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Jittery scrolling titles
I posted this in the FCP forum, but have AE questions as well:
I’m trying to get decent (non-jittery) scrolling titles working in a doc I’m finishing and I’m looking for advice on workflow and where to attack the problem.
The project is DV-NTSC, frame rate 29.97, I’m using FCP Studio 2. The director is having me output an uncompressed quicktime which she will then take to a post house and lay off to digibeta, for festival screenings.
I made off-white titles in Helvetica and they play over the final footage of the film.
I first tried using Boris 3d title which only looked good if I rendered with field dominance set to none. Which I assume would not be good for the rest of the interlaced footage. Otherwise, it looked really terrible.
Then I tried creating the titles in Illustrator and pulling that into AE and exporting a quicktime. I used the animation codec, the field render set to off and motion blur on. Titles look fine in AE. After importing QT into FCP they look better than my previous method, but still not great.
My AE specific questions: Are there other render settings I should be using in AE when exporting a quicktime that will be used in a dv timeline? I’ve read about making the pixel/second rate an even multiple of your framerate–how much difference will this really make?
Any tips, advice, suggestions welcome. Naturally, this needs to be done by the end of this week, along with a dozen other things.
Illustrator is CS2, AE is 5.5.
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12 Replies
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Simple solution: Two causes for jittery scrolling titles…
1. If the text is white, it be could be TOO white…tone down the white.
2. Put a 1 pixel vertical motion blur on the text. That will stop the jitters…It will stop any jitters in any video. -
There are instructions for dealing with vertical text scrolls/crawls in the “Best practices for creating text and vector graphics for video” section of After Effects Help. That section directs you to an animation preset for getting the right speed.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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Thanks all, for the suggestions and resources.
Dave, no, this project is not going to film. Its final destination is digibeta. I exported an uncompressed quicktime which is being color corrected, and then it will come back to me and I will stick it in an uncompressed timeline, put the titles back on, and export another uncompressed quicktime which will be laid to tape at a post house. My first time with this finishing process.
I got hold of an external video monitor, but can only hook up via firewire (to converter to monitor) so I can’t actually look at anything uncompressed, so I’m still flying a little blind.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to implement the pixel/second suggestions made by both Dave and the Best Practices link Todd led me to. Seems like it would be easy, but it’s not. The best practices recommends 119.88 pixels per second (4×29.97) but when I move my position key frame around to try and reach it, I discover that number lies between two frames. How do I make that number happen?
I looked for the Mercury Jones info–I guess it’s a preset to which a link once existed. No link found. Nothing found by googling.
Thanks!
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Did you try the Autoscroll – Vertical animation preset recommended in the “Best practices for creating text” document?
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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i had that preset stored on a friend’s server that down a while ago, and i just haven’t tried to put those presets back up… i think i had posted most of the expression in these forums. you may be able to find it and just paste it into the position property of your list… although the preset had some expression controls too…
however, this simple expression will work:
n=2; // value in pixels per frame to move, use even values for field rendering
value-[0,(n*timeToFrames(time))]no key frames needed, just position the credits of the bottom of the screen and hit ram preview. they’ll march on up the screen until the end of the comp.
as for tips for the rate value (n). keep it an even number for field rendering and you’ll probably want to keep it under 1% of the height of the comp (so if you’re working in 720×480, 4 may be the max before the movement is too strobe-like).
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I tried copying this expression in and got this error message: “Class ‘Layer’ has no property or method named ‘timeToFrames'”
Wondering if this is due to working in AE 5.5? Which is why I can’t use the vertical scroll preset Todd mentioned.
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The timeToFrames method was added in After Effects 6.5.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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Got the expression working. Really does make a huge difference.
Thanks!
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Thanks Kevin.
I’m returning to AE after awhile on Combustion and Motion, and just tried your expression on a title scroll I’m having problems with. The scroll started fine, but then began speeding up almost twice as fast.What am I doing wrong?
Thanks
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Hi Kevin, I am having the same problem. the scroll starts exactly when i want it to, but i dont seem to have control over when it ends. What am I doing wrong?
thanks
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