what’s a good ending credit Font?

[Bill Russell]

Well, if you want to be totally conservative, simply go with, say, Arial, Arial Black or Arial Narrow. It actually looks quite fine in my experience, and you can still work up plenty of exciting designs around simple fonts.

If your work is going to be final output and not color corrected by anybody, then you should observe a few rules. Set your working color space to HDTV (709, found in “Project Settings”, which is also a good profile for projected film). Don’t let your white letters be totally white!! They can do weird things (like vibrate, and on TVs can even cause an audible buzz). Use an almost white, around 90% (or 95% if you want really white) white. Same with any color, don’t let it’s brightness reach a full 100% — bring it down to between 90-95%.

If white is to be seen over a large area, like a white background instead of a black background, or a large dominent shape is white, then bring it all the way down to around 75%. Yes, indeed, the big “white” bar on NTSC color bars is actually only 75%! 75% looks slightly gray on a computer screen, but quite pleasing (not blaring) on a video or film screen, when it is the dominant color.

Back to styles. If you want fancier font styles — especially fonts that have custom “textures” or “roughness”, I find these fancy fonts can fool you. They look best in print or on a computer screen, but really jaggy and messy when projected or on a video screen. So go for the font style you want then “pull back” by choosing the more conservative of options — ie, fewer curlies, smoother details, etc. A little goes a long way with fonts. You can get away with more in HD. But if you are in standard def, then best to go very conservative.

Interlacing as well as the just low resolution of SD demands sufficient smoothness. For that matter, in both HD and SD, people think sharpness is the key, but really its smoothness. Even softening things very slightly can do wonders for a good steady clear result, and for getting rid of artifacts such as crawl or moire.

So there ya go. Hope there are some useful ideas in there.

– B

(P.S. Don’t forget title safe area! AE has a safe area guide box — all video applications do — the outer box is picture safe, which is the total area that will be visible on most televisions, SD or HD; the inner box is title safe, you don’t want to go beyond this. In fact, broadcast quality checks will reject video masters if text goes outside of title safe. Your layout may look great on a computer monitor, but then you’ll go to screen for an audience and shed tears when all your text is cut off at the sides and bottom. Some DLP projectors can be set to show every pixel, but is rare and not to be counted on. It’s a tricky world now — you gotta make the whole picture “safe”, but still be “within safe”. Rather Zen, huh.)

“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –

And more…

[Vin2000]

Hey B,

Thanks for the info!

I tried a different font and will test it out in a couple of hours to see how it looks.

But yes, I found out the other day the hard way on Encore about the “safe area!”

Thanks again,

Vin.

[Joseph Springer]

In general you want to steer clear of Serifs for text that is to be displayed on screen — best left to print — especially if there is a lot of it, VERDANA is a standard sans-serif font…

Regards,
Joe Springer
Certified Adobe After Effects Training and Premiere Training Instructor

[Ethan Swords]

Wow, I was searching online for this information, and a link sent me here. Great info! You sound so knowledgeable in this field, I wonder if you could answer a slimier question I have: Relating to titles, fonts etc. do you know how to stop the “twitching” (as I’m calling it) from titles that roll up the screen? I’m not sure if it’ll do this on TV screens as well, but at least on my computer screen, there’s pretty bad “twitch” going on as soon as it starts moving up the black screen.