Image darkens from bottom to top. How can I make it uniform?

Here's my result, if anyone's interested. Not perfect, but turns out the result is similar to some of my other title shots, so things are consistent at least. Not nearly as uniform as fox_m's but his or her result is not the look I was going for. Though cleaning up the white letters is pretty cool.

Admittedly, it could probably use a little bit of fine-tuning. Maybe later if time permits.

I don't understand. First, the connected clip would simply block out the clip below it. Second, I already tried the graduated mask, and couldn't find any settings that would work anyway. So why would using a connected clip make any difference?

BTW, I have since done a partial solution. Using 3 masks, each on one line of the title except the bottom one, to adjust them to all have the same brightness, while subtracting out the red from the mask. So at least the letters are good. I can go with the gradual darkening of the red background if no way can be found to fix that.

olson30 wrote:

Brighten the connected clip. Apply the graduated mask. The graduated mask gradually alters the opacity of the layer it is applied to. The "settings" for a graduated mask are the angle, the start of 0% opacity and the end at 100% opacity. Click on the mask in the inspector and move the circles. You'll need to tune the brightness and the mask but you are on the right track using the scopes.

After some struggling I got it to sort of work. I didn't realize at first that the graduated panel in the inspector had to be "active" to get the two circles. I was wondering why they kept disappearing. Using the graduated mask slider controls was a disaster. So I set the color controls on the connected clip to make the top look good, and moved the circles to try to make a smooth change across the image. I have them at the edges of the image. The scopes and even visual inspection show I haven't quite succeeded, but I like the red background being normal instead of dark, like it is in my previous effort. NR (Neat Video 4.8.5) has to be turned off. But I guess I have to make this a compound clip and apply the NR to that anyway, as applying them to both clips seems wrong and would probably seriously slow down rendering.

Thanks for the tip. Hopefully I can get things to be more uniform from top to bottom.

Update: I've achieved a much better image now. Still a little dark at the top, but still a big improvement. Also, I had to mask and color correct each row with different settings anyway. I had to use the color mask in subtract mode on a red sample between the letters and crank up the "Softness" to 100.

Thanks, I appreciate your effort, but it's not the look I was going for. I need it to be consistent with all the other title shots, and one of them is animated. Also, I want it to look like plastic letters with just a hint of dirt and scratches, so as to make it look like a live shot as opposed to a fixed slide. Sorry.

I do like the cleaning up of the letters, though. Is there some way I can do that natively in Final Cut? My own efforts at that produced outline oversaturated artifacts. It was pretty bad.

Oops. That's the version without noise reduction. It also looks better right-side up:

Thanks for your effort. Drop shadow?