[cognoscenti]

I'm relatively new to the world of video, and I'm trying to figure out something with Final Cut Pro 1. I'm making a 'game show' type thing and I have some text which needs to be clearly readable. I have it set up as a Photoshop file transparent to a blue FCP color layer behind.

When I have the Render Mode set to Cuts Only, and I click somewhere along the red where it has not yet rendered, it gives me the preview of this.

However, when I do indeed render the file, the text comes out like this.

Is there any way I can have it so that when the video is rendered it will look as crisp as it does in the preview?

(And no, that's not me in the video).


[edited to correct links]

[ 03-30-2002: Message edited by: cognoscenti ]

[ 03-30-2002: Message edited by: cognoscenti ]

[lucylawless]

you need to encode that part in a lossless format (the animation codec, for example) instead of lossy (most others, like sorenson, cinepak, mjpeg, dv, divx, etc). One way is to do the whole movie in a lossless format, but you'll probably lose a lot of compression efficiency. Another way is to do only the text scenes in that format, and piece everthing together at the end with quicktime pro.

I recommend you use a text track in quicktime. Start off by reading here. I've seen better explanations on Apple's site, but I can't find them now. Once you have exported a text file with the right time stamps, you can edit the colors and font in the properties at the top of the file. you can position it onscreen in quicktime pro just like any other track

[direktor]

While what Lucy reccomends would solve the problem, I don' t think any of that is too realistic for the casual user...neither the animation codec or lossless would playback in real time on any normal machine. Also, I'm quite sure you can't manipulate text tracks in FCP.

Cog, what you're seeing is the decoding of the DV codec to your monitor. When you construct the text in FCP first off...FCP is rendering it's own text and superimposing it on your source layer. This is not a real time process, and thusly it can look very nice. After you render it...it is generating new DV footage and it has to decode that new piece of DV footage just like all other DV footage. That is to say, not very well...depending on what kind of processor you have. Quicktime figures out what processor you have and scales the DV playback quality to fit. On old G4s and G3s it's going to be pretty low quality, and is especially apparent in text and animations.

What to do? Nothing. The DV footage rendered actually looks fine, and if you were to print it to tape or export it to another codec, it'd look just fine. Try it.

It's true that the DV codec doesn't handle fine detail as well as some others, but it's nowhere near as bad as what you're seeing on your monitor...that's just a side effect necessary to play back your footage.