Hey Red, thanks for bringing your question to the forum
Almost always the flicker is due to Final Cut Pro trying to cram all the detail of your picture into the format of your (probably interlaced) sequence.
Final Cut Pro isn't particularly smart in this area, so its best to prep images in advance - but lets first look at why it happens...
Its all about the detail content of the image, and the larger the size of the image, the more detail in the image.
Lets pretend that the following two images are hi-res (Say, 3-4 times the size of your actually sequence or canvass.
Given that, You're unlikely to get a flicker in an image like this:
Because there are not too many lines of detail.
On the other hand, you are more likely to get flicker in an image like this:
Because if the image is hi-res, and if that image has contains little details (those dots in the Mac Tower) when the hi-res images is downscaled by FCP, some of those details are going to be as small as one pixel - and if you are working on an interlaced sequence those single pixels are going to fall on one scan line, and some are going to fall on the alternate scan line. The result is the dreaded flicker.
Incidentally, that's why placing a small blur on the image often works as a 'band-aid' solution. It blurs the image enough to reduce the detail, but not so much to make the overall image blurry.
The tutorial places emphasis on pre-prepping the images for two reasons:
• It takes the workload away from Final Cut Pro - so FCP can concentrate on other things.
• It allows you to use a graphics editor like photoshop which has much better ways of scaling images down (and up) than Final Cut Pro does.
So the best approach is to always begin by scaling images to approximately the size you need in FCP using Photoshop, or Preview.
Hope this helps
Doug_
