View Full Version : scrolling text(paragraph) in FCP Suite...


Charlie Wu
July 23rd, 2006, 04:49 PM
Hello guys,

I have a long paragraph of notice (white on black) that needs to scroll throught the screen. My first solution was to type the text in photoshop and export as a jpeg; then just use motion to move the jpeg over the canvas. The text jittered/jumped while playing back. It seems like the scrolling was not smooth, and the picture gets stuck on and off. tried de-interlace or progressive, didn't work. In the beginning, i thought maybe the computer wasn't faster enough to preview the thing in real time, so i exported the clip as ntsc mov, still the problem occurs.
so i typed the whole paragraph in motion with paragraph format, the picture doesn't get stucked, but scrolling is just not smooth.
tried to type the paragraph in FCP, but can't set margin so the typing goes in one long long line/i could press enter and go to the next line but the text appears out of alignment.

what should i do???

Please help

Martin Pauly
July 24th, 2006, 11:39 AM
Charlie,

I have done what you describe with LiveType, with very good results. It comes with the FinalCutStudio package. The LiveType manual (which comes as a PDF file, not a printed manual) contains instructions on how to make scrolling text.

- Martin

Greg Boston
July 24th, 2006, 12:07 PM
Charlie,

This is one of the vagaries of our NTSC interlaced system. There are a couple things you need to do in order to make the vertical scroll look smooth. First, apply a slight blur to the edges. This helps to keep the horizontal lines within the text visible in both frames of interlaced video.

Next, pick a scroll rate that is an even multiple of 60 so that your text isn't jumping between fields as it moves.

There are tutorials on the net that talk about this same issue.

-gb-

Charlie Wu
July 30th, 2006, 08:29 PM
one thing i tried, and it did work was using the paragraph setting in motion and literally typed in those words and then used text scrolling behavior, and then it turn out smooth enough.

the thing i don't understand is that what i did before was basically pan up on a huge jpeg file with very high resolution.... and then it jittered like crazy. If i was doing a ken burn(correct?) effect on a huge picture with no text, is it going to jitter too???? if that's the case then motion has got one more flaw. (text is different than picture, but once export as jpeg.. it's a picure too.)