fuzzy letters
by eggohead
on
Oct 31, 2007 at 3:05:00 pm
Hi, I'm exporting out a 720x480 quicktime with a split screen. All of the text is coming out looking terrible. You can view a 15 second clip of the video here:
http://jsnidervideo.blip.tv/file/457278/
The box on the right are jpegs sized down a bit on one track, and the box on the left is video of a lecture, also sized down. The background was made in photoshop, as was the text above and below both boxes.
Both the text from the .psd, and the text in all of the slides look terrible. Even when I export this file at full quality and play it back in Quicktime--the text looks terrible....any ideas here?
Re: fuzzy letters by Mattyc on Oct 31, 2007 at 3:22:38 pm
Jpgs aren't really optimal for titles as there is compression on them, so it'll result in soft edges rather than crisp ones especially when you scale them. Also if you distort it rather than scale it constrained that'll make it look worse. I'd also check in the motion tab to make sure all of the titles have an even number for the position of the horozontal axis. anything that isn't an even whole number will usually make it look bad.
As far as the PSDs are concerned, did you scale them? What size were they created at in photoshop?
-mattyc
Raising money for Blood:Water Mission to help build wells in Africa. I'm
putting my hair on the line to raise some money.
Check it out http://rattail.callac.com
Re: fuzzy letters by kuma16 on Oct 31, 2007 at 3:30:31 pm
Try this:
Export to desktop. Open in QuickTime. Click on video. Press Apple J. A window will pop up.
Highlight video track. Click box on lower right hand corner that says High Quality.
Go over the text segments in your video to see if there is improvement. If there is, save your changes
Re: fuzzy letters by David Roth Weiss on Oct 31, 2007 at 4:52:19 pm
[eggohead]"I'm exporting out a 720x480 quicktime with a split screen. All of the text is coming out looking terrible."
Josh,
The problem is DV compression using the DV codec. The way to prevent that from happening is as follows:
After editing is complete, click on the Sequence tab, then Settings, then look under Quicktime Video Settings and you'll see Compressor and a dropdown menu box. In that box change the compressor to DVCPRO50-NTSC. Now hit OK and then Re-render the timeline. You will magically find that your text and graphics suddenly export with much greater precision and clarity, because the color depth of the DVCPRO50 codec is 4:2:2 rather than the horrible 4:1:1 of the DV codec.
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™
A forum host of Creative COW's Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
Re: fuzzy letters by David Roth Weiss on Nov 1, 2007 at 1:29:15 pm
[Chris Poisson]"I do what David does all the time, only I use 8bit."
I use 10-bit, but no everyone has a raid necessary to play back 8 or 10-bit uncompressed. Pro Res is a good alternative now as well. But, DVCPro50 does a decent job for DV projects.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™
A forum host of Creative COW's Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
Re: fuzzy letters by scottyp on Nov 2, 2007 at 9:21:21 pm
I'll try it. but still not sure why it looks great with a no field sequence, or even as it sits in a lower field sequence with the blue bar on top before it gets rendered. Once I render it however it looks terrible. So odd.
So once I render in DVCpro 50 and I want to make a dvd, I just re-import the final movie and send it out to compressor?
Re: fuzzy letters by Mike Weber on Nov 1, 2007 at 5:00:52 pm
I'm not sure, but your clips like a little bit stretched horizontally, and are not displaying in a 4x3 aspect ratio. This would definitely cause your text & footage to look bad.
If your footage is DV 720x480, then it is made up of rectangular pixels. Final Cut Pro knows how to display this properly in the canvas window, but QuickTime Player doesn't automatically - instead it will display them as square, causing a slight horizontal distortion. As an experiment, try exporting your video as a true square pixel aspect ratio, like 640x480, instead of 720x480, and see if that helps.
