Bringing in jpeg, looks blurry

PowerMac
Intel 2.16 Core Duo
3 GB Memory
FCP 7.1

Often when I bring into FCP a jpeg that is created in high resolution (300dpi) it looks blurry and soft, but in Photoshop it is sharp as a tack. Any suggestions? Blue background with white lettering.
Thanks,
Stan

make sure it's fully rendered (?)

WM

WM
It is definitely fully rendered. Would appreciate any other suggesitons.
Thanks,
Stan

300 dpi is overkil for video, and in fact dpi is sort of irrelevant.
try making 72dpi copies, see what they look like.

remember your computer screen probably has more resolution than most video you are working with,
so a still image may lose resolution may lose resolution when you start working with it as video.


nick

What are your sequence settings? If your sequence is DV, no matter what the DPI is, the photo will not look all that sharp. Once rendered, it's now 72DPI and DV.


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Quote
Nick Meyers
300 dpi is overkil for video, and in fact dpi is sort of irrelevant.
try making 72dpi copies, see what they look like.
remember your computer screen probably has more resolution than most video you are working with,
so a still image may lose resolution may lose resolution when you start working with it as video.

To further Nick's points. 'dpi' usually pertains to paper copy, now pixels per inch. Instead, the pixel count for the whole still image, not per inch, is what determines whether the still image degrades when made into video.
Assuming your video is 1080x1920, jpegs larger than 1080x1920 generally lose sharpness in your video. Jpegs smaller than 1080x1920 generally don't.
To check whether FCP is doing an decent job of resampling your jpeg, resample it in Photoshop for comparison. First crop it to 16:9 proportions and then let Photoshop make it 1080x1920 (choosing the appropriate resampling algorithm).

(There is an option for "best" motion filtering quality in the FCP Sequence Settings Video Processing tab which might (slightly) enhance its resampling.)

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany