Avid Tip: Ugly fonts in Media Composer 6

When I first installed Avid Media Composer 6, I ran into an issue where the main Avid UI application font was horribly ugly. It was low rez, unsmoothed, and had awful kerning. Like this:

Ugly aliased badly-kerned fonts. Notice how not all text is ugly

It turns out this is a known problem with a simple solution.

In case that link ever dies, here’s the info:

Quit MC and run the enableFontSmoothing script in the Applications > Utilities > Avid Utilities > AppleFontSmoothing folder. I think you just double-click on it for it to work. Then you can launch MC again.


Or if you feel comfortable using the Terminal (and this is what I used successfully), quit MC and launch the Terminal.  Then execute the following command:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1
Hit Return and quit the Terminal, then relaunch MC.  The value of 1 at the end should fix the issue (it did for me) but it was also suggested to try 2 or 3 if you still see an issue.  Executing the command with 0 resets to the default.

This is a permanent change (you don't have to re-execute the command on system startup) and should solve the font issue.

Here’s what mine looks like afterward:

CAPTION — Nice smoothed fonts. Still somewhat crappy kerning.

Thanks to Kevin Klimek on the Avid forums for posting this solution