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Scroll Text Behavior
Hey Pasture,
I need help and I’m against the clock! I don’t use the word “URGENT” too often, but I feel that I am up against it now.
After following Mark Spencer’s great tutorial on MacBreak Studio for the new Scroll Text Behavior in Motion 4, I’m still having problems.
Although the vertical movement of the credits is smooth, the letters themselves are somewhat blurry. (if i advance frame by frame the letters are smooth, just not when playing in realtime.)
The doco video edit is based around HDV 1080 50i footage, using the Prores422 Compressor within FCP. I believe this best translates to DVCPROHD 1080 50i (1440×1080, Upper Field First) 32 Bit Float Point in Motion.
(I must point out that the FCP edit suite is FCS2 PPC, and the graphics suite is Intel 8 core FCS3, which is annoying but that’s just the way it is! Hence I have to create my credits in Motion 4 and export a ProRes QT file and import that back into the older studio version of FCP.)My workflow is:
Import RTF doc of credits and do minor corrections. (50pt, Myriad Pro, White, 80% opacity. Set against black BG with 20% opacity gray pattern) Their is no video in the credits, just text and a patterned BG.
Apply Scroll Text Behavior
Set Scroll rate to 225 (multiple of frame rate).
Make sure Credits are positioned on whole numbers for X & Y in Properties tab.Export Prores422 using:
Color, Premultiplied
Render Quality: Best
Field Rendering On
Frame Blending On
Use float Bit depthAs stated above, the output is ok, just not great. It turns out that the doco these credits have been created for has been accepted into a festival and I now have 2 days to try and improve on the current credits and then create a Blu-Ray version for the fest. (As opposed to the proposed 2 weeks I had left this morning!)
I’ve tried a variety of different outputs, some with field rendering, some without. Ditto for frame blending and Motion blur. But nothing seems to hit the mark and the text within the credits remains slightly blurry on the vertical movement. I’ve then reviewed them on HD Broadcast Monitor via Blackmagic, Mac Book Pro HD LCD and low quality CRT as QT ProRes file and and VideoTS DVD, the problems remains on all formats and mediums.
This is the first time I’ve encountered such a problem and I must admit it is doing my head in! So any advice at all would be greatly appreciated. Worse case is that I keep the current credits, but as this is gong to the fest and it has my name on the credits, I want to create the cleanest and smoothest credits possible. Surely I can create perfectly clean scrolling credits using motion and ProRes!? What am I doing wrong!?
Many thanks!
Simon
Graphics Suite: Snow Leopard, Intel 8 Core, 6GB RAM, 512MB AGP, FCS 3, ESATA Lacie Drives.
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8 Replies
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You must assess the overall risk of the judges marking your project down for what you think are “blurry” credits and their ability to objectively evaluate the quality of your story, editing, photography, audio mix, and effectiveness of the film as a work of art. If the credit rendering is THAT important to this contest, you’re in the wrong contest.
Forget the credits for now or recreate them as sets of still images, a perfectly acceptable and, some might say, elegant solution. Concentrate on getting your project burned to BD (first festival I’ve heard of demanding BD submissions).
bogiesan
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I understand what you’re saying bogiesan and I agree to a certain extent- the technical aspect of the credits should not affect their judgement of the other aspects of the doco. But the problem of creating clean vertical scrolling credits remains!
It’s not just for the sake of the Judges that I want to create the best possible credits to go with a great doco, but it’s for my sake, my sanity and credibility also!
It must be possible within Motion right? Am I missing something inanely obvious? I’ve been using Motion for the past 4 years and have created numerous credit rolls, idents, motion graphics etc but have never come up against this specific problem.Yeah, Bluray submissions to a fest is new to me too. Their only other accepted format was DigiBeta!
All the best,
Simon
“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”
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I wish I had something helpful to offer. I use Motion for scrolling credits often, no issues at all.
Have you tried simply adding one or two pixels of vertical-only blur? You can use any of the blur filters and set it to ramp in once the movement starts.
bogiesan
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Thanks, I’ll give that a try.
Just out of interest, what project settings do you tend to use for your hidef credit rolls? Or do you round trip from FCP? Also, do you find that you get a visual difference in scrolling quality depending on whether you export your HD interlaced credit rolls with frame blending, field rendering or motion blur turned on or off?“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”
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Other things to try:
Different font?
Use 8-bit instead of 32-bit. It sounds counter-intuitive I know.
Have you checked the speed of the scroll against the frame rate of your sequence? Perhaps a slower or faster speed might give better results.
Lastly, try your credits in 1920×1080 instead of an anamorphic frame size. It’s possible that the 4×3 aspect is blurring the text when it’s stretched back to 16×9 in FCP.
Andy
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Hi,
for quick comparison, try doing your roll in FCP’s Boris title Crawl ( it does rolls too). I find that sometimes the percieved quality is better than going through motion. And the render times are much faster.
(take into account that I am still using Motion 3 and its limitations/bugs when it comes to text)
hope this helps
Patrice
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[Patrice Freymond] “(take into account that I am still using Motion 3 and its limitations/bugs when it comes to text)
“Weird as it seems, Boris appears to have lost the ability to do field rendering in FCP7/FCS3.
bogiesan
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Well through a combination of horizontal and vertical blur plus a 1920 square pixel stage I was able to churn out some pretty reasonable scrolling credits that even stood up to scrutiny on BluRay.
But when time permits I’ll give Boris a try as well. Thanks for the combined advice everyone!All the best,
Simon
“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”
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