Importing HD Animation into FCP
by Aaron Godfred
on
Jul 2, 2008 at 5:16:10 pm
First of all I'd like to thank everyone for your help.
Here's what I'm working with. I've got a project that I shot with the Panasonic HVX-200 in 720 24p. I'm cutting it in Final Cut 5.0.4 and at the DVC-Pro HD 24 preset. So far so good, I've been able to burn a 16:9 dvd and it looks solid.
Here's where the issue begins. I imported a 1920x1080 quicktime movie, an animated sequence, that was exported from After Effects and is 8 seconds long, 75.9MB sec and 24 Fps.
When I dragged it to the timetine it required rendering but after rendered played fine and the aspect ratio and everything looks great. I went ahead an exported a 16:9 DVD video from Compressor's presets and noticed that the audio for the animation plays but the video is black. I tried to export a H.264 just for a test and again the screen is black.
I have played around with a new sequence and trying to export it to 720 via Compressor's advanced settings and was able to preserve the 16:9 aspect ratio but the quality suffers and it's very jittery.
My questions are:
- Why is it coming up black when I export directly from the master project?
- Do I need to convert to 720 in order to keep it from turning black?
- If so, is there a 1920x1080 24p sequence preset in FCP that I should be using for a separate sequence for the animation?
- What about the fact that my project is 23.98 and the animation appears to be true 24?
- What's the best way to go about this and maintain as much quality as possible?
Re: Importing HD Animation into FCP by Jeremy Garchow on Jul 2, 2008 at 5:52:24 pm
[Aaron Godfred]"- What about the fact that my project is 23.98 and the animation appears to be true 24? "
i'd start there. First, duplicate the file and open the animation with Cinema Tools and hit the conform button and change the frame rate to 23.98. This will make the file a bit longer as it is now running a bit slower. Import that file into FCP, edit into your timeline and try again.
Re: Importing HD Animation into FCP by Tom Brooks on Jul 2, 2008 at 9:13:27 pm
If you're exporting directly from the FCP timeline using Compressor, I guess it's a problem with that process handling the render of the animation. A quick fix might be to export a Quicktime movie "using current settings" and then take that to MPEG-2 in Compressor. Sometimes the direct export from the timeline causes unpredictable results. If FCP can render and play it but the direct export via Compressor fails, I'd try this approach.
-Tom
