Image Quality Question
 

I'm currently editing a documentary film in FCP that calls for a ton of images. Most of the images I have are in old magazines, and pictures I got from the subjects. Although I have filmed many of the magazines which works out well and look great, I also want to use digitized or scan images in as well.

My question is...what is the highest possible way to do this? I tried using a home scanner and scanned the pictures in at 300dpi and most look good, but when I zoom in on them they are not as clean as I would like. I have a budget for this film so if there's a company that specializes in this, please let me know.

SIDE QUESTION: In FCP why is the image very clean when the play head is not moving on an image but gets blurry when I hit play?

Thank You.
O.D.

What colour is the bar at the top of Timeline window? If it isn't neutral grey, the clips need rendering and FCP is playing anyway in Preview mode due to RealTime settings.

Side bar: you may want to look into the legality of using the scanned images as they are very likely the intellectual property of someone else and your client may or may not have legal right to use them.

Shaun, it's natural Grey so I'm pretty sure it doesn't need to be rendered. As far as the legality is concerned, that has all been taken care of properly so I'm not worried about that at all.

As far as getting the images into a workable file...what do the pros do for this sort of project?

As an answer to your side question:
Check out the "Pain in the Rear" topic right in this forum. The guy there had the same issue and there has been some great answers.

Also check out the following website ("How do I work with still images")
Technique: Prepping Still Images for Final Cut Pro

FCP still quirk:

Some stills come up as being able to play in real-time but they look pixelated when the timeline is playing. I haven't figured out what sort of stills cause this problem but it's happened to me. Force render these stills and all will be fine.

I used to have a photographic copy stand at my disposal and used that instead of scanning 98% of the time.

Will do, thanks

How do I force render?

Under the Sequence menu you'll find the render choices. In the Render Selection and Render All submenus you'll find that "Full" is not checked off. You can check it and then render or select the offending clips and select "Full" in the Render Only menu.

William, that seemed to do the trick.

Thanks everyone for all the info on this. The "Pain in the Rear" topic was very useful.