I can cut an hour with all the complications involved and not get my head around a couple of jpegs. Thanks for patience on this. Hope I'm not wearing out the friendship.

All you need to do is keep it below 4000px. So bring it into Photoshop and resize the horizontal dimension so that it is below 4000. Do not touch the vertical dimension or you'll mess up the aspect ratio.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...