If you have a Mac then you have iPhoto, which should convert the TIFF's to JPEG for you. If not there are dozens of free digi-image editors that you can download and get your conversions done. Don't need no stinkin' PC to do your work. (laughs)

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That's a good idea but my graphic work involves lots of map fly-arounds and zooms. If I made my graphics fit into the viewer and save them they'd lose their rez when I do major zooms on them. I can't believe they even sell a turnkey editing system with final cut studio and there's not any imaging application that's included with it. I was just gonna download the free trial of photoshop, but CS3 is only for Leopard OX, and I have Tiger. Too bad there's no free trial for CS2........but I know some people.............

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I need to preserve my transparent backgrounds though. How do I go from getting a 125MB TIFF file with a transparent background into something more appropriately sized for FCP........without Photoshop.

I don't think you can. If you're doing most of your work on the Mac you can call Adobe and have them sell you a transfer-license to migrate your Windows products over the the Mac. You'll have to send them the original PC discs along with a letter of destruction and for a small fee they will send you Mac discs with new install codes. That's what I would do.

Did you try what I said, selecting a TIFF into the viewer, make a freeze frame, and using that instance on the timeline?

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I would Ben but I do a lot of zooming into these photos and I need the quality to hold up throughout the zoom. What format besides TIFF can I use in Photoshop Elements to save an well-compressed image with an alpha channel? Elements saves most of the same files as Photoshop. What settings does it need to be in for FCP to treat it properly?

When you save as Photoshop aren't you left with a PSD? Because PSD is what you want...

Try exporting just the TIFF parts as ProRes quicktime movies and re-importing them into the FCP timeline, then do your export to compressor.

As an aside put me down in the camp of saving these files as self-contained, saves a lot of headache from re-rendering and there is virtually no quality loss using ProRes. You have so many more options once your file is completley rendered. Especially if you want to test different mpeg2 quality settings or need to create a quick web copy, etc..

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Okay I bit the bullet and converted all of the TIFF files to PSD's, thus cutting this file sizes in half. They're still pretty large though. With ones that didn't require transparancies, I converted to JPEGs. I'll update this posts with the results. One last question though. I have several nested sequences, and many clips have heavy filters applied etc. Should I render the underlying sequence AND the parent sequence before I export. If I understand it correctly, they're absolutely no need to render prior to exporting from the timeline (I've done it before), but is there any advantage of doing it?

Qood question about the rendering, been wondering that myself...

...let us know how the PSDs work out for Compressor.

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Okay that didn't work. Compressor is choking on my very last sequence with a "Quicktime Error 0". I'm converting all of my graphic animations into their own movies, exported via "Animation" Millions of Colors+ (the + preserves the alpha channels). We'll see how this works out. It will be a drastic reduation in file size for sure.

Solution!!!!!!!!!
 

Okay fellas,

I was able to develope a work-around, and am posting this in case someone else might ever have the same problem. I recompressed all of my extremely large TIFFs that were not alpha dependent into JPEGs. This did not work, as Compressor choked on the large image files. I could render them and play them fine in the timeline of FCP, but compressor just couldn't handle it. Sometimes Compressor would leave out layers, and sometimes it would drop all layers to black. This was random, and after 6 tries, I resulted to othe rmethods. Note: This was only when I exported directly from the timeline. I could have exported a quicktime self-contained or reference movie and it would have worked fine, but direct from the timeline is THE BEST quality (even though so many seem to disagree).

To keep compressor from dropping those large image files, I copied all of the image animations to thier own separate timelines, and exported them with this setting:

Animation, Best, Millions of Colors+, Keyframe-All Frames.

Then I re-imported those Quicktime movies into FCP, and replaced the old image layers with their own single quicktime file.

I think what was happening, was that in an ordinary movie sequence, FCP looks at eack movie frame as a small file compressed in the DV codec, etc. With extremely large image sequence files (20MB+), FCP must treat that entire image file on a frame-by-frame basis. So, essentially if you added motion to a 30MB graphic for 10 seconds, it would be equivelant to a 30MB X 30 Sec X 30 Frames = 27,000MB, 10 sec. movie file!!!! My guess is that most applications would struggle with a bunch of 10 second, 27,000MB+ movie files. And that's with only one image layer. I was compositing up to five images of that size onto a single layer. That's a whole lot of processing, and when you send a 2 hr sequence like that into Compressor, your just asking for an accident somewhere along the encode process. That's why I think the drop-outs were random during each encode.