Resolution Bug

Hello everyone,

I'm currently working on a project in FCPX, and as I was brushing it up, I wanted to add a picture in the very end. I've done this many times before but this time something odd occurred.

When I hover above the picture on the timeline and press play, everything seems fine. But when I pause and press play again the resolution seems to worsen awfully. From there on the resolution is just trash until I delete the picture from the timeline and reattach the picture again. Then the whole thing starts over.

I've edited the picture myself in an editing tool called 'Pixelmator'. I have exported the picture in .JPEG in various resolutions and also in .psd, but nothing seems to change anything.

Any thoughts? Many thanks!

Kind regards,
Christian K. Bay

Hej Christian, welcome to the forum.

If you have done this many times before with other pictures and without any issues, it's not a "bug" but rather a problem with the specific image.

- What are the settings of your FCP X Project?
- Do you have Background Rendering turned on? I think so.
- Could you send me the Pixelmator picture so we can have a look at it?

Send it to: ronnycourtens@mac.com

- Ronny

It would be interesting if the lower resolution still is manifested if exported. E.g, use R key to select the range of timeline having the still, export at 1080p and examine the file.

If playback view is set to Better Performance the apparent resolution of stills can drop, but only while playback is running. So this doesn't explain the behavior. But it would be interesting to know whether he has view set to Performance or Quality.

Unlike Premiere Pro which truncates still resolution if they are imported with "scale to frame size" enabled, FCP X always maintains the underlying resolution whether Spatial Conform (in video inspector) is set to Fit, Fill or None. So that also does not explain the behavior. However it would be interesting to know his settings and whether he transform/scaled the image after adding to the timeline.

I got the still image from Christian this afternoon (Belgian time). His projects settings are 1080p24 (23.98fps). The still image is 2050 x 2850. I have added the image to a 1080p24 timeline, and I see no problems with the still.

Here's the image on the FCP X timeline, unscaled to fit the complete image in the HD frame:



And here it is, scaled up to fill it into the 1920x1080 frame:



As you can see, the quality is excellent in both cases. I have played and paused the clip multiple times, I have rendered the clip... and it always looks great.

However: when i opened the still in Preview, I noticed that its resolution was 1 ppi, which is rather unexceptional:



Wether or not this may have any influence, I don't know. As he also sent me the Pixelmatr file, I have created a new JPEG still with 72ppi resolution. I have sent it to hime and asked him to test if this works for him. He didn't get back to me yet, so I am waiting for his reply.

- Ronny

For anyone following this thread: the problem was resolved by changing the resolution of the still from 1 ppi to 72 ppi. Strange though, that I had no quality problems with the 1 ppi still. But The OP is happy, so I'm happy as well

- Ronny

I've seen some issues in the recent past with low DPI like that. Rare, but happens. Changing to 72dpi always seemed to help. Hadn't seen it in awhile, though.