Anamorphic fonts
Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2013 4:19 pm
Hi there.
I would like to share my thoughts with you, regarding a font family with anamorphic dimensions.
I know that maybe some of you, might ask, “Why do Ι need anamorphic?”. The answer is very simple.
I work for a TV lab. And I work there, almost the last 20 years. So, when I get hired here, we only work on 4:3 films. Now we work ONLY on anamorphic wide 16:9 films. In both cases (full frame 4:3) and (Wide anamorphic films), we use Digital Tape. In this material, you can’t add a digital info on the tape (saying that the film is wide). So, this is not working like digital files or DVD video, where you can put the info “Anamorphic”.
In all the PAL or NTSC broadcast systems (Except the High Definition), the size is one and only.
In my country, the tape dimensions are always 720x576.
And yes. The picture that all the modern Television Sets shows the following bars like that.
However, the tapes I give to the TV Stations, are always like that. Sqeezed:
In the lab I work for, we put subtitles on films. So, one digital VTR playback a tape, and then we “key with subtitles” the digital signal and record it to another digital VTR.
When the material is Full Frame 4:3 (Non anamorphic-squeeze) we don’t have any problem at all.
But the last years, we ONLY put subtitles on new films, that are ALL OF THEM, Full frame anamorphic 16:9 (with squeezed picture) like that.
In this case, the subtitles should be also anamorphic.
Recently, I use the program Fontlab Studio to create an anamorphic font family.
The font family that I decide to make anamoprhic was Arial.
So I did many tests, I squeeze the Arial Font and create a new one.
The setting I used was that:
The result was absolutely perfect but… only with specific size of the same font. For example…
Size 30 works perfect. But 29, 28 and other sizes not!
When I say that “it doesn’t look fine” it means that on the same phrase, some specific letters have different dimensions. Do you have any idea, what is wrong?
If someone wants, I can screenshot a phrase with size 30 and the same phrase with size 21 or 20 to see the problem.
I would like to share my thoughts with you, regarding a font family with anamorphic dimensions.
I know that maybe some of you, might ask, “Why do Ι need anamorphic?”. The answer is very simple.
I work for a TV lab. And I work there, almost the last 20 years. So, when I get hired here, we only work on 4:3 films. Now we work ONLY on anamorphic wide 16:9 films. In both cases (full frame 4:3) and (Wide anamorphic films), we use Digital Tape. In this material, you can’t add a digital info on the tape (saying that the film is wide). So, this is not working like digital files or DVD video, where you can put the info “Anamorphic”.
In all the PAL or NTSC broadcast systems (Except the High Definition), the size is one and only.
In my country, the tape dimensions are always 720x576.
And yes. The picture that all the modern Television Sets shows the following bars like that.
However, the tapes I give to the TV Stations, are always like that. Sqeezed:
In the lab I work for, we put subtitles on films. So, one digital VTR playback a tape, and then we “key with subtitles” the digital signal and record it to another digital VTR.
When the material is Full Frame 4:3 (Non anamorphic-squeeze) we don’t have any problem at all.
But the last years, we ONLY put subtitles on new films, that are ALL OF THEM, Full frame anamorphic 16:9 (with squeezed picture) like that.
In this case, the subtitles should be also anamorphic.
Recently, I use the program Fontlab Studio to create an anamorphic font family.
The font family that I decide to make anamoprhic was Arial.
So I did many tests, I squeeze the Arial Font and create a new one.
The setting I used was that:
The result was absolutely perfect but… only with specific size of the same font. For example…
Size 30 works perfect. But 29, 28 and other sizes not!
When I say that “it doesn’t look fine” it means that on the same phrase, some specific letters have different dimensions. Do you have any idea, what is wrong?
If someone wants, I can screenshot a phrase with size 30 and the same phrase with size 21 or 20 to see the problem.