How to remove text aliasing in After Effects?

I'm not very experienced with After Effects and I was wondering if there's a built in option or a feasible workaround for text with no aliasing (think pixel art).

I know this can be easily be done in Photoshop, so one option is to prepare text there, flatten the content, then bring the pixels over to After Effects.

What would be the cleaner/more efficient way to achieving sharp pixel looking text in After Effects ?

2 Answers

In After Effects you can use the Mosaic effect (Effect > Stylize > Mosaic) to make the text borders more or less jagged or you can use Sharpen (Effect > Blur & Sharpen) to clean the text from aliasing.

You can also change the text layer quality from Best to Draft, clicking the / symbol in the Timeline. In this case, when exporting, you have to set the quality to Current in the Render Setting panel or the text will be aliased again.

So I finally got around to spending some time with After Effects and messed about with the render settings.

The best solution I found so far for pixel perfect content with no aliased (text or otherwise) was to rely on the Cinema4D Renderer Options which allow you to set Quality to 1 (Anti-Aliasing: None)

Here is the workflow I recommend:

1. Go to Renderer Options (via Fast Previews context menu)
2. Go to Cinema4D Renderer Options and set Quality to 1 (Anti-Aliasing: None) disabling aliasing
3. Enable the 3D layer for the items you want aliased (forcing the C4D render options)
4. Ideally your assets land on whole pixels especially for position and size, at least for the keyframes where they become static. When assets are scaled or or floating point sub pixel positions aliasing won't look great. In motion that's less noticeable.
5. Add to Render Queue (not Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue)
6. Select Render Settings > Quality > Draft to render the same aliasing as in the preview window and select a non compressed image sequence format (e.g. PNG Sequence with Compression set to None)

(Optional) Set the Resolution/Downsample to lower for a more blocky look, but Full will be the crispest aliased output. Fast Drafts feels more predictable, but feel free to experiment and choose what looks best for the content at hand.

Here are a few screenshots for reference: