red text on black- why so blurry?

[Tom Wolsky]

What format are you working in? Red is really, really hard to compress. Usually you don’t use red beyond 190-200. If you’re redder than that you’re going to have problems.

All the best,

Tom

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[Randy Johnson]

have you tryed adding a black stroke to the text?

[David Roth weiss]

What you’re seeing is DV compression at its worst. If you change the compressor in sequence settings to DVC50, Pro Res, 8-bit or 10-bit uncompressed and re-render you will see a huge difference.

Test it out to see for yourself, then the proper workflow is to cut everything in the DV timeline and then change the compressor and re-render when you’re completely finished editing so that you’re not having to render constantly when your in the creative stages…

Make sense???

David

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[Dylan Reeve]

This is probably a DV compression thing… But also, red-black contrast is always a problem with composite video (which is what a lot of people use with the DVD players and VCRs, and is what all analogue broadcasting is) – I can’t remember the specifics, but something about where red is on the spectrum (shortest visible wavelength) and the method of modulation use to encapsulate the luma and chroma signals. I understood it in the lectures, but it’s all escaped me now.

Basically the end result is that solid red, especially on a solid (or black) background is never a great idea with video. However with less saturation the problems are less pronounced.

[David Fortin]

If my long term memory is any good, I remember something from the TV 101 lectures in college about the three colors that make up the video signal Green, Blue and Red. And that out of the three, red has the least amount of information in the signal, so red is the worse reproducible (if that’s a word) color.

I think you’ll have trouble no matter what compression you use. If you have ever rented a movie that has red credits over black, they look nice and crisp in the theater, but when you watch it at home on DVD, you can barely even read it.

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[Alan Lacey]

Saturated red is very low luminance level and with composite, Y/C and YUV it’s only the luminance channel that has greater bandwidth.

What you’re seeing is the lower bandwidth quality of the chroma channels. Increase the red luma somehow – ie desaturate.

Even going uncompressed (YUV) saturated reds will have less ‘sharpness’ than white, greys or blacks.

Alan