Minimum TV lines for captions

[HalloweenJack2]

The old issue of 'how small can we make this legal line?' has come up again.

As I understand it it's 16 lines for SD and 28 for HD in the UK. I've heard 20 lines in the US?

There's no real comparison to tv lines and Smoke's text size is there? As fonts are simply different sizes?

Most people on google searches say the only way is to know a font, say Impact at point size 20 is correct, or to use a vector scope.

I wondered if there was a simpler way on Smoke...

Surely if you generate a white farme at pixel size 16x16 and drag this into your comp it would give you a measure of 16 lines?

Is this reasoning correct? I just want to make sure before I make a fool of myself 😉

Cheers

[BKM]

Font size is scan line height. However, fonts are usually measured from lowest descender to upper ascender. So lower case you have to measure from lower case 'j' to 't'. An 'a' then, set at size 20 isn't 20 lines, but upper-case 'A' is. Make sense?

[HalloweenJack2]

Hi Brian,

Almost makes sense... if you measure from the bottom of j to the top of t isn't that bigger than A?

[BKM]

Depends on the font I guess... but let's restate it as... the size of the font is decided from the height of the lowest descender and the highest ascender. Capital Letter appear to be smaller than actual font size if the font has descenders.

[HalloweenJack2]

Thanks Brian,

If anyone's interested minimum height according to Clear Cast is 16 lines for SD PAL and 30 for HD.

This is measured on a lower case w.

This is for UK at least.

[AlanMaiden]

I find the easiest way to measure text height is to go into your grids and under the 'grid' tab select 'pixel grid' then type your line height into the 'H' box, this then gives you a grid with boxes of the desired height.

Hope this helps. As a note aswell I find it safer to use 17 and 32 as UK legal height as when they get converted you can get soft characters and sometime this allows for some characters to be counted a line less than they actually are. Better to be safe than sorry, and whats 1 extra pixel in the grand scheme of things.

[HalloweenJack2]

Good idea using the grid, I made a colour solid but it seems to be too small to pick up/select 🙂

Cheers