Titles not as crisp as they should be in FCP

Question

Titles not as crisp as they should be in FCP

Ok so I recently just compressed my project and burned it to DvD and some titles are just not as crisp as they should be. Here's the rub, In the beggining of this edit I designed ONE title and since then just duplicated it, gone into text controls, and changed the name's and positions.

It's simple Text over two semi-transparent colors with a small icon upper left.

My FCP settings are for DV-NTSC (found under easy set up, because were not shooting in HD yet)

I've tried bringing them all into motion, re-creating them there and saving but it doesn't seem to help.

Whats really throwing me is that some of the tittles are fine while others are not and there really doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why.

Any help would be greatly apreciated.

Thank You.

P.s. I DID try to find the solution here but didnt see a match to my exact problem

Final Cut Pro 7

Posted on Jul 23, 2012 11:06 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Shane Ross

Level 8

43,110 points

Jul 23, 2012 11:09 AM in response to Brucey Bizzit

DV/NTSC is the lowest end SD codec, and treats text horribly. Copy and paste your sequence into a DV/50 or ProRes SD sequence and render...see how they improve.

Reply

Answer 2

Jul 23, 2012 11:24 AM in response to Brucey Bizzit

Try this:

Go to "Sequence Settings" & click "General" tab. Set "Field Dominance" to "None." That cleaned up all my text in DV and every other codec.

Reply

Answer 3

Jul 23, 2012 11:37 AM in response to Shane Ross

@Shane Going to try that now, I assume I can just copy the sequence, close project, change settings, open new project paste and export? I'll let you know how I make out.

@Singproinc I may just be blind but I couldn't seem to find that under user settings, system settings, easy set up or audio/video settings?

Reply

Answer 4

Jul 23, 2012 11:43 AM in response to Brucey Bizzit

Brucey-

Click on your timeline. Then hit "open Apple-0" (aka "command-zero"). Sequence settings should pop up. You can also find them under "Sequence" at the topmost menu bar, then select "Settings..." You must have clicked on the timeline to access the menu, or it will be grayed out.

Reply

Answer 5

Shane Ross

Level 8

43,110 points

Jul 23, 2012 11:48 AM in response to Singproinc

Yeah, in the sequence settings, just change the COMPRESSOR to DV/50 or ProRes NTSC.

Reply

Answer 6

Meg The Dog

Level 6

13,561 points

Jul 23, 2012 11:54 AM in response to Brucey Bizzit

Do not change your sequence to progressive (no field dominance) unless that is what you really want to do.

When working in DV, it is essential that the titles be placed on even number scan lines, or they will look distorted (blury, edge artifacts).

Double click on one of the problematic titles so that it loads to the viewer, and click on the motion tab. Make sure the title is positioned to an even number vertical position:

The horizontal position does not matter.

Adjust your titles so that they fall on the even vertical scan lines and see if that helps.

MtD

Reply

Answer 7

Jul 23, 2012 12:01 PM in response to Brucey Bizzit

gotta say if you do the text properly, dv text looks fine.

Reply

Answer 8

Jul 23, 2012 12:05 PM in response to Meg The Dog

Hey Meg- I had to create a couple hundred "lyrics & music" song videos in DV/Final Cut, and wrestled with jaggie lines on the nice round arial font we had to use. The final export out of FC was DV, then to several formats-from DVD to Windows Media and both interlaced/non-interlaced. We always had jaggies with either field dominance, no matter where they were placed on the screen. Changing the field dominance to "none" cleared up all our problems with artifacts on the watermark logo and jaggies on the arial font. Backgrounds were library selections of a variety of sources and random codecs.

We may have somehow cheated fate with what we did; but it made the output tolerable in DV and all the other codecs that followed. It's worth a try.

Reply