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Text looks like absolute jagged poo
A lil’ help on why my text looks SO bad. I don’t ever remember having problems like this before using FCP 4.5 and earlier versions of AE. I’m on FCP 6 and AE CS3 now.
I do everything in AE, and export Quicktime .mov files. I’m using ProRes422 (HQ). The .mov files look great. Text is RAZOR sharp. Too sharp even. But usually, just hitting the file with a 1 pixel blur will calm down the edges and keep them from crawling.
At first I was using what I thought was progressive output (no interlacing, no field order) from AE and into FCP and into the .m2v file via Compressor. Text in particular looks extremely jagged on DVD on TV. I’m using large san serif fonts. It looks like an interlacing issue? Even though I thought I was skipping interlacing altogether. Compressor saw the footage as non-interlaced.
Ok, so I take the .mov files and set the FCP sequence to render lower field first, and Compressor sees that, and the file still looks pretty bad.
I set the whole deal up again, and hit each clip with a 1 pixel Defocus filter and render lower field first. Looks even better still, but not acceptable.
I don’t even know why interlacing is an issue if I’m trying to skip it completely for progressive scan output, but, it’s all up in my biz.
Could someone please save the day, and get me from AE to FCP to Compressor to DVDSP 4 and get my text to look great?
What settings should I be using in AE output? I’m about to go back to Animation output, although I don’t see why ProRes422 (HQ) would be an issue, and like I said, the .mov files look awesome.
Somewhere between my awesome looking .mov files and the DVD something is messing up my text in a serious way. Images and backgrounds look ok, since they are images and not text. The Text, done in AE, just looks awful at final output to DVD.
Thanks in advance.
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4 Replies
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There’s lots of text and lots of sentences in your message, but no where did you ever mention if your Pro Res files were HD or SD.
And, no you didn’t mention what the settings were for your FCP timeline either.
Since Pro Res can be both SD and HD, and since SD is lower field first and HD upper field first, it would be pretty much impossible to help you in any meaningful way without that information. Right???
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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lolz, my bad… I do just enough video to keep it painful… I was miffed and just whipped that post together, I’ll do better this time…
The workflow is numerous 720×486 D1 comps exported as .mov and brought into FCP to be edited with clip transitions and add audio.
I did a bunch of test DVDs and exporting lower field first interlaced from AE with a 1 pixel blur added in FCP is more or less acceptable.
Maybe I don’t know enough about ProRes422 to use it, so I’m going back to Animation codec.
I may try a test MPEG-2 encode right out of AE just to see. I’ve always kinda had a love hate relationship with compressor .
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Since DVDs are 720×480, you might want to start working in AE in comps of that size. FCP does a pretty bad job of placing mismatched file sizes into a comp and aligning the fields correctly, or scaling correctly. You really need to baby sit what it’s doing. So, if in FCP you’re still in a 720×486 comp, you’ve still got the wrong number of scan lines. You’d need to make sure compressor is cropping an even number of lines off the top, and an even number off the bottom. Definitely not squishing the image vertically.
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Okay, you’re doing better… There’s no reason I can see from your post that your text should look bad, and fields are proper at lower field first. How are you monitoring?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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