-
Motion text looks blurry after being letterboxed in 4:3 FCP timeline
I am working on a show in Final Cut Studio, using FC Pro to edit, and Motion to do the graphics, which consist of moves on stills and titles/lower thirds. My codec is standard definition 8 bit uncompressed, 16:9.
I plan to work in 16:9 throughout, but in the end one thing I have to deliver a 4:3 letterboxed version on tape. My plan was to take my final 16:9 timeline in Final Cut Pro, and nest it into a 4:3 timeline to output to tape.
I did some testing, and both the camera footage and Motion moves-on-stills look great on both the 16:9 and 4:3 letterbox timelines. However, the text done in Motion looks sharp on the 16:9 timeline, but blurry on the 4:3 timeline. Almost looks like a field order problem. I tried shifting fields for the Motion project file in the FCP timeline, but it didn’t help. Is there something in either Motion or Final Cut Pro I can do to have the text keep it’s sharpness on the 4:3 timeline? I suppose I could re-create 4:3 versions of the titles just for that timeline, but obviously that’s a last resort. Thanks!
Mike
-
2 Replies
-
something I noticed about Motion is that if the Anchor Points aren’t located a whole pixel (for instance, 360.5 x 240.5), Motion will make the object(s) quite soft-n-fuzzy.
check your anchor point for you project and if it’s off, give it a nice whole number (eg 360×240).
good luck
I change the world.
-
Yeah, I checked, the text is on an even line, both vertically and horizontally. The culprit is definitely Final Cut Pro. It does the letterboxing of my nested sequence by changing the Distort value to -33.33 in the FCP Motion tab. Doesn’t appear to affect camera or photo image quality, but the text is definitely not holding up.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up