Text Jitter Caused by Optical Kerning in Essential Properties

[Motion Forward]

When using essential properties for text, a bug occasionally causes text jitter issues during rendering. This result is unpredictable but usually occurs after editing the text with essential properties.

The problem occurs when using optical kerning with essential properties. The fix for now: when using text in essential properties, ensure the kerning is set to "metric" instead of "optical." The jitter seems to occur only when kerning is set to "optical," and appears to switch back to "metric" kerning only for a few frames shown below. 

flicker issue with optical kerning

no flicker with metric kerning

This error occurs in both After Effects and Premiere (when using MoGRTs created in After Effects), as Premiere relies on After Effects for rendering MoGRTs.

The solution: Until the bug is addressed, always use "metric" kerning when working with essential properties for text in After Effects and creating MoGRTs.

If you have a MoGRT using "optical kerning," open it in After Effects, reveal the source text, change it to "metric" kerning, re-save the MoGRT, and replace it in your timeline. When prompted, choose to update all.

Hope that this bug can be addressed. thanks!

[krejue]

In our case, it is changing the spacing in a really ugly way. 1 and 0 arevery far from each other. Is there no other solution?

[nishu_kush]

Let us know if you're still having the issue in the new version.
I am moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions for now.

Thanks,
Nishu

[Aaron Cobb]

On what version of AE is this fixed? I'm encountering a similar kerning glitch very sporadically when rendering graphics in the render queue (not in MOGRTS) in AE 23.6.0. The text is set to Optical kerning, but when it glitches the kerning only changes between certain pairs, and doesn't seem to match the Metrics kerning for those pairs. We are set to upgrade to AE 24.x sometime in the coming months, so if this is fixed in that version I can just be vigilant about spotting it when it occurs and re-rendering.

[nishu_kush]

We're still investigating this. I tried reproducing it on my end several times, but it didn't flicker. Can you share a file that repeats the issue? Happy to look into it. Feel free to DM me.

Thanks,

Nishu