Dear Friends,

 We've noticed that while we're editing our art work looks great.  But, once we output through the  MOJO, all the art work (graphics, art, quicktime animations that are keyed over video), all have jagged edges.  It makes our work look cheap.

The interesting twist is that the ONLY thing that doesn't ever get jagged edges, is the fonts we type up right in the AVID program.  They always look sharp and free of jagged edges.  But, if we do a title on a title page that we creat in Photoshop and then import into the project, we definately get jagged edges on it when we go to export to tape and/or view in the client monitor.  It's weird.

FYI, we always import in 1-to-1, render in 1-to-1, etc.  So, I don't believe that this is an issue.

We are running Media Composer on one machine, and Express Pro on another.  Both machines seem to have this issue when we export.  And, by the way, we are exporting through a MOJO on the Composer machine and a Canopus on the Express Pro machine.  So, I don't think the issue is the digital output boxes.

We run XP Pro on both machine with NVIDIA video cards and 4 gb of Ram.

Your thoughts will be appreciated.

Thank you,

Cindy

This is probably artifacts being caused by interlacing, where fine detail in your graphics 'pops' on and off field lines as they are redrawn on the video monitor.  I routinely add a gaussian blur in Photoshop of 0.3 pixels (this is for SD work) and this 'bleeds' the detail nicely into the next field.  This also applies to stuff I've composited in After Effects, but in that case I use 'Reduce Interlace Flicker' and a setting of about 0.4.

I hope this helps....

 I do a lot of after effects work then bring it into MC or EXPro

I found that rendering field order thing an issue till someone told me that DV footage uses lower field first and most other formats use Upper field first.

I use uncompressed QT when rendering out from After effects and select the field order depending on the footage. If you are outputing stills from photoshot etc for overlays the best result with dop shadows and blurs is alwas PNG files. they rock!

Hope that is of some help.

John