Flicker free titles and scrolling text?

I'm in a 1080p project that I burned to DVD. Watching it on a TV, the titles exhibit a little flicker but the credit crawl flickers so bad it is nearly unwatchable. I understand this is exacerbated due to compression from 1080p to Standard def mpeg-2.

In FCP, I see no flicker in the titles but I do see it in the credit crawl.

My question is what can be done? Is there another filter that I could try?

I've tried flicker filter, blur, reducing the brightness of the white text, and making the text bold. The bold bit may have helped the most but the flicker is still noticeable in FCP (so I shutter to think what it look like as a compressed DVD)

Scrolling text
Helvetica
16 point Bold
Color: off white

Titles
Handwriting - Dakoda (this has thin edges so I figure that's what's causing it)
36 point bold
Color: White

Finally, is there a set of specs (font, size, color, speed) that I could use, that would be flicker free?

Thank You

Have you tried Motion Blur? This has worked for me in the past.

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Tried motion blur - not much help. I even recreated the credits in photoshop, saved to to a png with transparency and it still flickers. This is incredibly frustrating, I see these on films all the time, what is the secret?

Are you producing titles for a film? Because it works on film does not mean it will work on video. Do you see scrolling titles at the end of TV shows?

All the best,

Tom

It's for a short film but shot on video, so on TV shows the credits flicker? If that's the case ( I assume do to conversion progressive HD to regular DVD) and there's no solution so be it, I just don't want to delude the client into thinking they will get flicker free credits.

"so on TV shows the credits flicker?"

No. TV shows don't do scrolling credits unless they're traveling at a hundred miles an hour.

All the best,

Tom

Also film is usually digitized and edited on NLE systems, unless the standard end scrolling credits are created in a different program?

That's true, but that has nothing to do with video flicker. They're not output on video, are they? And they are edited in progressive frame formats at film frame rates.

All the best,

Tom

To avoid flicker, the text has to move a specific amount of pixels at a time, an amount that is determined by the height of the letters and the thickness of the lines. This is why, on professional on-air graphics programs you are limited to specific speeds for rolls and sizes for type, not just any speed or size. It's also why you don't see many rolls on series TV. Some but not many. Not even going to bring up the squeezing, retyping and other mangling of end credits that they do now.

There is a script floating around that you can use in AfterEffects that limits you to integral speeds.
You make your text page in Illustrator, import to AE and add Motion Tile to it and use the expressions to adjust the roll speed based on the composition hight. I got it from someone here, I forget who, because we're all so wonderful and helpful that I forget which one it was. Show yourself!!

If you are AfterEffects capable, it's worth checking out. I can send you a copy of a basic project but you'll need AfterEffects and a basic knowledge of expressions to make it work.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Andrew,

Please do that would be great

Tom,

Thanks for the info, I understand that they initially output to film but they eventually encode it to DVD? Moreover, maybe I'm just going crazy but I just looked at the scrolling credits of a couple of DVDs of blockbuster films (on multiple tv's) and they flicker/strobe as well.

DVD is made from 24fps progressive media. Pulldown is added on playback from the disc for television display. The result is not very pleasant.

All the best,

Tom

Is this an NTSC thing? We run rolling credits all the time here in PALand and they don't flicker. Only the badly made ones flicker.

Rules of thumb

? Make the media the same size as your output. Not lots larger, or lots smaller. Scaling is bad.

? Don't use white on black. Use grey on black, or anything else that isn't high contrast. If you think it's grey and it still flickers, make it greyer.

? Thick fonts. Sure, it's supposed to work with anything over 3px, but try not to push the rule where possible.

? Work in ProRes

? No serifs. Serifs get thin. This is bad.

? Check your output on the media it will be displayed on. Not on the computer. This is not an accurate representation of how it's going to look. Unless it's going to be played on a computer, of course.

? If you're dumbing down to SD and you just can't get your original titles to work, consider making fresh titles that work correctly in SD and adding them to the end of your dvd with an end jump, rather than just running them off the end of your film.

I would only add that serifs are permissible if you choose a robust font with even legs and stems, such as Century SchoolBook, Clarendon and others. A world without serifs would be kind of boring... and less readable. San-serif is surely legible-- but not always readable.

The legs and stems in serif fonts aid in readability but drawing the eye along legs and stems to neighboring shapes.

I avoid bold types because they tend to fill in the counters, the space inside a's, e's, o's, b's, d's, p'sand q's. A problem which bit me in my early film work.

I've had decent luck composing serif titles in Photoshop-- for instance a 44" X 10" X 144 ppi file for an end title crawl using Century Schoolbook roman and italic types-- and importing to After Effects with a directional motion blur to avoid beating against scanlines. Render out in the FCP program codec and bring it in.

Boris Title Crawl makes correct speed pretty easy right inside FCP but the layout is a bear. Just doesn't center up easily between guttered titles and centerline titles.

- Loren

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Here is some love on that. The matching frame rates for scan lines is important, but...

You can also export as a tif sequence and re-import that tiff sequence. The titles wont strobe, they might jitter a little but on the whole they will look a lot better.