Quality, Export, and Compression help (pic included)

I'm working on an edit of my RTW trip and am struggling to figure out some quality issues. Video was captured by 3 cameras (a JVC everio, a GoPro Hero 2, and a Droid 4). All record in HD (720 or 1080). I figured I would use the lowest common denominator and converted all the video in MPEG streamclip to be 1280x720 HD, using Apple Intermediate Codec and 100% quality. I have the whole timeline basically finished in FCE, but I'm trying to refine it now and I'm really bothered by the quality. It doesn't look HD at all...it looks really pixelated. Below is a screenshot of my viewer, which is at 100%. Note the edges where the blue arrows point-they're all jagged.
It looks decent at 100% but that is not even 1/6th of my screen. If I go up to 200% it looks like crap. Is this just because I'm editing on a 26" iMac and my screen is so big that I need 1080p or 4K to look good at full screen? When I cropped the 100% screenshot in Preview I noticed that it is 640x360 pixels...exactly half of 1280x720 like I would expect. Why is that? How do I get the quality to be like it should? Am I losing it in MPEG Streamclip or Final Cut? I haven't even started the export battle, which always infuriates me with how bad the quality comes out if the video is a reasonable file size (This video is 5m40s, I feel like 100MB or less is reasonable for streaming right?)
Thanks a ton for the help. I really want to finish this edit this week but want to make sure I do my trip of a lifetime justice.

1.) Any advice for resizing the 1080 clips?
Go to the first clip in your timeline that is 1080 and looks incorrectly sized. Double click on that clip in the timeline, you will see the clip open in the Viewer. Once it does that, in the Viewer, click on the Motion tab, and then adjust the Scale paddle until the frame is just filled. Once that is done, type Command + C to copy the clip and the settings adjustment you made.
Now go to the next instance of a 1080 clip in your timeline and click on it to select it. If there a bunch together you can hold down the shift key while you click on the clips and select as many as you want at a time. Once you have made the selection, type Option + V to paste the attributes from the clip you had just copied. The Paste Attributes window should open, and you want to check the Basic Motion box and keep everything else unchecked. Then click OK, and the clips you had selected should now all be resized.
2.) Some of the clips still have blurry frames. Now that I have the sequence totally edited and don't need to trim/move clips all the time, if I use the raw source video (not optimized for Final Cut via MPEG streamclip and the Apple Intermediate Codec) in Final Cut, will the quality be better or will it be the same/not work at all?
Final Cut Express will only work with HD material in Apple Intermediate codec. You were smart to convert the footage prior to editing. Are the clips that look blurry the 1080 clips? At any rate, you may need to render your timeline, see if any colored render bars are showing on the timeline (rendering will occur automatically when you export your finished movie).
MtD

