Flip Boom Animation into Final Cut Pro 5: Pixels Matter
Cheat Sheet 20080404

First of all - remember this above all else when it comes to importing still and animated images into Final Cut Pro: FCP does not care what the DPI is - all that matters is what your pixel dimensions are. You need enough pixels (H x W) to fill your canvas screen. This Cheat Sheet only covers Flip Boom and FCP 5.

Flip Boom publishes at a fixed pixel dimension of 500 x 375. If you import this size into FCP 5, you will get an image that's smaller than your canvas screen and FCP 5 will create a border - see below. (FCP 6 will automatically scale the Flip Boom animation up.):

For an output that's going to be in a standard 4:3 ap sect ratio, Final Cut Pro 5 wants to work with a pixel dimension of at least 640 x 480. So, open your Flip Boom animation up in QuickTime Pro and then press Command-J (⌘J). This will open the QuickTime Properties Window (seen below):

Change the Visual Settings to read the following (seen below):

• Scaled Size: 640 x 480 pixels
• keep Preserve Aspect Ratio checked
• check High Quality

Then Save (⌘S) your new QuickTime Pro properties and you're ready to go into Final Cut Pro 5 or any other program. Oh, you can also just scale it up in FCP 5 in the Motion Tab, but this is faster.

Below is Flip Boom at 500 x 375 (viewed in QuickTime Pro, scaled down 50%):

Below is Flip Boom at 640 x 480 (viewed in QuickTime Pro with High Quality checked, scaled down 50%):

Any questions?

return to top