I've searched around the forum's for an answer but without any luck i'm afraid.

I need to cut a showreel for a friend on FCP 5.1.2. There are 5 different clips all on different formats. Some .mov some .m2v some even .mp4

I wanted them all to be converted to the same format in compressor, which i did to DV PAL Quicktime, but it seems to have made them all look very "fuzzy"....(yeah, good description neil)

Just looks like it's been beaten up by compressor rather than converted.

Is this the correct way to prepare different format clips for FCP or should i just put the different format clips straight into the time-line and render them?

Hope somebody can help!

Usually Compressor does a better job but if the settings are off at all it can be a disaster. Try dropping the clips into an FCP timeline and let FCP do the rendering, there has been a couple of times where that worked better for me.

Neil,
Are all of the files the same resolution? Do the DV files look fuzzy if you play them at full rez in quicktime?

Hi Liam, unfortunately the clips are all different resolutions too, the sources are from DVD rip's and all sorts. Not the best start i know!

I want to convert all my clips to DV-PAL 720x576

One of my source clips is an mpeg file

720x540
Square Apect Ratio

it plays absolutely fine in QT player, but when i use compressor to adjust this to a QT DV-PAL file at 720x576....I get unwanted horizontal lines like in the picture below.

Would anybody know the solution to this?

really, any help would be amazing. Thanks!

Hi Neil,

Looks like you've got interlace issues to me.

You can fix that in fcp using one of a number of different plug-ins (Joes field fixer could do the trick) or you can re-transcode the original movies.

Try a different programme to transcode, like MPEG Streamclip and play around with the interlace settings when you export to quicktime.

Hope that helps,

Liam.

Thanks Liam,

Much appreciated. Joes Filter didn't seem to do as good a job as FC's built in de-interlacer. But i think a whole re-transcode is the answer.

I posted the final results in the JVC HD100 forum if you're interested! under "Camera Op Showreel"

thanks again.

Neil