Aliasing on animation for NTSC

[Amit Zinman]

What type of animation?
Does it look good playing with Quicktime or VLC?
Can you be a little more specific as to the type of “horribleness”?

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Yeah, it would help us to know if you are working in FCP with interlaced or progressive footage. Most times a clip will play jittery if it is a interlaced clip with the wrong field dominance.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Avital Pelakh]

Thank you for responding.

The animation is just a guy walking. I created the pieces in Illustrator and used the puppet tool in AE. I exported it using the animation compressor with an NTSC pixel aspect ratio.

when i play the clip from the finder, there is no aliasing. but as soon as i drop it into my FCP timeline, the aliasing looks really bad.

my FCP sequence settings are as such:

Frame Size: 720×480 NTSC DV (3:2)
Pixel Aspect Ratio: NTSC – CCIR 601/DV (720×480) Anamorphic
Field Dominance: Lower (even)
Compressor DV/DVCPRO – NTSC

Thanks again for responding, I hope I’ve provided more useful information here

[Avital Pelakh]

Thanks, I changed the settings to Apple Pro Res 422 with square pixels and it seems to be much better, although I had to resize most of the clips on the timeline.

I appreciate the help!

[Avital Pelakh]

Alright, now I have a new problem. My animation has a chroma key filter on it in FCP to make it seem like my guy is walking through a bunch of different real world scenes.

I exported the video using compressor with the Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) setting. Now my aliasing is gone, but my chroma key filter isn’t working in the final output (so i see my animation with green behind it, but no backgrounds). This is not the case when I look at the preview window in compressor.

any ideas?