• Apple Final Cut Pro

  Text size/scale animation – Keeping vector quality

  Posted by Olivier Laflamme on July 10, 2015 at 2:53 pm

  Hi, this is my first post ever, and I feel bad this is for such a simple task I’m unable to accomplish. I usually find answer to my question by searching around, but not this time.

  I’ve just transitioned to FCPX from FCP7 and everything’s going somewhat smoothly except for when I’m trying to do this :

  – A slight zoom in (or out) effect on text.

  In FCP7 I would just put the text on the timeline, choose a big enough font size, then Keyframe the starting scale a little under a 100%. So the text fade in and out while getting from 95% scaling to 100%. And it maintained a sharp text quality.

  And this is the bug for me here. I have no problem creating this effect in FCPX, but the quality of the text is degrading as soon as I touch the Video scaling property. The text is quite sharp at 100%, but animating this juste create a small, but annoying to the eye, blur/lost of quality.

  I’ve try rendering it manually (the blur is there in FCPX and in the export I did), I’ve tried the Ken Burns effect to do it, making it a compound clip, changing the font, to no avail. I don’t get why I lose quality when scaling it down (under 100%).

  And since I can’t animate the font size, this is puzzling me.

  Thanks for your time!

  Bret Williams replied 11 years, 1 month ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Bret Williams

  July 10, 2015 at 4:19 pm

  I can’t replicate this. However, unlike FCP 7, you can scale the text up to all you want and it retains it’s vector quality. Even if nested in a compound clip. No need to scale back to 95 and scale up to 100. Animate from 300-400, it looks sharp.

  Could be a font or particular codec issue?
• 

  Nikolas Bäurle

  July 13, 2015 at 11:47 am

  Are you playing back in better performance mode?

  “Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python
• 

  Olivier Laflamme

  July 13, 2015 at 8:05 pm

  Thanks for the reply guys. It couldn’t have been the playback settings, since my export had the same problem.

  I’ve found that It was because of the gaussian blur effect I had applied. But WAIT hehe. I keyed it to go from 0 to 15 with the fade out of the text, but it turns out that if you change the video scale property, even with the gaussian effect to 0, it still blurs the text a bit (even once rendered). I’ve tried other types of blur, and it still does this. I’ve also seen that there’s a blur property in the Face tab, but it’s unkeyable. So I’ve got around it by using the Blur Title…Still I’m not sure I like all those prefabricated text templates and that I cannot simply create this effect by hand directly in FCPX. What if I want to have a different type of blur than the pre-applied one? I guess I should get into Motion somehow.

  Thanks again!
• 

  Bret Williams

  July 13, 2015 at 11:04 pm

  The custom text template is essentially a blank template where you can animate anything about the text or characters individually. Check it out.

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