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>
Currently I am exporting files in FCP in QT H.264 format at 320x240...the image is clean loads fast,
but clients are asking me to give them a larger image.<
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I'd like to ask a few questions.
(1) I have several subclips in FCE that I would like to export, so I can import them back into FCE as individual clips, separate from the original capture. I would also like the option to use the exported clips in iMovie project. The most important thing is to save the clips at the highest possible quality. I ran into a problem when trying to import the clips back into FCE.
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(b) Would those clips then be recognized by FCE and iMovie as having 48 kHz audio even though it was originally recorded at 32 kHz? (I know the quality will be no better, but I've read somewhere that using 32 kHz audio can cause some problems with out-of-sync audio, particularly in iMovie. My hope is the new clip with the 48 kHz audio will circumvent such problems.)
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TSchneider: Thanks again for your valuable reply. I have a few follow-up questions.
My first set of questions is about rendering audio to 48kHz in the timeline.
Almost immediately you'll notice that FCE has tagged the
entire audio track with a red bar meaning it will
need to be rendered (if you try to play the clip from
the Canvas controls you'll just get beeping or very
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48kHz audio of the sequence it's sitting in.
I followed your instructions and everything seemed to work until I got to the passage above. I dragged the subclips into the timeline. The clips appeared in the timeline but there was no red bar. If I chose Render All from the Sequence Menu, nothing happened. If I chose Export to Quicktime Movie, however, it takes several minutes, apparently rendering the audio and video. If I chose instead, Print to Video, the red bars do appear and the rendering process again gets going. There is a small progress bar for both operations in the center of the screen with a percent done and estimated time remaining.
Question: Why doesn't the red bar appear as soon as the clips are in the Timeline?
Question: Why doesn't Render All (or Render Audio) work? It would be much easier to walk away while all the audio rendered into 48kHz and then come back later to save the individual clips to disk.
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Quicktime Conversion" there aren't any suitable
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I understand your description of rendering the audio files in the timeline. If only academic, I was trying to see if I could duplicate the results using using Export>Using Quicktime Conversion. I chose Quicktime Movie as the format. The video setting was DV/DVCPRO-NTSC. The audio was uncompressed with 48kHz rate. This created a Quicktime movie file with these formats. If I opened the quicktime movie file in Quicktime and checked the info on the file, the audio was indeed 48kHz.
Question: Does this mean that the Quicktime Conversion process rendered the 32kHz audio to 48kHz audio prior to writing the file? If so, it would seem to bypass the need to render the clips in a sequence (although if I could render all the clips in the sequence at once, while I was away from the computer, it would be faster than rendering and saving each clip one at a time).
Question: When I exported a clip this way, then imported it into iMovie, the original capture date/time info was missing when I got info on the clip. However, when I save the clip using Export>Quicktime Movie, the date/time of capture was still present. Would there be any way to preserve this date/time of capture info when using Export>Using Quicktime Conversion?
Question: If I decided to Export>Using Quicktime Conversion with the above settings (DV/DVCPRO-NTSC, 48kHz audio) there are other options I'm given pertaining to the video settings. There are settings for Compressor Quality, with a sliding bar where you can choose Least, Low, Medium, High, and Best quality; and there is Scan Mode (interlaced or progressive). How does one choose among these? If you want the best quality exported clip, I suppose you would chose best quality, but what scan mode is "best" for my purposes -- interlaced or progressive?
Thanks a lot for your help. I'm learning a lot!

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Luxesto
Welcome to the Apple user to user assistance forums
If the pictures are in 4x3 format, exporting them using the "Custom" size option and specifying 1024 as the maximum pixels results in nice 1024 x 768 photos that fill the screen on most projectors. This is good.
The exported photos are also at 72 pixels/inch. This is OK for onscreen display, but not so good for printing.
DPI is meaningless for a digital photo until you display it - Dots Per Inch are just a meaningless number - the displayed DPI is the size of the photo in dots (pixels) divided by the inches of the display measures in inches - the DPI setting in the photo means nothing - see The Myth of DPI for a longer discussion on this.
Oddly, the results are the SAME (1024 x 768, 72 pixels/inch) whether one specifies Low, Med, High or Max quality in the iPhoto export panel -- though the file sizes ARE different (higher quality = larger sizes). (I used Photoshop Elements to identify the sizes of the exported photos).
What's odd? you said export with the largest dimension 1024 - that occurred just as you specified - what would be odd would be that the export were different form your specification
What gives? I would have thought higher quality files would have been associated with higher resolution (more pixels/inch) but this doesn't seem to be the case, and I don't understand why the file sizes are larger.
Higher quality means less compression (and therefore larger file size) - it does not mean a difference in compression - JPEGs have a compression from 1 to 12 available - iPhoto does 4 steps - small, medium, large and highest. I've not see the compression documented but I think of it as like 3, 6, 9 and 12
Can someone recommend a way to export a batch of photos from iPhoto at a specific size (1024 x 768) and perhaps 300 pixels/inch) that I might use in PowerPoint for both display and printing? And perhaps explain the bloated file sizes with no apparent quality increase?
Forget the DPI - just be sure the pixel sizes are correct - for printing you should have at least 150 dpi and 300 dpi is better - so at 150 DPI printing your 1024x768 photo can be printed at 6.8" x 5.12 " -- at 300 dpi it would only 3.4" x 2.55"
LN

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Edited by: 973089 on Nov 27, 2012 9:41 AM

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