I"m making a animation with text and photo's in After effects 5.5 and all is ok except when I just enter a simple text the edges are jagged, photo's are ok, it's only text which has the issue, first I thought it has to be a preview setting but the problem is also visible on my file I render, this animation will be projected onto a cinemascreen next Tuesday so I"m a bit stressed right now. Currently I have applied a blur effect to soften up the edges a bit which helps but I prefer to have razor sharp edges on text, my textlayer is also set to continuously rasterize but that doesn't help.


anyone has a idea what might be going on?

Which font is it?
Do all fonts do this?

These are the important questions to answer, firstly. Some work better than others. Some are not even truetype and/or may not be working correctly with AE.

ed. oops I didn't notice the date. Probably too late. Oh well.

I tried different types of fonts and they all had this issue, the font I used in the project was "trajan pro", not sure if that would matter but my pc doesn't have a graphics card but uses the gpu chip on the motherboard, since I don't have this issue in my nle, Edius, it has to be related to After effects only. I also noticed now I have the same aliasing issue on lines that are in an angle so it's not only font related.

It is a persistent tactic I use on all the font in AE that I usually have a .5px Fast Blur to soften the edges ever so slightly.

In a composition where the text is dynamically in motion, forcing motion blur usually takes care of this and makes the blur unecessary due to natural blur.

I tried different types of fonts and they all had this issue, the font I used in the project was "trajan pro", not sure if that would matter but my pc doesn't have a graphics card but uses the gpu chip on the motherboard, since I don't have this issue in my nle, Edius, it has to be related to After effects only. I also noticed now I have the same aliasing issue on lines that are in an angle so it's not only font related.

Hmm. You say it renders out in the file like this so it doesn't sound like it's some problem with Open GL or something else messing with WYSIWYG.
Off hand the main thing that springs to mind is having the layers set to draft render and then rendering out with "use current settings" left alone. (the switch is right next to 'continuously rasterize', although usually not on draft by default)

There might be something else I'm forgetting. I get good crisp anti-aliased edges with that font at 100% myself though.

Thx for the responses so far, whatever I change, the edges continue to be a bit jagged, for the event where I was making the visuals for I managed to get away with it by blurring the edges a bit. I think for now I"ll leave it as is as I have a big editing backlog to deal with but beginning next year I"ll install AE on another pc to see if that solves the problem.

That's cool. If you feel like it you could put up a project file (just text or something) that shows those problems and see if it happens to anyone else.