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Pixelated typography with PS/Motion/ FCP
I am fairly new to Motion. I have a typography project where I built my text image in PS-CS6 and imported as a project into Motion. I needed to be able to warp and bend my text layers to create the logo, and motion didn’t give me this option like PS does. My PSD was almost 3x the size of me final output. My thought was that I would be able to blow into the image without the text pixelating, but it the edges are stair stepping. What do I need to do to make the edges crisp? Is it because I built the text image in PS and is a PSD and not vector? How can I work around this with out diving into learning AI or something?
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6 Replies
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Your Photoshop files should look great. Change your Render Resolution to Best and see if it looks sharp. You are given different options so you can utilize real time preview if things get beefier.
Stephen Smith – Follow me on Behance
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I actually went as far as exporting a small portion to test it. Even in the exported .mov the text is messed up.
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Was the export set to Best?
Stephen Smith – Follow me on Behance
Check out my Motion Training DVD
Check out my Vimeo page
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Yes.
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An important concept to know here is the order of operations.
I’m sure you can find lots of good explanations online, but in short here is what might have happened in your case.The text you are using is from Photoshop has been rasterized in order to bring it in to motion. This means it no longer resolution-independent vector, but a bitmap like nay other image.
When you import a large image, Motions default behavior is to scale that image to fit the canvas. So when you dolly in on this scaled down image you are essentially moving your camera closer to an image, that is the size of you canvas, causing it to look pixelated.
Say for instance you have a 1000x1000px image that you bring into a 100x100px canvas. The image will then be scaled down to 10% thereby throwing away 9 out of 10 pixels. If you dolly in on that to the point where it would have been at 100% resolution, you now see 10x10px squares.
The way around it is to set the scale of your images to 100% and then move the camera back to where the framing is right, and then you can dolly in on it from there.
I hope that made sense, otherwise I’m sure it contains enough keywords for you to find a more eloquent explanation elsewhere.
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And in the motion preferences, you can tell Motion to “do nothing” when a big file is imported, that is, not to scale it to the canvas automatically or by default. That lets you bring in a ridiculously large file to preserve resolution (within limits)
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