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Examples of title text and color at various resolutions


Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

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This is a bigger topic than people think.

Traditionally there was, as far as I can recall, a tendency for features to have smaller title text than TV.

I have no idea why that is. Primitive caption generators were available from - what - the 60s? It was recognised early that any feature of the image - such as a horizontal stroke in text - needed to be at least two lines high to avoid horrific flicker, and in practice more than that to avoid interlace twitter, and to provide for a bit of antialiasing. The very earliest titles which were additively mixed in from another synchronised camera aimed at artwork, but the resolution and interlacing issues pertained still. Certainly for most of the time they've coexisted, feature films have had massively more resolution to play with - not now, though.

Whatever the background to it, the situation now is that Netflix shows, with their not-so-delusional grandeur, often have titles in text three pixels high because, hey, that's cool.

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2 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Traditionally there was, as far as I can recall, a tendency for features to have smaller title text than TV.

I have no idea why that is.

Because the movie screen was larger and higher resolution than the standard definition tube television, so the ‘smaller’ feature film title font was magnified more and was adequately legible for the normal theatrical viewing distance. It became an issue when those same films were transferred to video for display on the smaller screens.

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I got interested in the subject because I like to use red text in my films. I started with red spiral bindings on my artist's books. Became kinda a trademark. 

nsfw

https://danielteolijr.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/de-wallen-amsterdams-red-light-district-expanded-preview/

Then used red text on my RPPC mailings.

When I got into film / video I wanted to use red text. But it just does not work. It is OK if everything is Blu-ray or hi-res MP4. But as soon as you start making all the various lower resolution derivations, the red goes to hell. It looks orange and not red or it starts breaking up and shows a white border.

So I thought I would try some other colors beside red as I disliked plain Jane black and white text. I found all the colors suffered the same problem. So black and white it is for me. I uploaded my tests so they may be of use to others. 

With commercial movie text sometimes it is so small you can't read it. Or they run it so fast it is an unreadable blur.

 

 

 

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