Creating a Stills Project

[ This article was first published in the March, 2009, issue of
Larry’s Final Cut Pro Newsletter. Click here to subscribe. ]

 

Daniel Carrion writes:

I am a retiree picking up FCP as a hobby and it is being more than challenging this for me. I want to make a movie of my daughter’s wedding pictures (2304 x 1536). I started this project using the 4.3 format and the truth is that the quality is really poor in my HD 37 inches LCD flat TV. And also with just a few pictures I am already over 1GB of disk used.

 

For this project I bought your “Moving on Stills” DVD and following the examples I came out with the idea that maybe I should make it a HD movie with the stills or at least a format that I could easily convert it to HD later on.

 

Would you point me in the right direction?

 

I need to know:

• Picture sizes ( I imagine 2132 x 1200 is the 16.9 format)
• Settings for FCP, DVD SP
• Should I buy a blue ray burner for the Windows or for the Mac Pro?

Larry; why don’t you create a “Moving on Still for HD”?

Larry replies: Daniel, without a doubt, working with stills causes headaches for everyone.

First, the key question is how are you going to distribute this video? Blu-ray discs can be created on a Mac, but you’ll need Toast or Adobe Encore. Final Cut Studio can’t do it.

Second, High-Def Blu-ray discs can only be played on an HD TV set.

Third, yes, an HD movie would be better quality than SD. The image problems you are seeing are most likely due to down-sampling your image to SD quality (which is very much lower than the original image).

Fourth, the video setting I recommend would be either DVCPRO HD 720p/60 or ProRes 422. An hour of DVCPRO HD takes 48 GB to store. And hour of ProRes 422 takes about 60 GB to store. Neither is small, but the quality is much higher. The reason I recommend 720p is that it can be easily displayed to computer screens – which, I suspect, is where more people will view this movie, than on Blu-ray discs.

A suggested image size should be 2560 x 1440 x 72 dpi.

Here’s an article that can help: Improving the Look of Your Graphics and Text

 

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