square to non-square pixels
 

Hello,

I want to use photographs to create a souped-up slide show in Final Cut Pro 4.5. So the basic material for the video will be photos. Photos use square pixels. Standard video uses non-square pixels. This much I know. I also know that one way to do this is to convert the photographs to non-square pixels in Photoshop and then import them into FCP. These photos look distorted on a monitor but will look okay once they're converted to Quicktime and video projected. But it's such a hassle to convert every individual photo to non-square pixels. Is there some way to convert them as a group later in the process?

Also, what's a good pixel resolution to use for the photos? I'd guess this will be projected using a variety of projectors-- XGA, etc. The photos themselves are originally high resolution so maybe I shouldn't even bother with anything but dragging them to size cleanly within title safe boundaries.

Thanks,
Stephen

This will depend on your project settings. If you are using the NTSC DV easy setup then the resolution of your project will be 720x480 no matter what you do with the photos or how you project it, so the resolution will be limited.

When I use still photos I start by cropping them to the 4:3 proportion in photoshop, using the full resolution of the original for starters. Then I resize WITHOUT constraining proportions in photoshop to 720x480. Actually I just use the cheap Photoshop Elements program, but it has a function that allows you to script this for every file in a folder if you want.

I think these should import correctly as fullscreen images in FCP. I don't think there's an advantage to using images larger than 720x480 for stills in FCP unless you are panning/scanning them. In fact, I think that photoshop will do a better job of rescaling them than FCP, especially with older versions of the software like yours.

Caveat: this all assumes you are using regular 4:3 NTSC DV. If you have some sort of other project settings then you might need a different approach.

If this is only for projection then framing everything for title/action safe would probably look funny because you wouldn't be using the whole frame.

You definitely don't want to import big, still image files 'cause that will slow FCP down to a crawl pretty quickly, but you do want to have the image big enough so that you can do pans and zooms. A happy medium I've found is to use a program like Photoshop to resize the original images down to around 2k or HD resolution (assuming you are working in an SD project) before importing them into FCP. That gets the files into a more manageable size, but still leaves a good amount of room to put moves in the images.


-A