Jaggedy text

[Rob Forsythe]

First thing,

You need to RENDER all effects (Text is an effect) at the highest quality for final output to look the cleanest.

You must only check for QUALITY on an external Video monitor (not the computer monitor.

VERY IMPORTANT:

If you re-position graphics or any video image in FCP, make SURE the VERTICAL setting for each KEY-FRAME (start, stop or hold) is always a EVEN INTEGER (Even Whole Number). Examples: 4, not 3 / -144, not -143.27 / 336, not 335.62 / 12 not 11.

The positioning settings/info (as well as many other settings) are found under the “Motion” tab in the Viewer.
Vertical position is the number in the RIGHT window in the area called “Center” (the horizontal position is displayed in the LEFT window).

I sometimes forget to check this and I can end up with images that look fuzzy when in-position.

This info applies to re-positioning anything on the Timeline: moving video, freeze-frames, internally-generated titles, and imported graphics.

It can be quite detrimental to the quality of your final output to not double-check this every time you reposition and/or re-size an image.

[Rob Alexander]

Thanks, but I think this is a more fundamental problem. I’ve used title 3D a lot (although more with 4.5 than 5) and not experienced this. I’m operating in a full broadcast setup with the relevant monitoring and I haven’t repositioned the text.

It seems it’s more to do with the rasterizing of the text rather than any positioning – setting the point size to create large text by way of an experiment shows the problem up dramatically. I know that earlier versions of FC5 had people screaming about poor quality graphics and text but I thought that this problem had been solved.

[Walter Biscardi]

Check your Video Processing tab. It’s probably set to “Normal” which is default for all Sequences. Change this to “Best” and your text should clean up.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Director, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

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[Josh Weiss]

If none of those other suggestions worked, try changing your sequence settings. Check the field dominance. Your text will look best when field dominance is set to none. It won’t effect the use of field rendered clips, just FCP generated material.

[Joe Paolo]

make sure you sequence is set to high resolution. Ckeck the botton under the sequence name tab.

joe

[Kevin Monahan]

The biggest faux-pas is that you need to be in Safe RT as well. Unlimited will make stuff look pretty bad.

If you are not going back to tape, you might consider a better codec like DVCPro 50 as well.

Kevin Monahan
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