Need help making text more legible

[Raymond Tuquero]

Are you building the text in AE?

I find that when you create it in Illustrator and bring that file into AE it is quite a bit cleaner (gives it that Vector look in a raster environment)

That’s would be my first thing.

-Raymond Tuquero-
Houston Editor

[John Taylor]

No actually what is going on with this is kind of crappy the client gave me a PDF from the last designer how kind of flaked out on then and is now unreachable. They want that PDF to be made into a movie for their kiosk so I have been cutting sections of the existing PDF and placing it in PS files and then bringing the PS files into AE. There is quite a bit of text so I would like to avoid re-typing it if I could I tried using:

Effect > Blur & Sharpen >Reduce interlace flicker

effect on a Pre-comp of my movie but all it did was make things softer and HARDER to read so that didn’t do any good.

Thx U for the quick response!

John

[Mike Clasby]

To make the text pop off the video, try a little stroke (2 pixel?)of a contrasting color on the text, using the Character Palette (Window>Character).

If your not scaling the text, making it larger, it should look fine.

Just read about your PDF problem. I think I’d try to pull the text out of the pdf and then use AE’s text tool. Googling “pdf to text” gave lots of options.

[David Bogie]

Video is not PDF. video is made up pixels, PDF and Flash animation (not flash video) are vector displays. when you convert a PDF to video, the vectors get rasterized into pixels. Pixels are square blocks (more or less) so you’re creating your text characters with a mosaic effect. The further away from you are, the better it looks.

In the video industry, we have been creating superb text for 60 years. We use appropriate colors, typefaces and character sizes. “Calrity” is actually an illusion in interlaced video made up of pixels. What you want is a bit of blur, what we call anti-aliasing. Making the edges harder and sharper and eliminating the interlace will not, by themselves, improve the appearance of your text on your monitor or display.

what you have not icluded in your post, though, is crucial: What is your display system, how is your video being run, what is the playback codec? all of these dramatically influence your choices and attempts to make your text more legible. However, your client must understand there are limits.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[John Taylor]

WOW thats a really good idea!! and really simple 2 I’m glad you thought of it!

[John Taylor]

Wow that was very informative bogiesan thx.

[John Taylor]

Ok i got a bit more info:

1) The video is going to be playing on a norml (not HD) TV

2)The AE project is being rendered with no compression out of AE and then I’m running it throught window media encoder to get the file size down down so it will be a WMA format when I send it forward in the work-flow

[John Taylor]

I’m posting for a regular TV that will be playing off a DVD. The compression I’m using is Uncompressed then I run it throught windows media encoder making it to a WMA that really keeps the file size down and helps with the quality. What I did was find way to make the text stand out better by instead of taking the text elments from PS and importing them as a targa into AE just copying and pasing the text elements in AE directly and making them contrast more with the BG at this point the main thing I would like to know about is render setting that are good for text clarity when I out put my file. This file is being added to a DVD encore so its not going to be posted to the web so size isn’t to much of a factor.

Thx for the support

John

[Kevin Camp]

generally, when going from ae to dvd, it is best to render out of ae as uncompressed or losslessly compressed to maintain the highest level of quality prior to mpeg2 compression for dvd (ae doesn’t do a very good mpeg2 directly).

then take that high quality render to software that can do a 2 pass, variable bit rate (vbr) high quality mpeg2 compression. you want to do 2 passes because you want the software to analyze the frames prior to compressing them the maintain a higher level of quality. sorrenson squeeze and compressor can both do this and there re probably many other compression utilities that can.

if encore can be set to do this, then you can take the render straight to encore for compression and dvd creation. otherwise compress with a utility that can, then take the compressed mpeg2 to encore and create the dvd.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW