still no luck with all the suggestions... I even tried making a motion template, which imports beautifully in the viewer (and looks perfect in motion), but as soon I drop it in the time line, it turns to garbage...

I render, export and it looks the same.

I tried all the suggestion from the ripple training article... no luck.

Now, when I import other motion templates (Tech Blue- Lower Third), it works fine... maybe slightly blurry, but more than acceptable.

What else?

Did you try rendering in Motion and adding the finished quicktime into FCP?

yeah, I rendered in motion using the animation settings... the outputted mov looked perfect... that is, until I dumped it in my timeline. :)

I am really at a loss now...

So only the red graphic looks bad, and the blue one looks ok?

funny you mention... I tried rendering in blue, thinking it was having a hard time dealing with red (which isn't uncommon)... wrong... looks just as bad.

Interesting... I changed to uncompressed 8 bit (in the sequence settings) and it looks MUCH, MUCH better!

But, this kind of hoses my work flow, as I have to re-render footage. Not a show stopper, but a BIG thorn in the side.

***EDIT*** Once I rendered, it looked like POO!

As I said above, I have been working this issue in multiple forums... and someone pointed out something interesting... He was drawing to the conclusion that the renders are high quality images (4:4:4) and the prores is lower (4:2:2) and they will never match. I am a confused by this as its a bit over my technical head.

Anyone have an opinion on this?

this thread has kind of dried up on me... anyone have any other suggestions?

Check it out
 

it should not cause the problem.... BTW, is what you are seeing going out to the NTSC or HD monitor the same way ? or only the canvas ?

I think its kind of a dead end issue... here is what I have determined.

If I edit in a ProRes timeline and dump in an alpha channel graphic, it looks bad... but when I am done editing and change the sequence to "Animation", it looks perfect... I then export to quicktime using the sequence settings (animation) and the output still looks perfect, although huge in size.

But then, I run it through compressor and get results no better than I had with using ProRes.

See the difference here:

http://www.sacreativeservices.com/forum_stuff/diff.jpg

I think it is what it is... I can't seem to get razor sharp graphics no matter what I do...

well... knowing what I know now, when dealing with HDV or DV and other compressed codecs, you have to be careful with the way you create your graphics. High contrast, organic shaped stuff probably isn't the best choice...

so, I switched my graphic and got it to an acceptable level:

http://www.sacreativeservices.com/fo...uff/better.png

I really appreciate everyone's input...

Nice. Even though that wasn't what you original envisioned for the gfx, at least you know it's not a bug in your system and just a limitation the video world has that the gfx world does not.


-A

you know maybe its the curve radius of the graphic was the problem. it was in just the right spot to be 1/2 pixels for the codec. animation being 4:4:4 of course doesn't have the limitation of of 4:2:2, but even still it should of worked.


maybe just one last thing. if you took that graphic and made it 5-10% larger or smaller, did it work ? and maybe try nudging it a 1/2 pixel over in the motion tab. seems like your new graphic looks ok.

Steve... that's a good point, I may just have been at a level where with degradation was very apparent.

I will have to do a few more tests in the near future... right now I am refreshing the FedEx tracking page awaiting my new Mac Pro - YAY!