Anamorphic Help

Motion Newbie here. Got the basics down pretty well so far, but here's one situation I'm struggling with:

Working with a PAL anamorphic sequence in FCP HD, I need to export about 8 short segements (max 250 frames each) for title animation in Motion. Don't want to embed but rather export QuickTimes for client approval, tweaking and then re-import later. Questions/issues are:

1. When I export a self-contained quicktime at current settings (anamorphic), what pixel dimensions do I use in Motion (custom setup?) upon starting a new project ? Also, do I use the same pixel dimensions upon export, or do I squeeze the finished segment back into 720 x 576

2. I did a test of a 100 frame segment, and experienced very noticable color and contrast quality loss. What procedure do I have to follow to maintain the original quality ?

Thanks in advance for any help or pointing me to a tutorial.

Best,
Clay

Clay,

Don't do anything to change the size of the picture - export at 720 x 576.

Now, here's the big Motion bug - Motion does not recognise 16:9 tagged movies. When you make a Motion 16:9 project, you will have to stretch the x axis to 133% to "expand" the picture.

Likewise if you go the other way, your clip will not register as 16:9 back in FCP, so that means having to go into the properties to tick that box per clip.

For the best quality, work with the same codec throughout the process.

Peter

> Now, here's the big Motion bug - Motion does not recognise
> 16:9 tagged movies. When you make a Motion 16:9 project, you
> will have to stretch the x axis to 133% to "expand" the
> picture.

If you find cases when Motion doesn't automatically recognize the pixel aspect ratio of the media on import, you can still set it manually without having to mess with custom X scaling. Select your PAL 16:9 clip on-screen, then "Reveal Source Media" in the Object menu, then choose "PAL D1/DV Anamorphic" from the Pixel Aspect Ratio pulldown in the inspector.

As for quality, embedding the Motion project in the FCP is always better, since there is no intermediate file to deal with, and therefore less quality loss. When you embed, Motion uses the same source media that FCP sees to add the title animation on top of. I suggest that you can always create multiple sequences for each client-approved version so you can tweak the original Motion and FCP files instead of re-imported movies, and export new QT files for client approvals. If you simply cannot embed, then use a lossless codec for your intermediate exported files, such as Animation at 100% quality, or PNG (it's quite slow to read though).

-- Greg

Greg Niles wrote:


> If you find cases when Motion doesn't automatically recognize
> the pixel aspect ratio of the media on import, you can still
> set it manually without having to mess with custom X scaling.
> Select your PAL 16:9 clip on-screen, then "Reveal Source Media"
> in the Object menu, then choose "PAL D1/DV Anamorphic" from the
> Pixel Aspect Ratio pulldown in the inspector.

Will this embed the clip back into the time line in 16:9 and not 'centered' 4:3?
Changing the properties of the 'motioned ' clip on the FCP timeline wont change the aspect ratio. I drag the clip into a bin and then tick the anamorphic property in FCP, then drop the clip onto the timeline.

Embeding works well for 4:3 material, pretty lousy for 16:9

Peter

> Will this embed the clip back into the time line in 16:9 and
> not 'centered' 4:3?

It should. If it doesn't, try setting the Aspect Ratio slider in FCP (in the "Motion" tab, under "Distort" to 0. This is really what happens when you tick the "Anamorphic" box in the Item Properties in FCP, you are setting the default value for that slider based on the original pixel aspect ratio.

There are really two scenarios involved here. One is the standalone situation in Motion where you create a 16:9 PAL project, then import a 16:9 PAL clip (from anywhere, not necessarily FCP) into that project. It should automatically recognize this and set the clip's aspect ratio on import to 16:9 (1.42 in Motion's world), but if this does not happen, you can still set this manually as I explained in the prior post.

The other case is working within FCP and using 16:9 PAL clips in a 16:9 PAL sequence, then exporting to Motion and embedding the result in the FCP timeline. From what I can tell by my tests, this works correctly - the project opens up in Motion and the 16:9 PAL clip fills the screen as it should. The project in the FCP timeline should look exactly as it did before exporting.

However, if the embedded project is somehow NOT set to 16:9 Anamorphic on the FCP timeline, this too can be fixed by setting the Aspect Ratio of the Motion project (the "motioned" clip) to 0, as explained above, AND ticking the "Anamorphic" checkbox in the Item Properties. This should get you back to the same state that the clip was in prior to export, except now it is a Motion project with the same settings.

-- Greg

Gents,

thanks muchly for all your input. I ran a few tests today and it seems that the best solution is to export with quicktime conversion with quality set to highest and compression set to none. I then created a new motion project (custom settings) using 1024x576 as the image size. The clip appears centered and needs to be stretched left and right to size. After creating supers and grafix, I then export lossless 1024x576 and cut back into fcp. It then requires a quick render, but works quality-wise perfectly.

Don't mind having to tweak the aspect as required, but it sure would be easier if there was an anamorphic box to tick on an off as in fcp. There's one for the future version wish-list.

Will try the embedded route tomorrow (although not totally clear as to how that will hold up anamorphic to 16:9 and back), and post again.

Best,
Clay