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Drop Shadow / Flicker Issue
Aloha,
I wonder if anyone has a solution to the following issue:If I apply a drop shadow (from the Motion Tab) to a video track that has soft edges I get a horrible flicker.
This happens with video that has been cropped and has a feathered/soft edge (again from the motion tab) as well as with still graphics that have feathered/nearly transparent alpha edges (bezels, glows, etc. from Photoshop).The flicker disappears as soon as the shadow (in FCP) is removed, and does not appear to be related to the typical causes of flicker (over levels, excessive resolution, scaling, interlacing, etc.) De-interlacing, blurring and the flicker filter have no effect.
Any ideas? I have done some preliminary searching and it seems that this issue may have started with version 5 of FCP. Could it be related to the “Motion Filtering Quality” (Best/Normal/Fastest)? Somebody’s post suggested adding a slug on TOP of the offending area with an opacity of zero. Haven’t tried that solution yet, but even if it does work it would be nice to know the cause of the problem (and why adding a clear slug fixes it!). Another thought – should I be in “Render all YUV material in high precision YUV” or should I stick to the “Render in 8-bit YUV”?
To date my fix for video has been using a slug under my cropped video with feather edges to simulate a drop shadow. For graphics I add the shadow in Photoshop. Annoying.
To clarify, this issue is occurring on a DV timeline in FCP 5.0.4, OS 10.4.6, and the flickering is most noticeable on an NTSC monitor, though when it is particularly bad, it is visible in FCP.
Thanks for any help!
Mike -
5 Replies
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[Mike Peele] “De-interlacing, blurring and the flicker filter have no effect.”
filters are applied before motion. have you tried nesting the entire composite and deinterlacing the nest?
/matt
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Thanks for the reply,
I get the flicker even with no movement, an example would be a DV clip (cropped, resized, feathered, and drop shadowed) placed over another DV clip – thats it. There is a flicker when the shadow is on, and no flicker when the shadow is off.
Mike Peele -
Mike
I don’t know whether this will help but I have definitely seen this issue with basic text generators which were copied and pasted then had their text changed. As soon as the drop shadow was disabled the bad flicker always disappeared. Have any of these clips been copied or pasted or had their attributes copied or pasted? If so, try building them from scratch and seeing if that fixes it.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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Mike,
Try nesting the clips before applying the drop shadow.
Have a wonderful day.
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Nesting before applying shadow…that sounds like it might work. I don’t know why, but it just sounds like a very FCP-ey solution.
Thanks – I’ll give it a shot!
Mike Peele
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