Using pixel fonts in AE

[DDD]

Has anyone had any success doing this? I am trying to use ffftoronto in AE. I cannot seem to get them to display crisp. Even if you set the draft to none it still distorts.

[simplistik]

Turn there is an Anti-Aliasing option... press f4 and you'll see some boxes pop up and the / should look broken... not solid...

[DDD]

yea tried that, thats the draft oprtion, that really blows the fonts out of the water.

[ditt0]

i'm not having any issues with it, text is displaying in the right way.Are you using the text effect over the layer or just normal text?

[simplistik]

Hmmm... yea works fine for me :lol: why you gotta be so ghetto?

[DDD]

try it with fff toronto....I know you have it sim...lol. I am doing it before I place an effect on it. Ill try in again. Ill post screen grabs too.

[DDD]

see its not working for me.

See the screen shots

The first one is before draft quality reduction.

[ditt0]

And why are you reducting the quality?It's supposed to be "best" for good results. Why are you turning it to draft?

[.soulty]

^ yeah i agree with ditt0 here you should have that as best.

not sure what you mean by "draft quality reduction" the switch is quality switch which would increase quality rather than reduce it? you got me a little spun here. lol

[DDD]

I tried that just to try it.....lol...Thats what sim said he did and it worked.

[.soulty]

After some trial and error, ive got the same issue at DDD was getting, and from what i found is that even with best quality (forward slash) and best viewing quality a fff type pixel font @ 8px in a 5 line paragraph shows blurry and varies to light to dark.

From playing around we found that the issue is line height when the font is at such a small size. Since the type tool sets the fonts leading to 'auto' by default i can only assume its creating a interger for its value, but if you set the leading to a whole value it seems to fixed the problem, ddd also mentioned different fonts need different settings to work. :-/ strange aint it.

[DDD]

so ;P Sim...lol.

Yea we were messing around with it last night, and it is strange.

[simplistik]

:lol: well yes I have Toronto... and it seemed to work fine for me... but then again I wasn't typing a paragraph. Must be the heat in Aussie and Cali that are screwin your things up.

[.soulty]

dont know about cali but it's actually been raining here all week, lol :Phehe .. yeah i was only trying one line and found it was working fine for me but when i tried a paragraph i saw what ddd meant.

[Yuki]

I have the same problems aswell. And i still haven't found a solution.

[mlk]

I have the same problems aswell. And i still haven't found a solution.

Have you tried using the different text layout components of AE ? Since v6 there is the new type tool, but the old 'Text' filter (a pain in the arse to use) is still there, and could handle fonts differently.

Other than that, remember that you are most likely to use motion jpeg in the end which will screw your fine crisp looking font anyway.

Enjoy,

Matt

[.soulty]

Yuki : well didnt we explain that we sorta found solution?

mlk: Yeah I was thinking about that too , but even if you had motion in your scene the text still needs to rest to a pixel perfect position to the video to layout (in flash) to have a tight intergration. Or you would have to extra work in getting screenshots of the font final state and blending it in with the movie, I believe setting a value (1, 2,3) for the leading solved the problem.

[mlk]

What if you put the font in a comp (providing you don't need to edit the text as the time goes) and put that comp into another one ?

[DDD]

precomping yeilded the same results. But we have posted a sorta remedy that seems to work.