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Piexelated Animated Text
First, thanks to anyone who actually opened up a post with the subject line “Pixelated Text.” I know this is a boring example of a newbie question but I’m at a loss to find the answer. I’ve read the manual until my eyes are crossed, I’ve gone online to Adobe’s support section, I’ve searched the Cow’s archives, I’ve visited Adam Wilt and Ken Stone’s web pages, heck I even bought the Meyer’s book on Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects (great book by the way). But at the end of the day I can’t find a solution to my pixelated problem. Here’s the dilly:
In AE 6.5 I’m traveling text across the screen right to left over a color background. After rendering my composition and importing into Final Cut Pro v4.5 the text motion is smooth but the letters are pixelated. The text look fine on the computer screen but falls apart on an NTSC monitor. This result is consistent whether the text is created with AE’s text generator or is imported tesxt from Photoshop or Illustrator. I’ve applied motion blur, continuously rasterized, enlarged the text and slowed the pace of the animation. I’ve rendered “Best” quality, tried upper, lower and off field rendering, and have experimented with a half dozen video output format options. The result is always the same, pixelated text.
An interesting side note is that this past week I created a :30 commercial in After Effects. The spot involved text scrolling from bottom to top along the right side of the screen. It looked fine. Seems my problem is limited to horizontal movement, not vertical movement.
I am mastering this AE animation in FCP v4.5 on a Mac 2.5 G5 with a Blackmagic Decklink card. My settings are for Blackmagic 8 bit. And I’m just sitting here waiting for some smart person to point out the obvious to me. Any suggestions will be appreciated as long as it’s not “consider another line of work.”
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16 Replies
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In AfterEffects, check your composition settings and make sure that they are set to NTSC as opposed to square pixels. Also, your converter hardware that takes the signal from your computer to the monitor should have the appropiate settings in the software that’s driving it.
Hope that helps.
Arie
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Something I’ve done in the past is forget to click the quality selection on the layer.
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Are you sure it looks fine on the computer monitor? We’ve have a similar problem, worse in NTSC but definitel visible on the computer monitor and have yet to figure it out. “Affectionately” referred to here as “walking h” syndrome because of the horiz. flicker it so visibly throws into the character “h” in particular.
It’s really bad with text created in AE with “character tracking” animations, and barely passable with simple scaling. Definitely a problem horizontally vs. vertically.
Quality switch on “high” doesn’t improve it. NTSC vs square pixel doesn’t improve it. The “comp frame rate at 59.94 rendered at 29.97 lower field first” approach is a very very slight improvement.
Imported Illustrator type, NOT continously rasterized looks best, but then were stuck with sort of soft looking type and no easy way to do a tracking animation.
Anyway, we’ve just chaulked it up to being idiots, swimming somewhere lower in the AE gene pool than most, and hope that someone out there can help us. Any ideas?
Mr. Mike
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You mentioned a colored background.
Is it like 100% red text on a 100% blue background in the DV codec ?
Then that would be your problem: DV is crap at color-contrast, it has half the resolution for defining color, but full resolution for brightness.
That gives very ugly blockyness. Even a bit of blur might not cure it.check out this tutorial “Great Titles with the DV codec”
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/hodgetts_philip/titles/
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Thanks to all who weighed in with thoughts on my dilemma. I’ve been working my way through the Meyer’s “Creating Motion Graphics…” book and have noticed that in every turorial I’ve done so far the text on my NTSC monitor has looked terribly pixelated.
I seem to remember from my Media 100 days having a text pixelation problem and my foggy memory tells me that the solution to that problem had something to do with needing to install a new version of Adobe Type Manager.
I’m wondering if I might be missing some essential piece of software. Something unrelated to settings in After Effects. Does this ring a bell with anyone?
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Thanks to all who weighed in with thoughts on my dilemma. I’ve been working my way through the Meyer’s “Creating Motion Graphics…” book and have noticed that in every turorial I’ve done so far the text on my NTSC monitor has looked terribly pixelated.
I seem to remember from my Media 100 days having a text pixelation problem and my foggy memory tells me that the solution to that problem had something to do with needing to install a new version of Adobe Type Manager.
I’m wondering if I might be missing some essential piece of software. Something unrelated to settings in After Effects. Does this ring a bell with anyone?
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ATM is not available for osX AFAIK, and the OS should handle font-smoothing for you.
Besides if it was a font-problem; it would look crappy on the monitor too, not just on NTSC.How are you previewing to NTSC ? Through a DV camera or through some sort of BreakOut Box.
I remember my Matrox rtMac BoB only used to give half-res no matter what settings I used.
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Thanks for your continued interest. I’m running the output of my Blackmagic Decklink card into a Sony UVW 1800 Beta SP machine, then taking video out from the Beta machine and connecting it to a Sony NTSC monitor (composite).
It isn’t just my monitor though. I’ve mastered the project to Beta SP and taken the tape to a local post house and observed that the text is also pixelated on the monitors at the post production facility.
I ran a test this weekend where I created a right to left traveling text using Final Cut Pro, much the same as I am doing in After Effects. There was no problem with text pixelation. Makes me think my problem is AE related. The hunt for an answer contines.
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Does it occur with all fonts, or are you only using 1 particular typeface ?
If you create, say a solid that’s 4 pixels wide, 200 high and rotate it 45
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All:
We posted an AE project and rendered movie on our site for your info, if interested. It’s just a black text animation over white, but it shows the “pixelation”, “jittering”, etc. we’ve been experiencing. Have a look at it – as the text scales and tracks, it looks like a “heat wave” is passing over it, making the text jitter. (Ex., look at the letter “i” in “jitter”) The question is: does that look normal to you??
Here’s how you get to the files:
1. Go to https://www.mediaagentsinc.com/safehouse.html
2. Click ENTER
3. Password = CCow (case sensitive)
4. The AE project and rendered movie are downloadable from this level of the directory.Thanks! Mike
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