Export of text not consistent

[Geoffrey Beane]

Hi Folks: 

I'm completely confused and kind of losing it. I am creating text slides in Premiere that are just behaving really strangely when they are exported. My client first noticed the inconsistency, thinking that I had inadvertently bolded certain lines. 

If you look at the two screenshots, before and after export, you should see what I'm talking about. Numbers 3, 4, 5 all look like a heavier font after export, but all the lines appear consistent in the before.

And, adding to the mystery, when I actually play the video, #1 and #2 have the same heavier look, but then go light when #3 fades up a couple of seconds after.

I tried changing fonts to Gil Sans, thinking maybe it was a serif/non serif thing. I exported as mov and mp4. Neither of these did anything. Still inconsistent. Driving me kooky. Can anyone please suggest what the problem might be???

[Steve Griffiths · Accepted solution]

If you are playing your sequence (without preview rendering) you will often see text change it's look slightly depending on the number of layers.

This might account for 'adding to the mystery' part of your post.

If you preview render your sequence - what do you see when playing it in Premiere Pro? Any improvement/change?

If Preview rendering improves things you can then export your video and tick the checkbox that says 'Use Preview Renders' in your export window.

Your exported video *should* then look just as it did in the sequence.

Other things you could try ...

clear your media cache. Particularly if you have upgraded Premirer Pro during this project. Apparently Adobe sometimes change the way some codecs are encoded/decoded and an upgraded project may be referencing older previews in the cache (unlikely this is your issue but worth a try).

Also try switching 'renderers' in Project settings >General. If you are using GPU acceleration, switch to software only (or vice versa).

Are you using 'legacy titler' or 'Essential Graphics' for your text? Switch to the other as an experiment and see if that makes any difference.

Looking closely at your slides it looks like 3, 4 & 5 are not rendering at full resolution and I honestly don't really know what's going on, but the above would be my first approaches. Good luck.

... don't forget to correct the spelling of 'with' on point 5  of your slide 🙂

[Geoffrey Beane]

Thanks for the thorough response, Steve. I'll try your suggestions and let you know what happens. - Geoff 

[Geoffrey Beane]

Good point on the typo too! 

[Geoffrey Beane]

Well done, Steve. I started out by rendering the preview. No dice. Same problem. Next, I went to my settings and switched from GPU accelerator to software only. This definitely improved my text within the sequence. Upon exporting, 95% of the problems were solved. Went back and did a render again and that took care of remaining problems. The render definitely feels slower with software only (guess that's why they call it accelerator!) but worth the time.

Long and short: switch from accelerator to software only + render sequence = happiness.

Thanks for the help.

[Geoffrey Beane]

P.S. Not certain of this, but I also suspect there might be a correlation between my issues and Media Encoder. Not certain that Encoder was contributing to the problems. Just a hunch. So I've been exporting all of these text-heavy sequences directly from Premiere as well.