Mercury Jones preset – Flicker Free Credit Roll

[Kevin Camp]

hey jimmy,

there are two things that can be the down fall of a credit roll, the antialiasing of the edges of text and the amount of movement… the preset fixes the anitaliasing part of the problem, but if the movement per frame is too great (which seems to be values greater than about 1 percent of the comp height, so for sd, values greater than 5) you will start to see a strobe like effect.

if using the preset, there are two ways to decrease the per frame movement, increase the duration of the comp or decrease the length (height) of the credit list. decreasing the height of the list is often a better way for fine tuning a credit roll. you can usually easily do this by adjusting the leading (linespacing) font size or even just scaling it a little.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

one last thing that i can’t compensate for (but idon’t think is the problem here)… if viewing the credit roll, you will need to be able to view the actual size… so if you are working in 2k film rez, you will need to see view it at full rez to see how well it is working, otherwise, due the the scaling, the antialiasing will not be correct.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jimmy Brunger]

Hi Guys,

Yeah Dave – viewing it on my BVM through Premiere.

Moldy – I think I can get it looking ok if I have motion blur on, so that’ll be my fix until I get time to try some other variables. I tried pretty much everything without mobluer on though and it either flickered and stuttered in it’s movement, or moved smoothly but the text itself looked like a field had been removed (like when you deinterlace text)

The bizarre world of rollers eh!

BTW – I was going at about 5 or 6 pixels p/frame depending if I tried it progessive or interlaced.

Last thing then – is this subpixel rendering that AE uses a fairly unique thing? I mean how does Premiere/Combustion/dedicated cap gens render frames? It only ever seems to be AE I have a problem with.

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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[Kevin Camp]

try doubling the duration of the comp (or of a duplicate of you credit roll comp)…

i think that slowing that roll down will help a lot. 6 pixels is about half the height of a lower case letter (at 24px size) in many fonts, and that could get a little hard to read, especially with interlacing.

also, i modified the expression a little… it now will take into account any scaling that is applied to the credit list layer when calculating the movement. an oversight on my part… and i’m working on a way to incorporate entering a set value for movement.

here is the basic expression for per frame movement:

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

d is just the number of pixels to move per frame.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Uli Kunkel]

Kevin,

Your script works like a dream. I have only one question for you:

Working in a 2K composition, when I export the QT movie I see NO STROBING and NO FLICKERING. Assuming it looks okay playing back at it’s 2K size, then I shouldn’t run into any problems when the composition is transferred to lower formats like standard def on an interlaced DVD, broadcast formats, etc., right?

Uli.

[Kevin Camp]

hi uli,

i’m glad you like the preset. unfortuately, i can’t say for sure how well it will work when downconverted…

the way the math works, i’m fairly certain that frame size change shouldn’t affect it too much, but the framerate may.

however, if a framerate change from 24fps to 29.97 (with a pulldown) affected quality of credits for film on dvd, then all film credits on dvd would all have issues, unless they modify the credits for dvd… which they may, but haven’t heard of that practice — but i have pretty much only worked in broadcast (the last time i worked in film was in school over 15 years ago).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Maria Pixamins]

What about crawl (horizontal positioning)