Jagged edges

What I have tried doing the last two projects is having a JPG and scaling it down a little bit and putting a 30 pixel white border on it, and rotating it -3 degrees. When I look at the image on the screen (with scrub high quality on), it looks great, but once I render it, the white border becomes jagged.

Why is that? Can that be fixed?

I tried creating a white border around the photo in Photoshop. Again, it looks great until I render it, then I get the jaggies again.

Thanks!

Casey Petersen
www.unitedvideoinc.com

Is it noticeable on the broadcast monitor? Video tends to hate sharp edges, and worse if the line doesn't fall squarely on a row of pixels.

What is your sequence codec? I notice that RGB footage on a DvcproHD timeline tends to go through some kind of conversion (RGB-YUV?) only after rendering, but not so on ProRes/Uncompressed timelines.

You could try softening the border a little with a bit of blur. Or you could manually add that in Photoshop.

Hmm... Also, what kind of jagged edges are we talking about? Screen caps?



www.strypesinpost.com

It is noticeable on a regular TV (when downconverted), however I shoot and edit HDV, and it's noticeable on my HD monitor as well.

It's the border that has the jaggies...instead of a straight 30 pixel line at a slight angle, it looks more like steps...but only after rendering...before rendering it looks perfectly fine. It does this for both the basic border filter and if I have the border created in Photoshop.

Here's a capture of the image:


It looks fine before being rendered (which it won't let me export), but afterwards, I get this.

Casey

Hmm... Are you doing the rotation in the motions tab in FCP?



www.strypesinpost.com

Yep...let me try doing the rotate in Photoshop.

Yep, that takes care of it. Well, at least I know what can be done to fix it, though it doesn't seem like this should be happening in the first place.

Thanks!
Casey

Never trust FCP to perform rotates, movement and scaling... It doesn't do it as well as other Motion/AE/Photoshop. Possibly because it doesn't work in vectors, or it just doesn't do it for some weird reason or other.



www.strypesinpost.com

In the "video processing" tab of the timeline settings box, make sure "motion filtering quality" is set to "best." Then this will probably work fine.

I just tried the motion filtering quality thing, and that didn't have any effect on the jaggies.

Casey

Oops. I thought for sure that would at least lessen the severity. Oh, well. Sorry about that. The advice to do it elsewhere ? I use After Effects myself ? is sound.

I don't have AE, but I tried it in Motion, and it worked fine there, too

Thanks!
Casey