frustrating!! rolling credits, help!

[Bill Russell]

There’s a little motion blur check box goes with each layer, and a little motion blur check box at the top of the composition window. I could write paragraphs trying to describe where they are. Each is just a little symbol – try hovering over the column header symbols, after a few seconds a small text pop-up will tell you what each switch is. Best thing to do is look up “motion blur” in AE help — it will show you a picture of what the motion blur switches look like.

What you want to do is enable motion blur for the composition, which means that every layer that has its motion blur enabled will render a blur between frames when there is movement. This may help your jitters.

It is also possible the text is too sharp or moving too fast. You might want to try putting an imperceptible Gaussian blur on the text layers just to see if that helps the problem. Also, don’t do text brights at 100% — do ’em at 90-95%.

If your text is a bright color, this will cause a lot of jittering too, especially if you are working in DV. Color in DV video is “blobbed” on top of grayscale and is only one-forth the resolution (which you will experience only AFTER you render out to DV), so a bright red letter will be MUCH softer and blockier than a white or grey or black letter, and maybe unreadable. In most other video formats, color is compressed this way to different degrees depending on format.

Also, in DV, in bright colors you may notice striations. So if strong color is your problem, try reigning in the saturation of your colored text quite a bit so that there is enough grayscale “showing through” to reveal sharp detail.

Thoughts.

“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –

And more…

[Vin2000]

thanks for your help,

i still have to wait till it finishes encoding so i can try it on dvd, but on the preview i did notice that.

i don’t remember how sharp or whatnot i put the text.

the text when it wasn’t in motion looked great.

but when it will roll up, it rolled up slow, not fast, so maybe it should be the opposite way? i gave it 9 seconds to roll up and center itself on the screen…

tomorrow i will try all the advice you gave me. i’m looking forward to the motion blur tool since that’s what fixed the other guy’s problem.

thanks again, i will update you on my progress!

Vin.

[Kevin Camp]

if the text is moving slow, then motion blur may not help much… the problem is most likely the ever changing antialiasing as the edges of the text are rasterized as it scrolls up the screen.

to fix that you need your move to be restricted to whole pixels… there has been a lot of discusion about this in the ae forums, and it would be worth searching solutions to this issue. you can read a good description for a mathmatical process on of how to create flicker free credit rollhere. there are also expressions for the postion of the credit list that can be helpful.

here is a simple one, just paste it into the expression field for postion (to enable expressions for a property, option-click (mac) or ctrl-click (maybe alt-click) for pc):

d = -2; // positive values will move up, negative values down
y = value[1] + ((time * (1 / thisComp.frameDuration)) * d);
[value[0], y]

just position the layer where it need to start then set a value for d.

this type of expression is hard to control (as far as starting and stopping) it just goes forever.

you can download a preset that may work better for you called flickerfree credit roll. it uses the mathmatical calculation described in the post i linked to, but will also allow you to use keyframes to start and stop the roll. although due to the restriction of movement, stopping won’t be precise, but that’s the price of smooth movement…

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Bill Russell]

You mean it takes 18 seconds to go from bottom to top of frame? If I’m understanding you correctly, that is a very slow crawl indeed. Anyway, seems the pixel for pixel advice is a wonderful thing!

Learning something new hourly here. I do my crawls with camera moves (since I often have graphics and animation within the roll… and don’t get buffer errors…) so I’ll have to pick brains here to see if there’s any way to achieve pixel perfection in 3D space! Isn’t CC wonderful?

“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –

And more…

[Kevin Camp]

instead of a camera move, you could build your credit list with graphics and animations/video in one really tall comp. then bring that into a new standard sized comp and then animate you credit list comp…

i’m not sure if that makes things easier or not, but it is another method…

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Joseph Springer]

This sounds similar to another problem I’ve seen, make sure your default preference (in preferences — general) for spatial keyframes is set to LINEAR

Regards,
Joe Springer
Certified Adobe After Effects Training and Premiere Training Instructor

[Joseph Springer]

This sounds similar to another problem I’ve seen, make sure your default preference (in preferences — general) for spatial keyframes is set to LINEAR

Regards,
Joe Springer
Certified Adobe After Effects Training and Premiere Training Instructor

[Vin2000]

Hi there,

It’s a 9 second scroll up.

I’m going to try that flickerfree credit roll from that site to see if it works!

Thanks again guys!

Mike A.

[Todd Kopriva]

There’s a section in After Effects Help that deals with the sort of problem that you’re seeing: “Best practices for creating text and vector graphics for video”.

If the Help document doesn’t contain the information that you need, or if you’d like to add a tip of your own, leave a comment using the link at the bottom of any Help page.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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