Text Positioning Help

Since Motion3, I've been having problems with animated text not holding positioning properly. Individual characters jump/bump slightly on the y axis, sometimes randomly, sometimes in the same location each playout. This is especially evident when using a camera together with text scaling or the grow/shrink behavior. Very tough to deal with because it isn't apparent when working in the project, but rather on playout to whatever codec I try.

I'm currently trying to play out a client master where grow/shrink is a must (part of the client CI). Camera moves too. I can't just say sorry guys, I can't make it work, let's try something else.

Is there a fix for this? Deadline looming, any help much appreciated.

Clay

Hard to say without seeing your project. You might be hitting your graphics card limit. Are you rendering at best quality? Do you have filters applied to your text layers?

Hi Mark,

Yes, I am at best quality, full res. There are two behaviors applied: grow/shrink and a blur fadeout. And one camera. I notice the problem in this and other projects only when a camera is inolved in the mix. It doesn't seem to matter which font is used.

The project settings are custom, Broadcast 1280x720 PAL. Bit depth is 8. The projects are contained as .motn projects in an FCP sequence 1280x720 ProRes PAL. Sequence Render Settings in FCP are for normal motion estimation. White processed as superwhite.

I'm on an octo intel with 12GB Ram and an ATI HD3870 card.

Do you think that it's a render/processing issue rather than a Motion issue? If yes, then I can try boosting the bitdepth or the motion estimation or both.

Clay

In FCP, with the sequence selected, go to Sequence > Settings, then to the Render Control tab and make sure you rendering Motion projects at best quality. However, I suspect it's the blur filter that is expanding beyond the limit of your graphics card. You could try turning it off to test. If that proves to be the case, turn it back on, and try flattening the group containing the text, then setting it to fixed resolution (note-this may mess up your 3D project because flattening rasterizes the group, so that it will be composited based on layer order, not z-space)

Mark,

<<turn it off to test, turn it back on>>

Turns out that the culprit is the Grow/Shrink behavior. One of two things seem to happen: if I just turn the behavior off and then back on again everything is fine, or same thing plus making the very slightest of tweaks to the percentage of growth parameter (reducing or increasing).

It seems that if you inadvertently hit just the right combination of camera move while using Grow/Shrink, that's when the behavior starts acting buggy.

Thanks for the help, everyone's smiling again.

Clay