Re: Pixelating fonts

I need some advice from some top notch professional television editors who deal with a lot of graphics. I use Final Cut 6 and Live Type to create my graphics. Recently I created a commercial shot in HD for a plastic surgeon. The client chose some very thin fonts such as Lucid Grand. The commercial aired in SD because our cable company is not yet ready to transmit in HD. The fonts looked horrible. They were so bad the commercial was pulled immediately and I went to work trying 4 different programs to include the quality of the font. None of which worked. I have not used After Effects. Any suggestions before I lose a huge client? Please advice.

You've no choice.
You have to use bold fonts, and the bold type within those fonts.
Try to stay away from those w/excessive curves.
The client ought to need no convincing now.

Any thin graphic looks awful.

Be it a font or an outline on something it's far worse/noticeable on bright things. So I'm guessing your text was white.

If they really love the font then I'd suggest making it larger, playing with alternative colours, adding a soft drop shadow.
Make sure you preview everything on a domestic CRT monitor. Or "punter-vision" as it's known round these parts.

Incidentally, thin things generally look pixely but shot footage is helped by a certain amount of movement blurring. Think of a stripy shirt or railings. These suffer terribly from "moiré" (Google it), which is where they buzz and zing. ("Never wear spots or stripes on TV")

Sometimes I have my graphics made in AE and have the motion blur turned on and an interlaced quicktime exported rather than my traditional tiff sequence. But I work mostly in SD PAL.

Charles