Text from After Effects Project doesn't look sharp in FCP

For one...
Shane's Stock Answer #2: Blurry playback

ONLY JUDGE THE QUALITY OF YOUR MATERIAL ON AN EXTERNAL BROADCAST MONITOR, OR AT LEAST A TV.

The Canvas shows you what happens after the codec you are working with has been applied. The Viewer shows you the material in its native format.

1. Disable overlays on the Canvas.

2. Make sure you've rendered everything (no green bars at the top of the timeline).

Video playback requires large amounts of data and many computations. In order to maintain frame rate and be viewable at a normal size, only about one-fourth of the DV data is used in displaying the movie to the screen. However, the DV footage is still at full quality, and is best viewed thru a TV or broadcast monitor routed thru your camera or deck.

Then for two, what settings did you export this from in AE? And what are your sequence settings in FCP? If you are working with a DV timeline, then your titles will inherit the DV 5:1 4:1:1 compression, and that doesn't treat text very well at all.

Shane

I usually export AFX projects as lossless animation for best results.

However as Shane points out if you are working with a codec like DV PAL/NTSC you can expect some degradation in image quality since the DV codec is not ideal for graphics and text.

If you have no intention of putting the finished program back to DV tape and are creating a DVD for example you might consider working on one of the 8bit 4:2:2 codecs this will not improve the quality of the DV video but it wil preserve the quality of the text overlays . . . its your call really as to whether there is enough graphic content to justify the extra renders you will incur.

🙂

What do you intend to do with the sequence?

take it to tape or DVD or internet?

Again, viewing the text inside of FCP won't provide eventual image quality.

And depending on what delivery you make you to assess your workflow

Depends...what are you outputting to? Final product will be what?

Shane

Well, if you are going out to DV, then you will have to live with the blockiness, for even if you use another sequence setting, like DV50 or uncompressed 8-bit, when you output to DV you will get that DV compression again.

But, this should make for better FLV and DVDs.

Shane