Loss Of Video Quality in Drop Zones

Hello,

I am a choir director and I have been making virtual choirs for about a year now and thins the first one i'm using drop zones. I made a templet with cascading drop zones in Motion . In fcpx I synced and added my choir's videos to the drop zones and exported with apple ProRez 4444 so I could edit all 120 videos in one project with a transparent background.

After exporting 4 projects, 30 videos each to combine into 1 project There is a loss in video quality from the export/original student video submission. All the student videos are of various file sizes, types, and aspect ratios. I normalize that by making a compound clip of each which is required as well for Drop Zone functionality.

Are my drop zones too small? Is there a sizing option I can adjust in the original 4 projects or in motion to allow the videos in the drop zones to have a better quality? Am I missing somthing?

Attached are screen shot from the main project. One full view and one zoomed in with Ken Burns.

Thanks,

Nigel
Just trying to get through the school year.

 

Yeah, you may be shrinking the videos way too much. By what percentage are you shrinking the videos?

The videos are 30% of the original size. I changed the aspect ratio to vehicle and got like... 15% (arbitrary percentage) better quality. Do you think if i were to make a custom video frame size like 480x1080 do you think that would help?

I'd use Compressor and bath re-size those videos to be closer to the size you really need. Too much enlarging and shrinking degrades (pixelates) images.

I do not fully understand your workflow but I think what might be happening is that your videos are not going back to the original source resolution once you bake them into groups. Think of it this way: I put a video in 50% size in a HD project and export. I then import the result as a new clip. I now zoom in 200% into the new clip. In regard to my original video I reduced the resolution by half in the the first step and now expect it to have the same quality as the original. Doesn't work of course.
The only way to maintain max quality of your original videos is to not export your pre-compositions. Only than are all resizing operations are calculated from the original max poss quality.
Drop zones do not have a certain resolution. The resolution is whatever % the size of them is to your max template size. So if the drop zone is filling a quarter of your frame it is a quarter the resolution of your template resolution.

If this is not your workflow then the only other possibility I can think of is that your template has less resolution than your project. Say the template has a max resolution of 1920x1080 and your project is 4k than the template has to be zoomed in 200% to fit. And all it’s contents have to be too.

Thanks for the response. Do you have any recommendations for setting in Compressor? I'm trying to figure this program out for my next project.

Thank you all for the replies. For my next project I will batch covert the videos through compressed closer to the scaled size that will be using in the grids for my virtual choirs.

In this video I'm dealing with 100+ videos in one project. I make 4 identical projects and work with 30 videos at a time. Its all my 2019 MBP i9 can handle. Those 30 videos will either go in to an effect that I custom make in Motion to position each video evenly. This particular video I created falling drop zones. I export a master file in Apple ProRes 4444 (transparent background) of each project and combine them into one placing the videos evenly in the project horizontally or in the case side by size vertically.

Here are links to two of my more recent creations. both resized the videos a great deal... but the Drop zone one the quality was greatly reduced.

This one with Drop zones.


This one is with my custom effect.

wow! amazing video! the students' voices are angelic!!!