I am having issues placing digital pictures in master templates in FCP 6

Question

Hello everyone, this is my first post but I have been using Mac's for some time now with basically no issues.
I have two major issues:
First off, I am trying to place digital pictures which are enormous in the master template drop boxes, when I do this it cuts off the top and bottom of the image but the image still looks clear. The pictures I am importing are 1200 x 1800 jpg files, and were shot with a Canon EOS 30D. What I did was take all the images I needed and used Motion Pictures from Toast Titanium 8 and made a slideshow which I then exported as a QuickTime movie. I didn't know how to encode it so I used the DV/DVCPRO - NTSC codec and the dimensions were set to 3240 x 2430 since I thought that should give me the best quality image right?
Anyway, after doing this I have imported this QuickTime movie into Final Cut Pro and then I cut it up and placed little clips into each drop box. This makes it so I can see the whole picture now, but it still is not as high quality as the original pictures.
So, I have tried many times to export this master template with the pictures in the drop boxes and the finished QuickTime file looks terrible. I have not changed anything in the settings and when I export the quicktime movie I keep all the settings the same.
What do I need to do to get this to look better? Any ideas?
The other thing is that I have noticed a big reduction in quality from when I have the unrendered master template with the digital images in the drop boxes to when it autorenders after I have been away from the computer since I am stressing from this.
I am trying to take these pictures of high school basketball players and use the master template to have all the players pics and names come flying on the screen before the game comes on.
Any ideas? Why is the quality so bad? Am I doing something wrong? I have searched throughout the forums and found little information for digital images being imported into master templates, and I do not know if I am using a lossy format or something?
Any help is extremely appreciated!

Answer 1

First off, I am trying to place digital pictures which are enormous in the master template drop boxes, when I do this it cuts off the top and bottom of the image but the image still looks clear. The pictures I am importing are 1200 x 1800 jpg files, and were shot with a Canon EOS 30D. What I did was take all the images I needed and used Motion Pictures from Toast Titanium 8 and made a slideshow which I then exported as a QuickTime movie. I didn't know how to encode it so I used the DV/DVCPRO - NTSC codec and the dimensions were set to 3240 x 2430 since I thought that should give me the best quality image right?
Digital pictures are no different than any other still images, or movies, for that matter, as fas as Motion or FCP are concerned, they're just pixels.
Your image are way too big for video. Even if you're doing high def, you're scaling them down to fit many on the screen. Thye don't need to be an larger than, say, 1k on the long side.
You blew them up by a factor of 300% to get them out at 3240 x 2430 so now you've made all the pixels bigger than they used to be, you haven't added any pixels. Now you're biring that huge movie into FCVP and scaling it down by a factor of about 90%, wasting huge processing time and muscle and tons of disk space, totally wasted, and every scaling operation has introduced tons of artifacts.
Throw it all ways. Batch your photos through Photoshop to change them all into 1k jpegs and start over.
The templates are fun places to start but the mattes are (mostly) designed to crop and scale. so if you have images that are huge, they just get scaled to fit. You want to start with an image that requires the least amount of scaling.
Welcome to the family. Video is hard.
bogiesan