• Adobe After Effects

  jagged text edges, static and moving

  Posted by James Cook on October 17, 2008 at 10:36 am

  Hi guys,

  hope you can help.
  2 questions related to current and indeed all projects using text.

  Text in my after effects recently is looking really jagged. I’ve had comments from clients that the edges of text is jagged. I just thought my screens were rubbish lcds. but on inspection the fonts lately have terrible staircases on ‘m’s and ‘n’s mostly.
  Is there something that i’ve turned off or on. my settings all okay, rasterising etc. psd layered text even looks bad andae text looks worse.

  well when the text moves back in space or forward the text really shows it nasty edges. the ripple and buzz like crazy. left and right on screen too.

  Am i ging to have to put a .3 blur (box or gaussian) on all my text or is there something else i’m missing?

  I look at text on other lesser machines (monitor and graphics cards) and the text looks better – therefore the output will be better etc.

  the latest project went 2k and the texttracking back was so bad i felt ashamed.
  I tried 8bit, 16bit, matted unmatted, they all buzz. it’s not a quality of image it’s i’m sure in AE. 3ds max text/ combustion is fine also.

  Please, please help. I’ve been in the industry for 15 years and this is only just happening now.

  james.cookgfx

  James Cook replied 17 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Roy Mckenzie

  October 17, 2008 at 7:21 pm

  Are you sure it’s because you not looking at the finished movie at 100%? Ever noticed when you look at a comp at 100% quality and zoom out on it that exact thing happens. Or when you open a full 1920×1080 movie on a smaller monitor and scale it to fit the screen the text looks jagged?

  This would happen especially with a movie that is 2K and sized to fit on a smaller screen.

  I have not seen any setting other then the system preferences to smooth fonts. (i work on macs)

  Thank you

  Roy
• 

  James Cook

  October 20, 2008 at 4:45 pm

  Hi Roy,

  thanks for the post back.
  No, I’m only looking at the text (on my workstation at least) at 100% – granted my graphics card is poor, but that doesn’t exclude the fact that the 2k sequences were viewed in a screening room and they still looked bad.
  But also you may have a point, that we also deduced that; our screening room here is using an HD monitor and screen and therefore scaling down the 2k files. sure picture is fine but text is bad.

  I may have to just concede that a blur needs to be added to bad fonts.

  Do you agree with me though that some fonts are just too bad for motion – or is it a setting i’ve messed up on my machine?
  The font i was using was Compacta. all uppercase and the worst characters are M, N and 4 – all the really severe diagonals.

  If you get a chance.
  scale down a caption – white on black over say, 5 seconds from 100% to 80% and see the jagged edges.
  if you don’t then i’m skrewed. if you do then all is well and i can sleep easy.

  james.cookgfx

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up