Caution: Problems Exporting Stills Containing a Magnetic Mask in Final Cut Pro 11

Last week, during my webinar on Visual Effects in Final Cut Pro 11, I demoed how to create a magnetic mask to remove a background.

Later, as I created an image to promote the webinar, I exported a still frame from FCP. At which point, the weirdness started.

Still frame exports don’t come close to matching what you see in Final Cut.

Here’s what the image looked like in FCP. The woman is a foreground image. The magnetic mask removed the background behind her and inserted a background shot of flying sparks from a blast furnace.

When we export a still, Final Cut gives us several choices. My primary choice is TIFF, followed by PNG, because both retain the highest image quality and all the original color. As well, both formats can be opened by just about any application.

However, here’s what the image looks like when exported out of Final Cut as a TIFF, then opened in Photoshop. See how washed out the background is? In fact, the background is translucent.  It also looks washed out in the Finder.

However, as you can see from the Layers panel on the right in Photoshop, there is only one layer. The transparency seems to be inserted by Final Cut during export. If so, it’s a bug – the exported image should look the same as the screen shot in Final Cut. Or, it should be exported as two layers – foreground and background – but not with a translucent background.

Worse, even though the background is translucent, there’s no way to adjust the background to make it fully opaque.

This time, I exported it as a PNG. Again, the quality SHOULD match the screen shot. But it doesn’t. It has the same translucency as the TIFF image. And, again, it is only one layer, so there’s no way to correct this problem once the image is exported.

Here, I exported it as a PSD. Same problem. In theory, perhaps, FCP should have exported this as two layers: foreground and background. But, nope. One layer with the background translucent and no changes possible.

Only when I export the image as a JPEG is everything merged into a single layer that looks like the screen shot in Final Cut.

I generally don’t like exporting master shots in JPEG because they are highly compressed, color space is reduced to 8-bit which can cause problems with gradients, and there is often a color shift. However, when dealing with images created using the Magnetic Mask, this is the ONLY export option that will provide a similar image to what you edited in FCP.

NOTE: This is NOT a problem when exporting (sharing) video. Only when creating stills. Still, it’s a pretty big problem that Apple needs to look at.

---

Bookmark the permalink.