Q: Importing 2.7K video for a 1080 project; Quality not good
I'm on FCP 10.1.4. Editing on a 15" MBP that is running OS 10.9.5.
I have imported some beautiful 2.7K 60fps (59.94p) GoPro footage. When I play it back in the viewer on the upper right quadrant of the screen, it looks great. Sharp, bright color, smooth.
I have created a 1080 30fps (29.97p) project. I plan to export to that resolution as I find it streams well and looks fine on most screens large and small. However...
If I take a video from the browser and drag it into my Project, the quality is severely degraded. When I now play that same clip from the project instead of the browser, it is now very soft, colors are not as nice. It just looks like another crappy GoPro video and not the great quality it looks outside of the Project.
I have not exported it yet, but from past experience, my export to Compressor doesn't bring back the fidelity of the original.
I am aware that I'm dropping the video resolution and the frame rate, however, I have seen some very crisp 1080 and even 720 video, so I'm not sure why this occurs. I thought if I gave FCP more than it needs, it could extract something nice.
Should I trust that Compressor will clean it up as much as it can?
Should change over to a project that is 2K and/or 60fps (to match the max resolution of the collection of footage I have.)?
I'm sure some of my footage is only 720p.
Is there a FCP setting to have it spend more time translated the video from the native resolution to the project resolution?
Thanks for any help. This has plagued me for a while. Web searches don't turn up obvious answers to this question so I was hoping someone here could help.
Posted on May 19, 2016 6:44 PM