Codec?

I've noticed that the initial full HD 1080p clips I've uploaded seem to be very artifacty in the flash preview. These clips were ProRes422 in Final Cut and I exported them with Apple Photo JPEG before uploading them.

I'm just looking at a 1080p clip now which has an aircraft fly left to right of frame over about 15 secs. I exported it as a ProRes and a Photo JPEG clip to do a comparison and the movement of the aircraft becomes 'juddery' in the Photo JPEG clip (same frame rate - 29.97fps). Seamless in the ProRes clip.

I'm curious as to what process people using FCP use to upload as there is an obvious quality decrease I'm seeing with Photo JPEG......

First thing to note is that the initial flash previews generated when you upload a video are lower quality than the "final previews" which are generated a week or two later.

I work on a PC, but I have the same type of problem with some of the footage I upload and I tend to let it sit in my uploads for a couple weeks until the new preview is generated before I submit it.

P5 has said they plan to update the process so that "final quality previews" are generated when footage is uploaded. No timetable, however.

Have you tried changing the "quality" of your Photo JPEG render to 100% to see if you see the same problems? While dropping the quality to 90% is preferable for file sizes, if doing so causes viewing quality issues with the footage, I leave it at 100%. Alternatively, if you have footage which does not compress well (lots of different colors, gradients, fast motion) try using the PNG codec instead.

If the video has a lot of tiny points of detail, like grass or sand, or the simplest example: tiny white dots on black. The photojpeg codec will have problems with that. Doesn't sound like your clip would have that though.

However, I do find that PNG does best with fast motion, but png also has problems with some types of lighting. Which I think is weird ???

Based on what you are saying, with a fast moving aircraft I might try png.

I have a Canon HF11 and although shooting 30p progressive, it actually wraps the shot as 60i. So when doing any color adjustment, I'm now doing a deinterlace - that made the PhotoJPEG export a lot more seamless. Not as good as ProRes but much better. I've submitted the clip and a few more so will look at them daily so see when the "final preview" happens. Changing to high quality doesn't seem to make much of a difference other than a substantially bigger file size.

If there was one good thing about DV, that was not having to worry about codec issues...