Scrolling credits issue (AE)

[Qyot27]

I've been trying for a day or two now to make my credits look right while scrolling, but I just cannot seem to do it.

As far as I can tell, it's set to use Progressive (this is pertinent because all the help I could find online assumed that people were working interlaced, even if they said nothing about it), but as the image pans up the screen, the words 'pulse' in and out, for lack of a better term. Looks sort of like the letters have a heartbeat. The part that's confusing is that the 'Reduce interlace flicker' effect pretty much eradicates this problem, but it hurts the clarity. I'd prefer to not have that, if I can help it.

Is there some prescribed way to make sure scrolling credits come out looking clear and sharp without straining the eyes, or am I just going to have to go with the reduce flicker operation?

I'm using a PSD file and AE's keyframing to scroll the text layer up. In some of the help I mentioned earlier I saw people recommend using Illustrator's text functions to do the initial work rather than Photoshop, but I don't have Illustrator (I do have Inkscape, though, if that's suitable).

[mirkosp]

That's weird... ae shouldn't have animation issues like that. If the composition is indeed set to progressive editing, then I'm clueless... it might be a preview issue perhaps, so you might want to see if you still have this flickering once exported.
If the video is still flickering... then a solution might just be cropping one pixel from the top every other frame, kinda like what you'd do with bob deinterlacers.

[blabbler]

i believe that you are supposed to use a font size that is an even number of points (no scaling), and make sure that the text scrolls an integer pixel value per frame.
i'd check how many pixels your text moves (ie final y value - initial y value) then adjust the number of frames over which it moves to a value the y displacement is divisible by.

/needs coffee, possibly not making sense

[Qyot27]

That's weird... ae shouldn't have animation issues like that. If the composition is indeed set to progressive editing, then I'm clueless... it might be a preview issue perhaps, so you might want to see if you still have this flickering once exported.
If the video is still flickering... then a solution might just be cropping one pixel from the top every other frame, kinda like what you'd do with bob deinterlacers.

I detected the issue in the exported copy, to make previews workable on this computer I have to set the granularity too low (like 1/3 or 1/4 most times) to make it test render a sizable portion of the timeline. Of course, I still have it set to Full when exporting.

The composition's Render Settings (Edit->Templates->Render Settings) have Field Rendering set to Off. That's the only place I saw a reference to fields at all.

I should mention that the pulsing is very slight, but it is noticeable - enough to nearly strain my eyes when I was watching the render.

The render workflow basically looks like this:
Export in HuffYUV (RGB mode) - color depth set to either 8bpp or 16bpp; the reduce flicker effect is restricted to 8, but otherwise I generally default to 16. Even though this probably means nothing after I run it through AviSynth. Script = AVISource("test.avi").ConvertToYV12().AssumeFPS(23.976) - compress to ffvhuff/HuffYV12/HuffYUV-YV12 using mencoder. Finally, give that HuffYV12 AVI to VirtualDub and run a two-pass with Xvid 1.2.2 so I can actually watch it comfortably. I wouldn't suppose any of that could have introduced the problem either.

i believe that you are supposed to use a font size that is an even number of points (no scaling), and make sure that the text scrolls an integer pixel value per frame.
i'd check how many pixels your text moves (ie final y value - initial y value) then adjust the number of frames over which it moves to a value the y displacement is divisible by.

/needs coffee, possibly not making sense

The text settings are: Segoe UI, Italic (actual Italic, not 'Faux Italic'), 24 point, Smooth anti-aliasing, small caps, white, fractional widths allowed; there's no scaling applied in AE - the text layer was imported to maintain the 848 pixel width of the PSD file, even though I didn't tell it to Merge Layers.

Positioning values are 424.0, 2000.0 at start, 424.0, 235.0 at end. Which means that the text moves ~2.865 pixels per frame over the 616 frames (25 seconds:16 frames@24fps) it's active. That would explain it quite nicely if that's the case.

I did read that white text on black backgrounds is sometimes apt to producing problems like this, especially if the lettering has sharp lines, and that using drop shadows and whatnot can help it, but is that just a fix similar to what I did with the Reduce flicker effect - where is just covers up the problem and doesn't address what actually caused it in the first place (which I assume is the non-integer y movement)?

[Qyot27]

Update: I adjusted the distance values so the text would move 3 pixels per frame, and it appears to have fixed the problem. Thanks guys.