Photos Look blurry in the canvas when movie plays....CLEAR when I pause???

What you see is FCP's Real Time display system at work.

If you render the files, the sharpness of the image will not change as the timeline plays.

More importantly, you should be viewing the material on an external video monitor. It is the only way to accurately gauge what it really looks like as FCP will only show you a proxy image.

good luck.
x

Converting the project to MPEG2 so that it can be written to DVD introduces compression artifacts. The display of that DVD on your TV introduces another set of variables.

Your project will never look clearer than your rendered DV timeline playing out through firewire to an external display device as you edit. Get an external monitor.

The graphics, print prepress and video work I've done has always been with either TIFF or PSD files. They both are lossless, support layers yet can be reasonably compressed for storage.

good luck.
x

This problem used to dog me also when I first started on FCP.....but the moves on photos really do look crisp and smooth....

One way to check the quality of the phots (without an external monitor) is to export a portion of you sequence that has a photo in it as a quicktime movie. Then open and play that quicktime in the quicktime viewer.....you'll be able to see the quality and smoothness of the final product....

(Basically, when you see the quality of the photo in your fcp sequence (as it's paused), that's the quality you'll see once you export it and burn it to a dvd...)

Enjoy.