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Red is bedevilling me!
Gidday Motion gurus.
I’m creating some Lower thirds based on the funky Motion 3 template with the sliding gray arrows that wipe on the text.
They look really cool in Motion but when I superimpose them over my DVCPRO HD 720p25 material in FCP 6.0.1 the red ( clients colour unfortunately ) text goes blocky and steppy round the edges. I can do a white version of the same text which looks much crisper but I’d really appreciate any advice on how to make the red workable.
I’ve tried importing the .motn project directly, turning it into a template and bringing it in that way and exporting the Motion project as a QT Animation millions+.
I tried making the Motion project setting 16 bit float and 32 bit float but that didn’t seem to help just slowed things down.
Do I need to change the Video Processing settings for my sequence in FCP to make those work?
It’s currently “Render in 8-bit YUV”.
Thanks in advance for any advice. -
2 Replies
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Red has always been a problem on video but it depends on your codec and display specs. CRTs are really bad with reds. LCDs not so much. You need to undestand pixel risetime, compression block handling between codecs, and know how to use a waveform and vectorscope.
You can get close to your client’s colors but there are technical limitations to using red that are simply built into video.
bogiesan
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Your post was so long ago that I’m sure you’ve figured something out by now and bogie always gives solid advice, but I had another thought.
You should suggest to your client that they go for a different color or less saturated and/or darker shade of red (not the suggestion), but if they don’t want to listen to your professional opinion they’re paying for then you’re stuck with it.
I would try using some kind of text style to add an outline, glow, drop shadow, or all of the above to soften the edges of your text. Subtly change the color from your text color to something more video friendly. I’m a bag fan of a 1 or 2 pixel outline of a just slightly lighter hue and and blurry contrasting glow with a subtle and blurred drop shadow (try a distance of 0 to use this a s a type of second glow) to set the whole thing apart from the background.
It’s all about the subtlety of the effect… just my $.02
Zak
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