re: Bizarre text issue

I have another entry in my series of ongoing titling gaffes...

I designed the intro sequence of an actress' reel last night. I had her name slide in, superimposed against a slow-mo shot of all, and I picked the Helvetica Neue font, bold, left-justified.

This morning, when I began tinkering with it, and also did an alternate version of the montage (with less visual filtering), the text completely changed. I don't mean moved in position. More like, what used to look like a nice, fat, saturated font now turned into spaghetti strands at 35 per cent opacity.

It's not an issue with sequence settings, though I did create a new sequence to contain the less-filtered montage with the text. I tried copying and pasting the exact same group of text objects in the timeline, then pasting them later on in that very same timeline, and the font still changed. It's not an issue with bad preview in the Canvas and Viewer, either, because I'm checking on the NTSC monitor, after rendering at High quality. I quit FCP, dumped preferences and repaired permissions, then restarted the application and opened up the project -- no soap.

What gets me is how I got the fat, saturated, nice version of this card in the first place last night, because for the life of me, I can't get that font/size/position combination to give me the same resulta gain. The change looks like what would happen if you changed a title card which contained a font that's not in your system -- it swaps to a generic, ugly thin font as a placeholder.

I've now moved on in the design (picked Futura instead; works just fine) but I was wondering whether other people have had similar experiences.

Are you using Suitcase to manage your fonts, or Font Book? And is that the Helvetica Neue that came with the machine (Truetype) or a Postcript version?

Try typing with the font in another application; does it work?

Yes, the font looks normal in MS Word and Stickies. I use Font Book for font management, and I'm quite sure this Helvetica Neue came with the system. The extension on the font is ".dfont"; I have no idea whether it's Truetype or Postscript.