I think you fixed it David!

Hi David,

I followed your directions and opened a new sequence, etc. and imported a couple of different versions of the picture that was giving me the worst problem. In every case, the pictures scaled without the wavy, watery effect! I don't get it but I'm glad you told me what to do. I should mention that the photos that I blurred slightly and saved as tifs came out the best.

Also, it turns out I did end up spending 12 hours yesterday redoing the entire thing in Motion (and learning Motion at the same time -- not really recommended but it worked). The pictures came out really so much better (quality wise) using motion (as opposed to FCP -- which many of you tried to tell me) and then importing them into fcp after rendering them out just in quicktime format (video only).

Also, I should mention that my husband found a great write up on Ken Stone's site that explained I should have had my canvas set up for 100% picture instead of viewing it as "fit to window" which really makes it look terrible. I suspect that this was the main problem -- that at some point, I actually did fix the problem with tifs and blurs but because I was relying on this incorrectly set up canvas window and in my freakage had stopped burning reference dvds to check them on the TV, I didn't realize I may have fixed the problem.

Yes, everyone, I promise when my income tax check comes in, I'm getting a monitor! I really can't thank you enough David (and everyone who replied and helped with this insane problem that was a lot of my own unintentional making). God it's gonna feel good to actually sleep tonight! :)

Thank you so much David! And thank you Jeremy Garchow, Richard Harrington (I'm buying his book!) Dave Jenkins, Gordon Gurley, and Richard Pengelly for their help. You guys are seriously the BEST!

Best to you David!
Toni

PS. If anyone reads this later looking for answers you should know that the best quality I got was using tifs with a slight blur on them and then timing the slideshow out in FCP and then duplicating it in Motion and exporting out as a simple quicktime (video only since I imported the music as a reference track in motion) and importing that back into FCP and marrying it up with the music track


Toni Carey
formerly Toni @ TONICK
www.tonickproductions.com
2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo IMAC
w/500GB Internal HD
running MAC OS X 10.4.11
(always updated to current version)
1 LaCie 500 GB & 1 LaCie 1TB HD's firewired to it
Running FCP Studio 2
Use Canon GL2 to shoot and digitize footage