Jagged lines with borders

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DVX100Shooter

Veteran
I have a series of photos that I imported and resized (scaled down). They are keyframed to move about on the screen. I then added a border to each photo and scaled that down as well. When i play the timeline back the border doesn't look good! It looks a jagged line with spiked points.

Now I will say that some of the photos I wanted to be on an angle or rotate in a circle etc. Those are the photos I am having issues with. The ones that come on to the screen that are not on angles or do any fancy moves, look perfect with straight border lines.
 
The border is aliasing. First, make sure you are viewing at 100 percent. If it still looks aliased, then do this. Nest your clip with the border by highlighting it and clicking Sequence>Nest Items. Then add the stylize>anti-alias filter. Adjust the filter higher until the aliasing disappears.
 
So your saying the pictures need that I imported need to be 100 percent because I have them scaled down on purpose, or do you mean that I need put them at 100 percent first then do what I need to do to them and then resize them to a smaller size?
 
DVX100Shooter said:
So your saying the pictures need that I imported need to be 100 percent because I have them scaled down on purpose, or do you mean that I need put them at 100 percent first then do what I need to do to them and then resize them to a smaller size?
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No, I just meant put the size of your canvas screen at 100 percent. If it's at say 67 percent, weird aliasing will happen that doesn't necessarily reflect your actual output. There is a tab at the top of the canvas where timecode and all that info is. Set it to 100 percent, and if your borders still look aliased then do what I suggested.
 
Setting it at 100 percent helped a little bit. I only see those jaggies when the picture is in motion moving across the screen however when the picture stops, the jaggies become straight lines. I wonder if it will be normal upon exporting. Actually it looked a little better when I looked at it on my external monitor but you can still see the jaggies there not as much as on the computer screen but they are still there and yes I tried the Anti Aliasing thing and didn't notice much of a difference. Thanks for your help anyway.
 
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DVX100Shooter said:
still there and yes I tried the Anti Aliasing thing and didn't notice much of a difference. Thanks for your help anyway.
Click to expand...

Really? That usually works for me. Did you nest it first? If you don't it will only filter the inside part of the border, the outside will still be aliased.
 
I tried to nest but I got an error message saying it wasn't enough content to nest. I have about 6 photos layered on each of the video tracks. I had them all highlighted and tried to nest. I bet I will have to put all pics on 1 video track then try to nest and I am sure it would work that way!
 
DVX100Shooter said:
I tried to nest but I got an error message saying it wasn't enough content to nest. I have about 6 photos layered on each of the video tracks. I had them all highlighted and tried to nest. I bet I will have to put all pics on 1 video track then try to nest and I am sure it would work that way!
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Never heard of that. What version of FCP do you have? ...You can also export the section from the canvas as a Quicktime movie. Bring it back in, put it on the layer above the photos and then add the filter.
 
Few other tricks that might help:

Usually with still pics the edges look ugly when timeline settings are using fields or DV codec, so go to timeline properties and make it progressive, fields = NONE. Check if that helps. Always check the photos at 100% Canvas if it works.

If you have lots of field using video in timeline already and don't want to render, you might wanna make an extra progressive sequence for the photo keyframe effects, copy your ready photo clips (with the motion animation) to it and export a QT movie and import it back to your final timeline. Use the best timeline codec for the job, uncompressed is best, I guess Pro res might be suitable too, or image sequence in .png format.

DV, HDV or similar heavily compressed codecs make all the trouble with photos in sequence. Usually in the final stage when you export the project in better resolution, the photos look like they should.

One last trick is the use traditional Gaussian blur at value of 0.2 (not too heavy). This does smooth the edges a little, but it's usually better with thin hair lines etc. that might cause field flicker in hi-rez photos.
 
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