FCE Video Quality Problems

[martynmc7]

Hi guys,

I'm quite new to video editing with Final Cut Express having only used iMovie in the past. Currently I've been playing around with a holiday video, and liked the titles and revolving globe animation from iMovie. I exported both of these as a 1080p .mov file and pulled it into FCE. In the viewer the movie looks great and plays at top quality in full screen mode. However, as soon as I drag the clip to the canvas the quality nose dives and looks terrible. What's worse is even when exporting the movie utilising the QT converter and setting it up as 1080p it still looks terrible.

According to the information in the timeline the clip is still 1080p, but it just seems to degrade as soon as I pull it into the project. What am I doing wrong? I've messed with a bunch of export options, and rendering options and nothing makes any difference

Thanks

 

[CaptainChunk]

1. What codec is the video you're editing? AVCHD? HDV? H.264?

2. The Canvas window will always display a lower-resolution "proxy" version of the video on the timeline. It's not a very accurate representation of what the video will look like on final output. You can adjust the playback quality (Low, Medium, High, Dynamic - I think) in the RT settings (there's a small "RT" button on the upper-left of the Timeline window for that). Depending on the codec you're editing and the speed of your computer, performance will vary.

3. When you export the sequence from the timeline to Quicktime, you should only use Quicktime Conversion if you need transcode to an entirely different codec on output. If that's your intent, also double-check the compression settings prior to output.

If you give us a little more information about what codec you're editing and what compression settings you're using for export, we can help you better.

 

[martynmc7]

I managed to stumble upon the answer by accident a few moments ago. I hadn't selected the Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i60 in the Easy Setup, now the quality is consistent when importing. Sorry to be a pain!