Problems with rendered text in Premiere

[Mike Smith]

Are you saying that the file as it comes in to PPro looks worse than you expect, or that it looks fine coming in and goes bad when you render out?

Do you have same pixel aspect ratio settings (widescreen, standard video or square) for AE and PPro …?

Is the text used full screen, or are you keying it – if so, is there a problem with the alpha channel … have you tested some text on an AE background / no keying, to try to eliminate that as a source of problems ..?

PS just remind me why you are using Quicktime as the format and Animation as the codec of choice for your reel ..?

[Keiser]

I’m having what’s probably the exact same problem. I animated some scrolling text in After Effects then exported in uncompressed video (I’m a perfectionist!). If I then use my compression program the text looks PERFECT. 720×480 @ .9 aspect pixels. I import the uncompressed footage into Premiere in my music video, then I export a few seconds of just the scrolling text uncompressed, then compress it with my program. The text now looks really bad, kind of pixelated and thin, same at 720×48 @ .9 aspect pixels. As the text scrolls it seems to get thicker and thinner based on how many pixels it decides to use at any given position. Final codec used is H.264 .avi file @ 100% quality.

At first I wasn’t sure if it was the export from Premiere or the encode that was messing it up, but after encoding the raw footage I made in After Effects and seeing it perfect, I’m 100% sure it’s the fault of Premiere or some setting within it. I’ve been messing with settings trying to get it to work correctly but no luck so far.

[Keiser]

I’ve never seen text so clear and beautiful now 🙂

This is in Premiere Pro 2.0, not sure how the menus relate in 1.5 but under the export settings (File->Export->Movie then in the Save As dialogue box hit Settings) under the Keyframe and Rendering listing I set Fields: to “Upper Field First”. For some reason any other setting makes it chunky. I changed every single setting in the export boxes then narrowed it down one by one until I found what fixed it. Took a lot of renders, but I’m glad.

[Nisha Samuel]

It looks fine coming in but worse rendering out. I’ve have been asked to supply a quicktime file and uncompressed so that it can go to someone else to be inserted into another reel.

Our format over here is PAL TV and I’ve kept the project settings identical between AE and Premiere, same pixel aspect ratio.

Text is full screen, bold, no keying, just straight animation – a scale up with motion blur.

[Nisha Samuel]

I ended up rendering my reel in Premiere and dropped it into AE with the titles. I think my original render was on lower fields (not looking so hot with playback on a pc because of the fields) so I made sure everything was consistently rendered with no fields and double checked the pixel aspect ratio. Seems to look alright now.

Thanks

[Mike Smith]

Glad it worked out.

For PAL land, for reasons that pass me by, DV video is normally lower-field first (unless captured with Matrox RTX.100 or other proprietary hardware/codec combos) and all other video is upper field first.

To check interlaced video for quality (or any video really) it’s probably necessary to play out to a good video monitor – the fields which can make motion smoother on the video screen can look grotty on a typical computer monitor with progressive scan – no fields.

All best