[Jit Gohil]

Hey Bret,

First, let me say thanks for your informative and non-snarky reply!

I took your advice and switched everything over to the DVCProHD 720p setting and I’m well satisfied with the quality.

Unfortunately, the LiveType issue had nothing to do with my settings per se. I did a number of tests to isolate the problem and this is the conclusion I came to. Oh and one thing you mentioned tipped me off to this..

Since LiveType uses the Animation codec, even though it allows you to export the project into motion, it doesn’t render it. Even when rendered on the Motion timeline, it doesn’t really render the LiveType project. I tried rendering my LiveType timeline and then importing the rendered version into Motion and Voila, no aliasing issues.

That said, the entire reason I was using LiveType was because of it’s versatility in terms of text placement. I didn’t want to render because I assumed it would keep the text vector so if I ended up doing some zooming (dollying) in Motion, it would stay crisp. So no crispness when it’s not rendered (the original problem) and semi-crispness when rendered (but not scalable without loss).

So I’ve ditched the idea to use LiveType altogether. Instead, I’m going to do my text placement stuff in Illustrator and then import that directly into Motion. That should allow me to do what I want.

There are still a couple of things I’m in the dark about regarding Progressive vs. Interlaced. For example, I was under the assumption that any signal being played back from a computer (either via VGA, DVI or HDMI) were all progressive by default. So why is that this TV reports it’s running off my MBP in 1080i? I suppose it could just be a shortcoming of the TV. Otherwise, on my Samsung 40″ at the office, I can output full 1920×1080 as a secondary desktop.

The other thing that’s a bit vexing is that I’m using a Generator (Radial Gradient) as the backdrop in Motion, and it looks great while I’m working in Motion, but when I export, the Gradient seems to lose ‘fidelity’ – for lack of a better word. It seems ‘stepped’. Is this because of the TV or is it due to my export?

Oh, something else interesting I found was that even if I’m working in 720p, I can export (up-res I guess) to 1080p and it looks just a wee bit better. My jpg images in the composition seem less compressed than when using 720p. Could just be my imagination…

Thanks again for your detailed and concise recommendations, they were really appreciated. Any ideas on the gradient issue?

[Jit Gohil]

Thanks for the input! I come from the Web Design world where we have well structured Typography, e.g. H1, H2, P

I thought there might be something similar for video, but apparently not…

[Jit Gohil]

Hi David,

Thanks for the tip! Is that because there is no noticeable difference in quality, while maintaining a smaller file size? Or is it just a best practice for footage destined for the web?

[Jit Gohil]

Hi Brian,

Perhaps my inexperience will show in my next question.. But how did you get 1920×1080 as 1.3 Aspect Ratio? When I do the math 1920/1080 it comes out to 1.7 Am I missing something important in the aspect ratio determination?

Now that you mention it, I’ve always been a bit confused about setting the aspect ratio of a sequence in FCP. Why is it that I have an option to select an aspect ratio, but then given another option to select ‘Anamorphic 16×9’? Does that override the dropdown Aspect Ratio selection? And finally, when I’ve selected either of those (or both) – what does that do to the ‘Correct for Aspect Ratio’ setting in the viewer?

Also, in this case, I did intend to scale my sequence down proportionately from 1920×1080 into 960×540

I guess more at the heart of my question is which compressor to use for the best balance between quality and file size.