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My subtitles made in FCP seem faint on the screen
I made subtitle for a film primarily in Spanish on FCP. However, when I actually export it to a movie and watch it on a tv, the subtitles seem far less bold (they are white) than when I watched it in the timeline? Has anyone ever had this problem before?
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3 Replies
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What kind of footage, what codec, and what are you exporting to? What font and size are you using? Is the text 100% white? Does it look OK when you view it on a computer, but bad on a tv monitor?
From my experience, text can be tricky and there are a few things that can cause it to look like crap. Choosing a bigger, chunkier, sans serif font can help. For example, when it comes to DVD, anything less than 18pt is generally not a great idea.
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The text is 100 percent white. It’s subtitled translation of people talking Spanish, and I have it against a relatively porous black matte. The codec of the movie file I made from the sequence is DV/DVCPRO-NTSC, Integer (Little Endian), Timecode. The size is 23 for all text and the font is Lucia Grande. The footage, unfortunately, was not taken by me but was taken by a variety of people in all different formats: flip cameras, an HMC 150, and i think some camera phones. Nevertheless, the text doesn’t seem bold over any of it.
Any ideas you might have would be useful. I really have no idea where to go from here, but it’s a significant problem.
thanks!
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First: did you happen to view your project on an external monitor? You can’t quite judge the way your text looks on a computer screen when it’s being made for viewing on a tv. Also, is your viewer at 100%? If it’s smaller, it can give the illusion of bad text.
However, I suspect that you’ll still have some icky looking text even after viewing in these ways (even if it’s not quite so bad) due to the DV codec. Is all the footage you’re cutting different formats? What is the sequence codec? Does it look bad when playing back the sequence within FCP, or just upon export? If it looks bad in FCP and you’re editing with the DV codec, you’ll need to switch that to something else, like ProRes. If it just looks bad when you export it, try exporting it with a lossless codec instead of DV and see how that works for you.
Your font choice and size shouldn’t be the issue. Using 100% white could possibly cause some problems, you’ll want to make sure the white is in a legal range.
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