Footage becomes blurred in Final Cut
by alicia nichols
on
Aug 19, 2009 at 4:41:59 pm
Hi - i received 8-bit Uncompressed NTSC footage. When I open the footage in Quicktime it looks sharp and clear. But when i import it into Final cut, it becomes blurred.
Also strange - the footage looks different in Aftereffects - it is not blurred and the colors change.
My final cut sequence is DV NTSC 48 kHz. Any suggestions on what i can do to eliminate the blurriness or why the colors change from Final cut to AE would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Re: Footage becomes blurred in Final Cut by Erik Lindahl on Aug 19, 2009 at 5:03:07 pm
Blurry footage in Final Cut Pro can be due to a number of things:
1. The clip has something wrong with it's attributes and FCP has issues interpreting it / playing it back
2. The clip is set to a different field order than the sequence and FCP sometimes then enforces a de-interlace.
3. You are going to a lower quality codec. Uncompressed holds higher color resolution than DV, sharp colors will look blurry or blocky in a DV-sequence that otherwise look good uncompressed.
For me no 2 is the most common issue since I always work uncompressed.
In regards to After Effects that's another "fun" story… The matter of the fact is uncompressed video stores data in "YUV" where AE works in RGB (as does most compositing software). This is much like the printing world needs to deal with "CMYK" vs RGB files as well. To deal with this a conversion is made where AE will most of the time does this slightly different than QuickTime player or Final Cut Pro. The best way to maintain gamma and color between the two is using animation as your intermediate codec, exporting your video from FCP to Animation files.
I've done some tests with AE and 10-bit uncompressed files but always see a slight shift between the two applications on way or another. You can minimize them with the use of color profiles, but the shifts are still there. This is very frustrating since using native 10-bit files would simplify my workflow A LOT at work.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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Re: Footage becomes blurred in Final Cut by Shane Ross on Aug 19, 2009 at 5:06:36 pm
#2 Blurry Playback
Shane's Stock Answer #2: Blurry playback
ONLY JUDGE THE QUALITY OF YOUR MATERIAL ON AN EXTERNAL BROADCAST MONITOR, OR AT LEAST A TV.
The Canvas shows you what happens after the codec you are working with has been applied. The Viewer shows you the material in its native format. Once you drop the footage from the Viewer into the timeline, it inherits the attributes of the sequence. If it is a DV sequence, the footage will render out as DV.
1. Disable overlays on the Canvas.
2. Make sure you've rendered everything (no green bars at the top of the timeline).
Video playback requires large amounts of data and many computations. In order to maintain frame rate and be viewable at a normal size, only about one-fourth of the DV data is used in displaying the movie to the screen. However, the DV footage is still at full quality, and is best viewed thru a TV or broadcast monitor routed thru your camera or deck.
