Bret Williams
Forum Replies Created
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Well the truth is you want to use straight. Straight will generally produce better results. It pretty much always produces better results. Only thing with straight, is it looks like hell on it’s own. Premulitplied tends to have the fringe effect in my experience. I use straight. Always get the expected results. FCP always guesses right.
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I read that in Creating Motion Graphics years ago. A book on After Effects. They cited Adam Wilt. The detailed info is on his site.
Hardware CG rolls used to confine you to good speeds. They might even increase or decrease the leading of your text to make it fit a particular duration.
Avid Media Composer did this with their old hardware based roll effect. It was smooth as glass.
But with software like FCP and After Effects and Boris they don’t lock in speeds. They try sub pixel rendering (which FCP sucks at), or blurs, or nothing at all and just let you create rolls at any speed you like. it all looks like junk with small text sizes.
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This has been discussed so many times. The answer is fairly technical, but the gist is that because of interlacing, the only way to truly have a credit roll look perfect is to run it at a speed that is an even multiple of the field rate per second. (see adamwilt.com for details) In other words, in the motion tab, your text must move upward 120 or 240 pixels per second (in NTSC). 240 is really fast, and 120 is pretty legible if you space out the elements a little. Or, if like most credits, you don’t REALLY care if they’re all that readable. They’re just supposed to be there.
It’s so ridiculously simple I uploaded a template project consisting of a psd and a fcp project file to my website.
bretwilliams.com/cowstuff (You’ll find a .zip called croll.zip.)
The psd is simply a 720×3000 with a text layer in times. Yes times. Even serifs are no problem.
It’s a 30 second roll, and if you look at the keyframes you’ll see it moves upward 3600 pixels over 30 seconds. That’s 30×120=3600. It’s just that simple. Credit rolls done this way are solid as a rock. No artifacts, no waves, etc.
The beauty of this template is that you can just change the psd file to change the roll. If the new text is shorter, then it’ll scroll nothing for the remainder. Just cut off the blank portion. But don’t move the keyframes. If you need a longer roll, simply put two back to back. I think FCP is limited to 3000 pixels.
Have fun.
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No, FCP doesn’t support LP or SP. It supports DV. LP or SP all looks the same to FCP. It’s a 25mbps stream. If you have a deck (not dsr-11) that will play back LP then FCP won’t know the difference.
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Ditto. This also begs the question what goes into the back port, the deck, or the drive? As it stands right now, on my dual 2ghz macpro I have the DSR-11 attached to the back, and the FW400 drive attached to the front port. No problems at all.
Is mine a 2nd generation? Is there a 2nd gen MacPro? Just got mine in January.
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Ayup. First, I think this is pretty much a demo for the wedding photographer. He probably had someone produce this to show off his photography in a little different light. Also, I would have to add that the “cutting out” is the simplest part. Cloning backgrounds (they’re not all grass and sky folks) would be the toughest part. Next would be the hassle of laying out the scenes in 3D space. You’ve got to get the depth right for it to look right. That means a bit of trial and error. But cutting people out is extremely simple. And it doesn’t really have to bee done all that accurately when it’s going to video with motion/motion blur in the animation. A good cut out and a little edge feathering does the trick.
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There’s no need to re render an entire quicktime file either. It is an editing machine after all. Just rerender the frames or seconds neccessary and insert them into the quicktime. If you want a nice concise quicktime that’s not broken into parts, just edit the parts together and export a self contained file. There’s no further compression. I find the benefits to enormously outweigh any downsides. What a hassle to have a computer drive full of image sequences imho. With a drive full of quicktimes I just open them up in quicktime, or even in column view without opening a single app. They show up in searches and spotlight.
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Pict is pretty much the format I always use out of habit. Works fine. Maybe it’s not really a pict.
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Have you saved it and closed the project? The size isn’t going to shrink until the undo cache has completely cleared.
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Old favorite… put duplicate clip above, then add blur. Apply clip with “screen” composite mode. Adjust opacity and blur of uppder clip to taste.