• christine 3 months ago
    Any help sometime this week would be greatly appreciated, because this video is for my school's art show next week.

    Here's the situation: I'm doing the video component for a class project, in which we're creating a new country. We have a 3D map (chicken wire and paper maché) and behind it we have a canvas, on which we'll be rear-projecting a little video tour. Each of us will come on screen, talk to an audience, point at specific parts of the map and describe/explain our country and what not.

    I'm using a regular mini-dv camera and final cut express to edit. In order to satisfy the length of our map and the preferred height of, let's say, the characters, I have to do some split-screening where I have to scale down each video clip to about 50%. By doing that, (I think) I'm reducing the quality of the video, which becomes very apparent when projecting the video 80in long.

    I'm wondering (and I'm beginning to think it's only possible in final cut pro), is there any way to change the size of the canvas so that I can fit the two clips side-by-side and keep the clips at their original dimensions, that is, not to sacrifice the video quality?

    This is what I have so far: vimeo.com/946905

    Also, when they walk, you can see horizontal lines, warping the picture. I'm not sure what the term is for this. When I exported the video, I tried to "deinterlace the source video" 'cause it sounded like it would fix the problem, but sadly, it didn't. What can I do about this? I'm sure it has something do with its compression type. How should I export it? (I exported my video as an .mov file with H.264 compression.)

    This is turning out to be a longer than I thought it would be. I hope all of this makes sense ... Can you tell that I'm not so video savvy?
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  • Steve Ellington 3 months ago
    Hi Christine
    First thing is, you don't have to worry about the split screen degrading quality. Making and image smaller actually makes the image better. The loss in quality you are seeing is probably final cuts real time engine at work. When you make an effect that final cut can't play back in real time it degrades the quality a bit and puts a green bar above the clip in the time line to tell you its preview only. If you want to preview in in full quality you have to render(under the render menu-> Render all. make sure render preview is checked).

    Changing the size of the video is not really an option. Video basically has 2 aspects ratios(4:3 and 16:9). You can play around with letter boxing though.

    The lines you see is a de-interlace problem. De-interlacing has to be done on export, not on the timeline to solve the issue.

    If you do file->export using quicktime conversion(i think this is it, but FCexpress may use different language that FCP). There you should find a window that looks like the quicktime export window shown in the Vimeo exporting guidelines. There is a deinerlaceing option there.

    Good luck!
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  • christine 3 months ago
    thanks steve, but i'm afraid i'm still running into some problems, or at least, i think i am.

    i know a smaller image improves the quality, but when you enlarge a small video with a projector, the pixels are much more visible. (it's kind of like when you zoom into a tiny photo.) i guess there's no real way around that.

    i've tried exporting the video de-interlaced, but i'm still getting those lines. should i already be seeing these lines on the canvas while i'm editing, even after rendering the entire sequence?

    thanks again!
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  • christine 2 months ago
    never mind! i got it. thanks steve!
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