graphic & titles

can anyone tell me should i use photoshop cs to make my graphics and title for fcp? When i make titles they come out fuzzy and blury. What type formate should i use, sharp,crisp,smooth? I need help

Are you looking at your titles on an external monitor? They tend to look bad on a computer monitor, especially in DV.

The built-in text generators (including Boris) are fine, but some of us prefer more control over fonts and text effects like glows and drop shadows in which case Photoshop is the way to go. Those format settings kind of depend on what font you use at what size, so try different ones and see what works best. Again, preview on an external NTSC monitor. Make sure you flatten your final Pshop file but leave it on a transparent background so you have an alpha channel.

Photoshop won't do the title crawls that are built into the FCP text tools though, so you may need to use those for any end titles. Another option would be to animate them in Motion or After Effects.

You have three good tools within the Final Cut Studio environment for titling:

Title3D (Boris Calligraphy)
LiveType
Motion

I have Pshop and use it heavily, but not for titles. Photoshop is primarily a raster system, you need to be on a vector system to get good, clean, scalable titles.

If you have nothing else, you can create titles in Pshop but you need to pay attention to the resolution because the output will pixelate (this is what raster does...) if you try to scale up in the FCP timeline.

I'd suggest learning how to use Title3D and LiveType. Both are relatively fast and easy to learn and work with. Motion is more exotic but a bit more difficult to use. If none of that is enough, skip After Effects and go straight to Boris RED...

Slim,
Your Graphics? They're totally fine. You just are not viewing them correctly. Likely you are not using a video monitor, eh?

Other gotchas:
Maybe you did not render at "Full" Quality.
Perhaps your timeline is not in Safe RT and is in Dynamic Frame Rate.

Read my article, then post back after you've followed my advice. Tell us if you see any improvement with your graphics.

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Kevin Monahan
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Okay thank will do. Also i made some titles in livetype and they too came out blury whats the deal? Is it any way i can get sharp outines of my type in live type? what im i doing wrong? i dont have a NTSC video monitor im using my regular television

Don't render your type out in LiveType. Take the Live Type file and drop it on your timeline, same with Motion files. These are just XML files and will render with your sequence's settings. Also gives you more control than just "render movie?".