Unwanted shutter on text

I may have found a much easyer solution for this problem

the problem seems to come from vectors or maybe more specifically the collapse transformations switch ( I think the issue has more to do with a glitch than real world physics).

solution:

• if your text is far away swap it out for with a raster image of your text
• when you need to zoom into the text, fade on the vector text and fade off the raster text

This solution fixed my shimmering or strobing vector text, in my case it was a PDF

Slowing down the camera movement will have the most impact.

Instead of directional blur - which needs to be animated along the camera movement, give Force Motion Blur a try. It's like the internal AE motion blur but you can easier play around with shutter angle and samples.

One more idea: you can add a mask to every single letter (there was an easy way, but my memory is insufficient - start with duplicating the text and convert the duplicate into masks or shapes) and apply a little feather to the edges. This will soften them and locally decrease contrast which should lead to a bit more smoothing.

Good luck!

*Martin

Thin fonts and high contrast backgrounds must move a whole number of pixels per frame to avoid judder or stroboscopic effects on the edges. It's a phenomenon that those of us that grew up shooting 35mm film with motion picture cameras are very familiar with. It's called Critical Panning speed. If the speed is wrong, the image will seem to stutter and jerk as it moves on the screen. The combination of retinal retention in the human eye, frame rate, and distance all combine to cause the problem. 

This is fairly easy to fix if you have a 2D layer, but when you are moving 3D layers and cameras it gets more difficult. The solution is to make the fonts a little thicker, reduce the contrast and change the motion. This is really hard to preview in After Effects because the footage needs to be played back full size and at full frame rate. The refresh rate of the screen can also cause problems. Footage that has no judder at 24

You can hide the problem if the speed is close by using motion blur. The easiest thing to do is to change the default comp shutter angle from 180 to 360 or more to soften the edges when the type is moving. The other thing you can do is make the project 29.97 or 30 fps instead of 24 or 25. That option depends on your audience. Rendering a 60fps comp will only help give you a wider range of speeds for some of your audience because not everybody's screen or internet connection will reliably playback 60fps footage. The size of the frame also matters. Footage that had judder problems may look fine half screen and terrible full screen.

When you get a little more experience you will be able to judge whether or not your animations will have these problems by just looking at the timing.