BluffTitler relies on hardware antialiasing when playing the animation in realtime.

No Antialiasing

Without antialiasing the jaggies are clearly visible, especially when using low resolutions, complementary colours and lines that are nearly horizontal or vertical.

Hardware Antialiasing

All modern graphics cards support hardware antialiasing. This picture has been rendered by a NVIDIA 6600 GT. Now, that looks a lot better!

You can turn on hardware antialiasing on by right clicking on the desktop and selecting properties > settings > advanced on XP and personalize > display settings > advanced on Vista. You will find a submenu where you can choose between performance and quality. When you choose quality the jaggies will be gone.

Update the driver of your graphics card

Make sure the driver of your graphics card is up-to-date. Failing to get hardware antialiasing to work can sometimes be fixed by updating the graphics driver.

You can download the latest driver from the website of your video card's manufacturer. For example if you own a GeForce card go to www.nvidia.com and if you have a Radeon visit www.ati.com. Do not forget to install the driver after downloading.

If you are not happy with the antialiasing quality your graphics card has to offer you could try adding a post-processing effect. You do this by selecting an effect into the camera layer with the menu item Media > Change Effect... The blur.fx effect works really well.

Post-processing requires a graphics card that supports pixel shader version 2.0 and for some effects 3.0.

When exporting your animation as a picture or movie file you can choose between software antialiasing and hardware antialiasing. You can find the antialiasing quality dropdown list box in the File > Export as Picture... and File > Export as Movie... dialogs.

The advantage of software antialiasing is image quality. You can choose between 4 software antialiasing qualities: Low Quality looks bad but is very fast, Super High Quality looks very good, but is also super slow and requires lots of memory.

The advantage of hardware antialiasing is speed, but you have to keep the render window completely visible and you can't create resolutions bigger than your desktop.

Fighting video driver bugs

Software antialiasing requires lots of memory that can confuse some video drivers. If your output is black or contains crap, your video driver is reckless and needs to be corrected manually: switch to Medium or Low Quality and the problem is fixed.

Free memory for better software antialiasing quality

Software antialiasing requires lots of memory, system memory and video memory. System memory is most of the time not a problem, but the available video memory can be a problem when exporting HD resolutions. You can free video memory in the following ways:

• Close all other applications
• Use a smaller BluffTitler render window (by setting the view value to 50% or 25% in the File > Set Show Resolution... dialog)
• Use a smaller desktop resolution
• Turn off hardware antialiasing
• Install a graphics card with more memory (HD resolutions in high quality require at least 256MB)

In the dialog that is presented after creating a picture or video file you can see the antialiasing quality. Depending on the choosen antialiasing quality and the available memory this ranges from 16 samples per pixel (very good quality) to only 1 sample per pixel (no antialiasing).