Is Your Video Looking Rough Around the Edges?

"Am I Rendering And Viewing At The Best Quality With FCP?" By Andrew Balis

This is a very good article over at kenstone.net. This is a topic that I sort of took for granted that I knew everything that I needed to know about rendering--then I find out features that I didn't even know about. One of these is the audio mixdown vs item levels rendering. There was also a setting for HDV rendering that I had totally misinterpreted the meaning of--it would cause me to have to re-render all my HDV footage, which takes a long time.

The article points out that the quality of real-time previews sometimes isn't as good as rendered quality. I used to see this everytime I did Latin Pulse. I like to use dissolves on title clips. If I had a color-correction on the video below the title, then the title would drop to half-resolution even though the timeline said it should be "Full Quality." So I would have to go in and render all of these little dissolves or change my settings to render out everything that should playback at "Full Quality."

So if you want your video to look as good as possible and your audio to sound as good as possible, I recommend this article.