Help! Easy Set Up Destroyed My Project.....
 

Ok so i have a bit of a problem. i started an HD project in FCE, with my easy setup at 1920x1080, 60i. i left the project for a month or two and worked on another project inbetween. however, i changed the easy setup settings for the second project to 720x480, 30i.

when i opened up the first HD project today and kept editing, i realized i hadn't changed back easy setup to full HD 60i. so i changed it back to full and kept editing. when i went to export the final video at full quality, low and behold.... the file exported as 720x480... and it looks awful. no full HD at all obviously.

am i screwed? or can i fix this....

any help would be very much appreciated.

thanks

- Morgan

Although your project got changed did the sequence you outputted follow that change? Often I have noticed that FCP is terrible at changing settings, there are 4 or 5 different places where you have the ability to change things like deck control, format, and so on.

i'm not entirely sure what you're asking :-(

when i re-opened the HD project that was originally set to 1920x1080, the easy setup settings were currently at 720x480, which is when i noticed the image quality had changed in the clips i was editing. then when i exported the timeline it was in 720x480 instead of HD

i've also tried going into sequence settings and setting the sequence preset to 180i60, and that creates a video outputed to the right resolution, but the image is a squished rectangle in the middle of the huge 1920x1080 quicktime player window.

When you are at the sequence that you want to export press "apple and 0" this is the hot key to open up that sequence's settings window. It will say all the settings that you most likely will want to change. You can select the sequence in the browser or if it is already in the timeline, make sure it is the one selected and press the hot key.

when i go into the sequence settings the only thing i can see that would help me is the load sequence preset button. i tried this and selected 1080i60, which creates a squished rectangle video image of the wrong resolution in a playing window at the correct resolution of 1920x1080.

looks like this:
http://i29.tinypic.com/30u37y8.png

I'm guessing that your timeline also needs to be rendered too. This should be because FCP rendered your footage to 720 instead of 1080 so that it would do the previous bad output. I would recommend re-rendering and double checking with the master clips to make sure there wasn't a loss in quality.

I did re-render the timeline and was left with the squished video image you see in the picture i posted in my previous reply.

what am i doing wrong?

If you go to user preferences under the Final cut pro drop down menu there should be an option to check or uncheck that says scale media to sequence. If that is unchecked it won't scale it of course. What happens when you re cut in media into the sequence with correct settings?

thankfully i fixed the problem today. i right clicked on the sequence, and removed all the video attributes, then i changed the sequence preset, and it was back to normal. didn't even have to re-render.

thanks for your help :-)

Ya I know your pain. There are too many ways to change settings and unfortunately only a few actually work.