Question about HD title I made in FCP

[Rafael Amador]

I guess you are editing on a DV sequence.
Change the sequence codec for something better (at least DVCPro50; Prores better).
Set the canvas to 100% size and render.
See if its looks better.
rafael

[Jonathan Young]

Yes, I forgot to mention that I am using a ProRes codec and not a DV codec and it still looks washed out, my seq compressor settings are ProRes and I am exporting the video with the ProRes compression through quicktime conversion.

[Shane Ross]

Titles done in HD, no matter how crisp the original looks, when put in an SD project, won’t be as crisp. less resolution.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Jonathan Young]

Ok, I thought I was correct, I had two of the same projects, one in HD and one in SD, the client wanted to know why the EXACT same title looked less crisp and sharp than the HD project, I told him it was because one was HD and one was SD, I originally created the SD tile in the 853X480 settings and it was looking washed out compared to the HD version so he asked if I could take the HD title and drop it into the SD project and the results were the same, but he still insist that I must be doing something wrong, I knew I was right when I told him no matter what I do the SD project text wise will never match the HD project quality wise. He then asked me to create the titles in after affects and bring them into FCP, I knew before I did it that it would not make a difference, but I did it anyway and same results. So know I think he wants me to do the both projects in Premiere Pro CS6, but as long as we are doing HD to SD even in Premiere Pro the quality in text will be the same correct?

[Neil Patience]

Hi Jonathan

just out of interest I tried to recreate your set up just to see what happened. FCP does not resize well so I would not put the HD caption into an SD timeline.
Additionally as the other guys have said – SD is never going to look as good. Your clients suggestion of creating in HD and putting that in SD is not going to improve things. If anything its the worst option, as I said it does not resize well.
Any SD pictures or captions are never going to look as good as HD no matter what software you use. Compared to each other HD is always going to look superior.

However I did some screen grabs of a grey and maroon caption on white and there was no huge change in levels. The SD created caption looked much better that the HD resized.

The 3 examples are below, as you can see the SD created caption is not that bad, certainly not as clean as the HD but pretty acceptable.
The HD in HD timeline is obviously the best.
The HD resized shows poor quality edges and is the worst by far.
Not huge level differences though – they were all grabbed at 100% otherwise as Raphael says they will not look good whatever you do.

This is HD caption in HD timeline

This is SD caption in SD timeline not resized

This is HD caption resized in SD timeline

If you click on them and look at them in the viewer its easier to see the differences in quality.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

8 Core MacPro, Kona 3, Tangent Wave, Mackie Universal Symphony 6.5 FCP7
i7 2.7 Gig MBP (non retina) 16Gigs Ram Blackmagic Monitor Mini Symphony 6.5 FCP7

[Rafael Amador]

A couple of things:
– FC has THREE “Render Motion Effects” options. Have you selected “BEST”?
– Exporting to Prores (10b) by mean of “QT Conversion” makes no much sense. QT process only in 8b.
rafael

[Jonathan Young]

Yes motion render settings in FCP is set to BEST