Re: Titles in FCP

Hi.

After creating some titles in FCP, and rendering, the quality looks very poor in the Canvas window. Unfortunately I don't have the budget to afford a preview monitor at the moment. (I know I'm at a real disadvantage!) My knowledge is very limited on this. I have exported my project to a Quicktime movie, but again the quality of the titles look poor. (It is simple white text on a black background.) Some people have suggested that by changing the settings in QT to ensure the video is played back in high quality that this will give a truer representation of the quality. When I make that change, the text appears very crisp and clear.

Can anyone advise if this is the best way to do it?

I am working in PAL. If the final size of the project is greater than 4.7GB, what is the best way of getting this burnt to a DVD. Is Compressor the software to use, and if so, could you advise what I should do?

Apologies for all the questions, but my deadline is fast approaching and I'm hoping to be able to resolve these issues before then!

Thanks again.

If you have a video camera you could use that to connect to a tv or vcr and use that as your monitor, right? And I would say yes, Compressor is the way. Ken has great articles about it here. Check them out!

All excellent tips, to which I can add:

- If you don't have an external program monitor and you can't work via a camera, your next best choice is to occasionally set your Canvas window to 100% (instead of "Fit to window") to check the quality of your titles and graphics. Setting the Canvas to 100% at least gives you a full image render of your video, but it also puts more strain on your system. So depending on the power of your computer you might need to set it back to Fit to window again to work smoothly.

- The high quality settings in QuickTime are the ONLY right way to view your video as it is. All this default low-quality viewing comes from the time when computers were much slower.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Another way to get nice smooth titles is to make them in Photoshop (for something scrolling you can make it as long as you want as long as you keep the relative width of the screen intact) and import them in FCP. After that you can use the motion tab in the viewer to pull it across the screen.
The moving title generator in FCP unfortunately is the worst feature in the package. However, I consider the still titles to be quite okay.

greetings,

Jasper