What fonts look good on video?

Erik · Posted: Jan 12, 2005 8:41 am Post subject: What fonts look good on video?

2 Quick Questions:

I am slowly finding my way around Ulead Studio 7 and managed to master a few dvds over the past few days. They look moderately ok.
For some reason I can't find a good font to use, for titles and text... and then I don't really how to treat it (shadowing, outlines etc). Any thoughts any of you might have on that would be appreciated.

Also, I have been editing video together, saving files off as MPEGs and then writing them to dvd. They look decent. Should I be using avi's instead?

ontrider · Ladies Man Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 16491 City: Russia

There are some variables like, size, placement, colour etc. that will depend on your video and what's going on with it while the titles are up - but generally I would go with something simple that stands out and is easy to read. I prefer sans-serif fonts for titleing... again though, it can depend on your video, editing style, music etc. as to what will look good with it.

If you're viewing your files on the computer, I don't think it matters if you're using MPEG or AVI as long as the quality is fine after compression. If you're actually making a DVD I think you need to use MPEG2, but there's DVD authoring software to do this for you I believe. I'd ask RD on this one.

freerider4 · Posted: Jan 12, 2005 12:43 pm Post subject:

Finally someone else that uses ulead I thought I was the only one.

Brandon Lee · Addict Joined: 17 Jan 2003 Posts: 532 City: Atlanta

not sure about ulead too much and what it would allow you to do but I get a lot of fonts from www.1001freefonts.com and then make my text in photoshop either on a black background or a transparent background and save it as a psd file. in Premiere you can take the .psd file and seperate all the layers so you can animate each layer seperate if you want. I doubt thats the case with Ulead but you could try. im sure you could flatten the text/title and save it as a jpeg or something and import it.

RD · Addict Joined: 22 Apr 2003 Posts: 626 City: Discovery Bay

Arial and Helvetica will give you nice text with video (especially DV) with minimum jaggies. Mpeg2 isn't really a practical format for use as a storage medium. It's the compression format that's authored and muxed into the final DVD format files as ontrider points out. There are mpeg2 "players" which play back raw mpeg2 files but hardly anyone uses them. Mpeg2 compressed video is just the main building block used in authoring a std DVD and at this point isn't really designed to be edited or converted to another format. AVI is your native DV files and is best archived on the original DV tape. If you properly log your tapes while you're digitizing source material for any given project you really don't need to store the DV source video files on your drives when you're done. Just archive a copy of the project with all the logging and edit info. With that you can recapture the DV material off your original tapes and recreate the project if needed.

Josh R · Posted: Jan 12, 2005 10:22 pm Post subject:

If you're using fonts that are giving you jaggies or flickering, and you're set on the font, apply a little gaussian blur to the text, and it should look a lot better when it's displayed.

Zach M · Posted: Jan 13, 2005 12:03 am Post subject:

sans serif fonts and fonts with similar stroke width. Fonts with a very thin stroke could disappear.