Removing Blanking Lines on Transitions
 
You’ve seen ‘em. A thin black border showing up on the border of your incoming clip during transitions like Slide, Page Peel and Push. But what if you want a cleaner look? Just how do you remove these unsightly lines?
 
 
Well, first of all, this is not a border at all. These are two lines on the left and right side of the frame lying just out of action safe. These lines are called “blanking lines”, a normal artifact of SD video. On late night cable TV, you will find a lot of cheesy commercials where the editor has blatantly overlooked cropping these unsightly lines.
 
What is confounding is that on a video monitor, normally, you would not see blanking lines at all.  So blanking lines kind of throw you for a loop the first time you see them in your transition.
 
 
You want to crop them within the transition, don’t you? Unfortunately, there really are no crop features within the transition controls for FCP, however third party developers like CGM, CHV and G Filters have them built in. Ah! So it’s technically possible to add them.
 
My suggestion is that if blanking lines bother you (and they should, if you’re a perfectionist like myself), you should use the aforementioned third party transitions. Note: not all third party developers have crop features. CGM, CHV and G Filters are among those that have them.
 
If you don’t have these third party transitions, you can do the following workaround:
 
1. Scale up the transitioning shot to 105% *
 
2. Crop Left and Crop Right 2 pixels on each side.
 
Your transition will now be clean.
 
I have found that the following transitions are affected as of version 5.0.4:
 
3D Simulation transitions
Page Peel
QuickTime > Zoom
QuickTime > Slide (when set to any other 0 or 180)
QuickTime > Push (left or right)
QuickTime Implode
QuickTime Explode (when point controls are off 0,0)
Slide > Band Slide
Slide > Multi-Spin Slide
Slide > Push Slide (when set to any other 0 or 180)
Slide > Spin
Slide > Swap Slide (when set to any other 0 or 180)
Stretch > Cross Stretch (except when set to top or bottom)
Stretch > Stretch (except when set to top or bottom)
 
Let me know if you find any other transitions that need crop controls.
 
 
 
 
 
Those Pesky Blanking Lines
Friday, June 2, 2006
*Note: The “transitioning” shot could be either the incoming or the outgoing shot, depending on the direction of the transition. Recall that you can change the direction of the transition with the Reverse Transition button, located just above the reset button in the Transition Edit Window.
It’s interesting to note that removing blanking lines is nothing new. In the late 80’s, when I was an online linear editor, I had to slightly scale up and crop any DVE effect I called up from my switcher. A clean DVE effect is something you should always strive for, no matter what the production is. It’s very amateurish to let blanking lines show up in any effect, including where you see them most–in picture-in-picture fx.
 
 
 
Note: If you are working with source footage from certain higher end SD camcorders, there are no blanking lines. Why? These camcorders shoot 720 horizontal pixels rather than the minimum required 702 pixels for spec.