Final Cut Pro Full Screen Video Playback Quality
 

Hello,

I'm running my second cinema display as playback monitor.. the quality is no where near as sharp as the canvas window, its very blocky almost like the quality is set on 50%.

I've searched all the settings for a reason for this

Any help?

Cheers

That's the way it goes- you're looking at a proxy playback of your screen. For much better quality you should look into an AJA Kona or Blackmagic display card- which gives you true HD or SD output to a broadcast monitor.

Noah

You may want to check the RT menu settings as show in the attached screen shot. Of course, if you are using DV (720x480) and blowing it up to the Cinema HD full screen (1920x1200), then you get what you pay for by quadrupling the image. If you are doing that AND you have low quality RT settings, it's only worser. :-)

Take a look at a Matrox MXO box too, if you get the chance. The original MXO is output only (not an I/O device) but offers broadcast quality monitoring to an Apple Cinema Display although as already noted, if you are scaling up an SD resolution image to view fullscreen on your HD resolution Cinema Display then of course its always going to be less than stellar.

I have an MXO and am using it with a 23" Cinema display myself. I have been very happy with it for working with HDV - looks great on the screen. But for some reason, it doesn't look so great with standard definition widescreen material. I guess it has to do with the way the image is scaled?

Overall the MXO is a nice product, but I find the software pretty quirky. The screens will frequently black out, then refresh in response to various things you might do (such as switching to another application). It also runs REALLY hot, which worries me a bit.

I should probably update the software (have been working on some big projects and haven't wanted to change anything), but I've had some crashes and strangeness related to switching between the MXO HDV and DV Easy Setups. The last time this happened even a reboot would not make the MXO work again. Finally I deleted the FCP preferences and it came back to life.