I’ve been using Motion on and off for more than a year now and I’ve only just discovered this little quirk with text rendering - Point Size Affects Text Filters Quality.
When laying out text in a project I normally type the text using the text tool at something like 10pt and scale it up to the size that I think looks good. This works fine and looks great but as soon as you add a filter things can go wonky. It appears that when you scale up text using the distort nodes it doesn’t change the point size so filters are applied as if the text is still 10pt or whatever point you started at. So what does this mean? Basically the text changes from lovely clean vector shapes to ugly blocky bitmaps. Check out my example:
Both Elephant text is the same text but the first one is scaled up and the second one is scaled down.. notice the bloom effect (with default settings) create a very different result!!
So what is the lesson learnt from all this? Don’t scale up text using the nodes.. scale text using its point size and you will have sharp looking effects text all the time!!! … unless of course you want blocky pixelated effects???
Well, in all honesty I find it depends entirely on the particular font you choose. Some are just more prone to become pixellated as you increase their size while others start out looking pixellated in the smallest size and look clearer and more concise when you enlarge them.
Go figure.
Happy holidays!
oh, and congrats on getting married. I guess.