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Rolling Credits have me stumped….
(I’m posting this over in After Effects forum as well….)
Here is the situation.
I’m trying to create a high quality rolling credits for an independent feature length film, but once they get into FCP, they dont look good.Project is PAL 10bit Uncompressed Anamorphic 16×9
Credits need to run about 00:00:02:40 (approx)
Font is Helvetica Neue Roman 24pt
Size of Illustrator file is 1024px by about 30,000px.I laid out the credits in Illustrator CS2. I tried both exporting the text as is, and also tried selecting the text and using the Create Outlines option. (I have NOT tried exporting as as Photoshop PSD yet. Perhaps I should be rasterizing the sharp vector text???)
I tried bringin the Illustrator CS2 .AI file directly into AfterEffects 7.0, but it wouldnt show me the text. I then tried exporting as an EPS from Illustrator, which worked.
In AfterEffects, created a composition as PAL D1/DV Widescreen Square Pixel(1024×576), set my keyframes for the beginning and end, and rendered the sequence out as 10bit Uncompressed with no filters.
The resulting QT movie looked very good on the computer monitor. I then imported into FCP (5.04).
When I inserted into the timeline, it needed rendering as the timeline is Anamorphic and the credit rool is square pixel.
The resulting credit roll flickers and the fonts are not as nearly as clear as they should be. I tried using the flicker filter set to Medium, or Minimal, but that didnt help.I think I am doing something wrong here.
Should I be doing something to smooth out the sharp edges of the Illustrator vector text in the EPS? Should I rasterize before exporting from Illustrator? What about blur in After Effects or FCP?
Should my AE project be Square pixel or just regular anamorphic?
I’ve heard about the scanline issue, where the lenght of the entire roll in pixels should be an evenely divisable by the frame rate. Is there an easy way to figure that out?
Should I be ending up with an Anamorphic movie to bring into FCP? (When I make my subtitles in AE, I make them Anamorphic. They look fine in FCP…)
Any suggestions greatly appreciated….
Matthew -
7 Replies
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Two things:
1) How does it look on your video monitor? (You really need to have a PAL monitor connected to your system. Search back a couple of months on this forum to find out why)
2) If your sequence is uncompressed anamorphic D1 PAL, then you should be rendering out from AE as uncompressed anamorphic D1 PAL.Arnie
Now in preproduction: Peristroika (Cosmological Congress), a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com -
hello,
I went through horrible episodes with this…
Do a few tests.
I found to get perfect rolling credits I would change the field order to upper field first, i know it goes against logic but sometimes it works…
and also check it with frame blending on and off,
theres a few variations in there, but this is the way I got it work….
sorry for the crap technical breakdown of the problem but there you go…
worked for me.
joe -
by the way,
everything should be the same aspect ratio as the project… if you’ve got it all set up in after effects at 1024, do your new renders with the stretch function set to 720-576 with the correct pixel aspect dv 16-9… or start again… whatevers easiest and works….
just requires a bit of trial and error i’m afraid -
Ok…. Here’s my question. How about using LiveType or Motion to do your credit roll? They do a much better job since these programs are made specifically for the video world. AfterEffects is a very powerful program but you really need to know how to use it and it still takes some trial and error on a project such as yours.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Hi all,
Thanks for your all your suggestions. I need to digest this and will post back.
Wayne, you mentioned doing it in Live Type or Motion. I already have everything laid out in Illustrator exactally the way I want it (font, point size, columns, tab positions, spacing). Can I just export a PSD or TIFF file and bring it into Motion? Or should I be considering redoing the whole thing in one of those apps? I have both of them as part of FCPStudio, but havent touched either of them, and not sure that I should be dealing with the learning curve right now. I wonder if After Effects is the culprit in my chain?
thanks
matthew -
Live Type is actually pretty bad at credit rolls (though really good at most other things). Even on the Cow Live Type forum they recommend not doing credit rolls with it.
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I agree. Also, I believe you have to have a plug-in for Motion to import an AI file.
Winston A. Cely
Editor
Envision Response
Seattle, WA
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