We’re building some call-out graphics with Title Studio, which is nice and convenient for in-line editing. But we’re getting some serious inconsistencies in the font render. See the attached screen shots. It’s primarily the letter space that appears off or at times random. We tried to compensate for it by changing the kerning parameter (which shouldn’t be really used unless you adjust specific character combinations).
The inconsistency is within two instances of the same title on the same timeline, sometimes between a PC and a Mac.
Client is unhappy, and we may be forced to go back to AfterEffects for these if we can’t figure this out. Any thoughts would be helpful.
Fonts are Agrandir family, locally installed from licensed font files.
Sorry to hear that you’re encountering issues with Title Studio. Would you mind please seving out the settings for two instances of TS where you’re seeing the problem so that I can look at the issue on my machines?
You mention that you see the error when switching between PC and Mac - is the error apparent when only on a single platform? Is the error only happening when using the Agrandir font? Is this a true type font?
We’ve seen the difference/inconsistency between PC and Mac, but also on the same system at the same time. This screenshot is from the Mac. The same screenshot earlier is from the PC (we’re two editors, one PC one Mac and it’s a shared workspace Avid project)
One thing to consider is that with some fonts, there is not a 1:1 parity between the way they are handled across platforms so that could be a contributing factor. Would it be possible for you to see if the issue is happening with one of the standard fonts that are available on both Win and Mac instead of using the Agrandir font?
What bothers me the most is that you’re reporting that the problem is apparent even when working with a single platform - I"ll mention this to engineering to see if they have any knowledge on this. Ideally, we would like a project from you where we can reproduce the issue ourselves, then it would make it easier for our engineers to diagnose and correct the issue. Might it be possible to get a project from you where we can reproduce the issue?
Apologies for the late reply, was in offsite meeting until now.
Regarding project - the Dropbox link at the bottom of my previous post went to a .blu file. Is that the type of project you are looking for, or did you mean a whole avid test sequence?
I’ll test a different font and see if that behaves differently. Though in the end we do need to make Agrandir work, since that is the brand font for the client we’re working for. I remember from other titler software over the years that font files and OS platforms can all be very fickle. Especially how font families are represented and when you get to bold/italics variations, etc.
Thanks for sending the .blu file - I’ll take a look at that to see if there’s anything odd in that but I suspect such is not the case. A host level project where we can see the font tracking change in the same timeline sequence would be most helpful to our engineers.
I’m also wondering about that font. Is it true-type? If not, I wonder if it would help to convert it to true-type using one of the free online convertors to see if that is more stable across platforms. I don’t have any real knowledge that this would in fact help but it’s an idea that might be worth exploring.
Look forward to hearing about the font testing and if using a standard system font is producing a result that maintains the tracking across multiple instances of Title Studio on the same and across platforms.
Thank you for the detail. I will prepare an Avid project this afternoon and include the font testing. Have to get through a deadline first this morning.
We have .otf and .ttf versions of this font, and I confirmed that we installed the .ttf version of it.
More experiments. Changed our font to Arial, the most basic system font.
Put the same text into Adobe Illustrator which I consider the gold standard for typography. Also tried it in Powerpoint. Still finding that the character spacing in the edit of Title Studio is vastly inconsistent and not inline with how those fonts should render.
Double checked our title setup and don’t see any scaling or other weird things that could mess with the text rendering.
For creative titles that all is not such a big deal. But for lower thirds and overlays in branded corporate videos, people are a lot more picky about their fonts and how it reads. Unless we can figure out why this is off, I don’t think I can use Title Studio on these projects, which is a major bummer, since inline editing would save a lot of time, and was one of the reasons we got a few BorisFX suite licenses.
I may have a hunch on root cause. If you change the fonts to regular (instead of bold), Illustrator and TitleStudio match pretty close. If you toggle ‘bold’ on and off in Title Studio you see how things get messed up.
The way Title Studio produces the bold variant of the font is not correct.
Possibility 1: Title Studio when bolding the font uses an incorrect kerning table and doesn’t allow for the wider characters.
Possibility 2: It’s producing a bold font through some transform and not the actual bold family font file. If you look at the ‘e’ in the bold version of Title Studio, it’s quite round, like in the regular weight of the Arial font.
Whereas in the bold variant in Illustrator and Powerpoint the ‘e’ is more oblong and slimmer, leaving more spacing.
I’m starting to favor the second possibility, that this is a cheated ‘bold’ and it’s not working out.
Thank you for sending the files - very much appreciated and should help with reproducing the problem. I’ll share it with engineering so that they can understand what your experience is with Title Studio. You probably won’t hear back from me until late Monday (EST) as Monday morning will be my first opportunity to discuss this with engineering.
Hi, I was curious about this so just for the sake of sharing
Green is my Title Studio Arial Bold.
Orange/brown is your image i’ve copied, I enlarged it to suit but kept the aspect ratio,
& blue is GIMP’s text
Your letters do look a bit more stretched horizontally?
Thanks for the extra testing data @Gid.Joiner. To eliminate other factors on one test I made a completely new effect in Avid, deleted the default text layer and just added one new text with out any other changes other than font and font weight. Was still wrong, just in case the rest of my animation contributed to it.
There must be some simple explanation. Hopefully the devs have enough to go by and figure it out.
@jan So today we had a brief discussion on the differences between the Mac and Win in terms of normal vs bold fonts and here’s what I’m seeing.
I used the font Arial set to 768 pts in Title Studio on Mac and Win and I see that when the font is set to “normal” the result is the same across platforms, however, when set to “bold” I see a big difference in the way the font is handled between Mac and Win.
Then I tried the same thing in Photoshop and they produce an identical result across Mac and Win when setting the typeface to bold, which leads me to believe that we’re doing something wrong on in Title Studio on Win OS when bolding fonts.
I’m pushing this as an issue over to engineering to see if they understand and can explain the difference that we’re seeing on Win OS. And, of course, hoping for a solution to this problem from them.
Thanks for the follow-up and the testing. That tracks with some of my testing.
I do remember discussions two years ago with some other developers on this topic, and the way the fonts APIs work is quirky and not consistent between OSes. Especially when it comes to the variations within a font family. ‘Regular’ is pretty straight forward, but all the others can be tricky to get right.
Since we’re on a deadline and have to deliver this week, I redid all the titles in After Effects over the weekend. But I very much look forward to getting to the bottom of this, so we can use Title Studio going forward.
I did find some other quirks in the titles we built, but they’re for a different post/ticket.
(a) When you set the position anchor to top/left in WriteOn, the text shifts during the write-on animation. As different characters appear, the text baseline and height of the box gets adjusted causing the whole text to move. We had to return to using center anchored position, which then forces us to adjust the position on each title. Using left/top would allow the title to auto adjust based on text.
(b) For some reason when in the text control, when you highlight a portion of the text, the line height gets adjusted for the entire title, not just the highlighted portion. That makes it impossible to create bigger spacing on the last line in a quote for example.
We have an engineer who is going to review the code to see if there is a better way for Title Studio to handle bolding when it comes to fonts on Win OS. Hoping to have some news on that for you towards the end of the week or early next week. We really want to address the problem and make this work for you.
I’ll take a look at the other issues that you mention and get back to you on that.
just realised i’d missed the ’ from leader’s 