In Motion, how can I remove the flashing/blinking effect from a File Generator?

Where does the text come from?

I tried a few text files, and the only way that I could get the text to "flash", as you describe, is if there are empty lines in the text.

The standard text format in the Mac uses a newline character at the end of each line. Windows uses a pair carriage return newline, maybe the text file came from windows and this results in the file being treated as if there is an empty line after every text line?

Update - That is exactly it, apparently. I created a test file using CRLF and it shows with these empty lines in Motion.

The thing with copying and pasting text like this is that the line ending characters may change.

I copied the text from your post to a text file and, as expected, it does NOT cause black frames - but that does not mean that your original text file would not have them.

Try a simple test: copy the numbers from your post above; open TextEdit, and a new document, and paste. Make sure that it is set to plain text and not rich text, and save.

Then test this file in Motion. Any black frames? I'm not expecting any.

I can tell you how you can achieve the last part of your desiderata in FCP.

There is, AFAIK, no way to program your generator so that it works in this way; but you just put the generator, with the appropriate duration, inside a compound clip, and then trim the compound in the project timeline.

For example, if your generator is 16 frames long, make it that long in FCP; press Option-G to make it a compound; then trim the compound to last the 8 frames you want.

Joey Delli Gatti wrote:

How do I update it to have the right type of carriage return? I'm taking values from a single column in an Excel document, and pasting them into a txt file. The other odd thing is that it doesn't do it after every line - but appeasingly random and frequently - but always between lines - never in the middle of displaying a line. IOW, If it blinks off, the next time it blinks on, it's always the next line.

Text editors like TextMate and BBEdit allow you to define which line endings to use, and also you can search and replace if needed. I use TextMate, and that is how I was able to test this issue. It is a free program.