Pixelated / aliased text in After Effects CC

[Michael Szalapski]

As I look more closely at your screenshots, I’m seeing the problem better. Back away from your screen and it looks fine. It only looks bad when you’re up close and it’s because of the shape of the font. That angle is just going to look jagged. You could help it look less so with a tiny bit of a blur. Basically, introduce your own anti-aliasing to it.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Lucas Rainey]

The “B” and “D” from the After Effects preview window look fine if you back away from the screen, but the “A” doesn’t. Then in the output render, they all look pretty lousy, especially the “A.” I can’t ask people to back away from the screen, though – those snaps are actual-size. You seem to mean that it’s simply impossible to use large text without this kind of distortion.

Adding a 1-3-px fast blur does work for me as a quick fix, but I find this whole situation bizarre. I’ve created whole worlds in this program, but a really big “A” is too much to ask?

[Michael Szalapski]

[Lucas Rainey] “I can’t ask people to back away from the screen, though”

I wasn’t suggesting that you do so, but if this is intended for broadcast television, nobody is going to be close enough to their screens to notice. Remember, professionals like us are going to nitpick stuff like this on a pixel-by-pixel basis up close while we are creating something. The end viewer is likely not going to be scrutinizing it up close.

[Lucas Rainey] “I’ve created whole worlds in this program, but a really big “A” is too much to ask?”

Funny how that works, right?

But think about it: a whole world isn’t going to have aliasing problems in AE because of all the details, curves, etc.

The issue with this is precisely the lack of detail.

Zoom in a bit and have a look at the actual pixels of your A. The difficulty is that angle and how long it is vertically compared to how far it moves horizontally. If that A were a different size, you wouldn’t have this problem. You only have so many pixels horizontally along which it can move from the base to the top.

Making it bigger or smaller will eventually remove the problem. However, you may need to change the scale so much that it would alter your design intent. If so, the only other solution that I can think of would be adding some anti-aliasing with a bit of blur.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Lucas Rainey]

Many thanks, Michael.

[Michael Szalapski]

No problem!

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Darby Edelen]

You’ve tried this with some standard fonts like Helvetica or Arial, correct? And you have no effects applied to the text layer?

Darby Edelen

[Mathias Erichsen]

Lately I’ve really been strugeling with after effects and aliasing too…
Text, shapes, vector files and most animated files look bad like the example in this thread. VC Element give me aliasing too in high contrast areas, even when I’m setting supersamling to max.
There is something fundamentaly wrong.

I’m doing commercial work and lately it’s been A LOT of workarrounds and checking of preferences settings and it is really frustrating.
I’m setting everything to “best”, in 8, 16 and 32 bit, toggeling color settings, interpeting footage and pre-comping but nothing ever gets better (exept maybe a little 0,5 fast blur hides the problem a bit, but I do not want to blur out my commercials) :/

I’ve been useing AFX for many years and I did not have this problem before, but I’m not sure at what point it started.. Maybe when Adobe CC came out.
It seems to me as if there is a general problem with After effects as the problem is the same on both Mac and PC.

Anyone know about a mystical new setting that i need to know about? Do I need a hack for the preferences txt file or something like that? Do I need to accept jagged lines and aliased flickering in my work?