View Full Version : Poor Text Rendering From FCP?


Vishad Dewan
September 19th, 2007, 02:11 AM
Has anyone recently experienced text rendering problems in FCP? For whatever reason, the text I've added to my sequences, after rendering through Compressor on DVD settings, and then burned onto a DVD using DVD Studio Pro, ends up looking jagged and incredibly interlaced. During editing it all looks just fine, but on a TV it's the complete opposite.

Any ideas?

Aric Mannion
September 19th, 2007, 10:08 AM
yeah that always happens... my only guess is that the text is not interlaced, and when it's exported it adds interlacing and becomes crunchy. I have no idea.
In any case If you make text in after effects it looks perfect, so try that. In my case, the text is always subtitles, and what I've done is imported the whole video into after effects and interpretted footage. Then the text gets a little blurry, with best settings checked it gets bulbous, so there's no real way to fix it.

Nate Schmidt
September 19th, 2007, 10:24 AM
You could try using the Boris 3D Text Generator, it's verctor based and may yield a better output.

Dino Leone
September 19th, 2007, 11:13 AM
Has anyone recently experienced text rendering problems in FCP? For whatever reason, the text I've added to my sequences, after rendering through Compressor on DVD settings, and then burned onto a DVD using DVD Studio Pro, ends up looking jagged and incredibly interlaced. During editing it all looks just fine, but on a TV it's the complete opposite.

Any ideas?

When you position the text on the canvas, did you make sure the coordinates (x,z) are integer numbers? If they are not, rounding them during rendering can lead to jagged edges and interlacing artifacts. I think you can sort of preview this in the canvas when switching between 100% view and "fit to window" - the fit to window will blend upper and lower fields (thus making things nicer than they are) whereas the 100% will only show the upper field (or is it the other way around?).
Dino

Daniel Ross
September 19th, 2007, 11:19 AM
Be sure interlacing is set to how you want it in the project. Perhaps the project is interlaced, but most of the footage is progressive, which would look the same when displayed as interlaced?

Vishad Dewan
September 19th, 2007, 02:25 PM
I shot the entire video in 60i; what I did was just insert a blank clip with text centered automatically. The weird thing is that if I do the same thing in Motion, it's definitely not as bad as when I insert the text clip in FCP. But, obviously, I'd rather not have to save and import my entire sequence to Motion, and then re-edit.

Now, what is this Boris FX text thing? Is it just for 3D text? And how is it different than the default FCP text option?