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Tips for text in video


Chad Warner
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Not sure if this is the appropriate place, but it was closest to what I need.

 

I was wondering if someone had any tips or links to tips/guidelines for using text in video productions. Whenever I try to use text, it ends up looking really bad, hard to read, etc.

 

Thanks for any help.

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basics for video display on standard tube tv's....

 

Television-safe fonts, size, and style

Thin serif fonts such as Times do not work well for television screens.

These are examples of fonts that do work well:

Arial, Helvetica, Palatino, MS Sans Serif, Lucida Sans

Minimum font size for legible body text is 18 points, 24-32 points is optimal

 

 

Television-safe colors

Avoid highly saturated colors: set the color saturation level to 200 and the luminance level to 100 (Font Color/More Colors)

Off-white and mild yellow work well

 

Backgrounds

Dark blue works best

The background must be low contrast so the font will show up

If a watermark graphic is used it should be transparent or embossed in a solid background so that it does not interfere with the text

 

Safe-Title Area

The safe-title area of a television screen is the area where views can see all the most important information you need to show them. All text should be inset 1" from all edges of the screen

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chad,

 

Very, odd. Vector base would be the highest quality.. What what format do you output (QT, MPEG etc.) , and what software do you use to put together your animations? Does your text move, or stay still. If you are using after effects and you have moving text, you have to increase super sampling (or somthing in that nature) - I don't know after effects, but I have seen that topic being discussed before in another website

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Outputting to Mpeg for DVD. Use After effects, premiere and adobe encore for dvd burning. The text looks good on the computer screen, its just that it looks kind of bad once burned to DVD. What I was looking for was the text size and format like CHG posted, I just wasn't sure if there was an optimal size for text on the screen.

 

-Chad

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