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Motion Graphics issue

M

Macpropro80

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 31, 2009
408
0
Hey I made a really cool looking title sequence in Motion and when I put it into my movie in final cut pro and exported it, the Motion graphic looks horrible! The Color is not smooth and it just generally looks bad. I exported it at the highest setting for H.264. I can't do uncompressed because I need to bring this project to school where they don't have raid.

Attached is a picture of what Im talking about.

BTW. Those blocky circles used to look like bubbles in Motion.

Anyone know how to fix this?
 

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The only way to fix it is to export it at higher quality. You should never, ever export as H.264 as an intermediate codec. Try using ProRes or DVCPro HD.


Lethal
 
Macpropro80 said:
Hey I made a really cool looking title sequence in Motion and when I put it into my movie in final cut pro and exported it, the Motion graphic looks horrible! The Color is not smooth and it just generally looks bad. I exported it at the highest setting for H.264. I can't do uncompressed because I need to bring this project to school where they don't have raid.

Attached is a picture of what Im talking about.

BTW. Those blocky circles used to look like bubbles in Motion.

Anyone know how to fix this?
Click to expand...

What bitrate did you export with? Are you planning on editing this again once you bring it to school?
 
huntercr said:
What bitrate did you export with? Are you planning on editing this again once you bring it to school?
Click to expand...

Yes, this is the opening sequence for a movie for my school. I need to bring it in and use it there. How do I change bit rates? It looks great uncompressed but I won't be able to use it at school if its uncompressed. Also what is the best codec if I want to play this on a dvd?
 
Try Animation codec. It's lossless and fairly low on CPU, with less disk access because the files are smaller. It does stutter sometimes, though, but will usually play back smoothly on modern hardware (at SD resolutions like 720x540 anyway). I can even play back PNG-compressed animations smoothly most of the time on a quad-core Intel Mac. PNG is great because it's about 1/4 to 1/2 the file size of Animation, but still lossless. It's just a bit more CPU-intensive to decompress in real time.

If your school computer has FCP on it, you could just bring in the project, render it to play it back smoothly in FCP. After Effects would also work.

But anyway yeah, h.264 is pretty bad with graphics, especially big areas of subtle gradients like you have there. It actually looks much better with highly detailed content like real-life images.
 
When you say play back off DVD, do you mean play back a QuickTime file off a data DVD (this is bad because the access will be even slower than hard disk), or do you mean burn a standard video DVD? If you can do that, it's probably the best option, then you can encode MPEG-2 (720x480) and crank the bit rate up to like 10 mbps, which should give you a pretty nice looking image.
 
HiRez said:
When you say play back off DVD, do you mean play back a QuickTime file off a data DVD (this is bad because the access will be even slower than hard disk), or do you mean burn a standard video DVD? If you can do that, it's probably the best option, then you can encode MPEG-2 (720x480) and crank the bit rate up to like 10 mbps, which should give you a pretty nice looking image.
Click to expand...

Well sooner or later it is going to have to be on a standard Video DVD to show the movie on.
 
HiRez said:
Try Animation codec. It's lossless and fairly low on CPU, with less disk access because the files are smaller. It does stutter sometimes, though, but will usually play back smoothly on modern hardware (at SD resolutions like 720x540 anyway). I can even play back PNG-compressed animations smoothly most of the time on a quad-core Intel Mac. PNG is great because it's about 1/4 to 1/2 the file size of Animation, but still lossless. It's just a bit more CPU-intensive to decompress in real time.

If your school computer has FCP on it, you could just bring in the project, render it to play it back smoothly in FCP. After Effects would also work.

But anyway yeah, h.264 is pretty bad with graphics, especially big areas of subtle gradients like you have there. It actually looks much better with highly detailed content like real-life images.
Click to expand...


The movie is 720P (its like a 10 minute movie) And I tried playing and HD animation on the computer and it was unplayable. The computers at school are 4 core 2006 mac pros, my 8 core 2008 mac pro can play them fine but sadly the schools cant.
 
Macpropro80 said:
Yes, this is the opening sequence for a movie for my school. I need to bring it in and use it there. How do I change bit rates? It looks great uncompressed but I won't be able to use it at school if its uncompressed. Also what is the best codec if I want to play this on a dvd?
Click to expand...
So in FCP, go to File>Export>Using QuickTime Conversion, select QuickTime Movie as the format, then click the Options button, and then the Settings button under Video. There you can set your data rate. Try something like 10,000 kbits/sec under "Restrict to" and then change to "Faster Encode (Single Pass)" (since you're manually setting a bit rate, you won't see a benefit from doing dual pass). You'll have to play around with the bit rate until you find diminishing returns with the quality and can still play back easily off disk. I would also recommend downloading the x.264 codec, which I think does a better job of encoding h.264 than QuickTime's standard encoder, and doesn't have gamma issues like the QuickTime one does. Once installed, you can select that instead of H.264 anywhere you use QuickTime, and the exporting options are the same.
 
Well, it looks better, but that background gradient is still pretty brutal with the color banding. You could try dithering the background, add a little texture or gaussian noise, that might help. Also it looks like your aspect ratio is horked, squished horizontally. I'm assuming the graphic in the center should be circular? Is that a square pixel version?
 
you should buy an external drive and do all your work on that. This way you don't have worry... This way you can go from school to home and vis versa and not have to worry about transferring files.
PS nice graphic mind post a link to the final animation?
 
Im uploading it to my mobile me right now, Il link it when its done. The funny thing about this story is the title is for a tutorial on how to use final cut. Im a little embarrassed to have to ask about final cut when Im making a video on how to use it.
 
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