On-screen text

What we ran

40 takes in two bins. Twenty archival mini-documentaries whose title cards carry dates with a right answer written down — Golden Gate, Sputnik, Apollo 11, Decimal Day, Suez. Twenty broadcast graphics packages where the prompt spells out the exact string: a scorebug reading 2 – 1, a departure board with six flight rows, eight names of end credits, four subtitle lines.

I read every take frame by frame. For the title cards I pulled frames at 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16 and 19 seconds; for the graphics at 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 9. Then I compared the rendered type against the requested type character by character, and against the historical record where there was one. 39 takes checked this way (E12-044 has no clip).

The board note warns that draft renders are soft and to re-run before scoring handwriting off a smudge. Not needed here. At 1440×608 the type was sharp enough to read individual letters in every take, including the 4%-frame-height subtitles. Nothing was scored off a guess.

What happened

Spelling is no longer the weakness. Across the graphics bin, 132 of 145 requested strings rendered exactly — same characters, same case, same punctuation. Eleven of the 19 takes got every single string right.

The departure board (30) is the extreme case: five column headers and six rows of five fields, 35 strings, all exact. 07:20 CASABLANCA AT811 A07 DELAYED. 08:10 REYKJAVIK FI455 B18 GATE CLOSING. Even the em-dash placeholder in the Algiers gate field. It held them byte-identical from 1s to 9s and changed only the two fields the prompt said could change — Oslo's status ON TIME → BOARDING, its gate B03 → B09.

1An airport departure board, 12 seconds, with exactly specified typography. BOARD — Fills the frame, shot slightly off-axis. Matte black #0C0C0C panel, split-flap style. Column headers in amber #FFB300, Univers Bold, all caps: TIME, DESTINATION, FLIGHT, GATE, STATUS. ROWS — Six rows in the same amber, monospaced, evenly spaced:206:40 LISBON TP1373 A12 BOARDING307:05 OSLO SK4821 B03 ON TIME407:20 CASABLANCA AT811 A07 DELAYED507:45 TBILISI GE202 C11 ON TIME608:10 REYKJAVIK FI455 B18 GATE CLOSING708:30 ALGIERS AH2041 — DELAYED ACTION — At 6 seconds the OSLO row's STATUS field begins to flip, the split-flaps clattering through intermediate characters before settling on "BOARDING". Two seconds later its GATE field flips from B03 to B09. Travellers pass in soft foreground silhouette. Every flight code and destination must be legible and correctly spelled, and only the specified fields may change.

The end credits (31) rendered all 8 roles and all 8 names correctly through a continuous scroll, including CLARA BENÍTEZ with its acute accent and JUN-HO PARK with its hyphen. The tale-of-the-tape (26) got 17 of 17: RUBEN 'THE CLOCK' MARTELL, IDRIS KANE, 6'1", 5'11", 74", 168 LB, RECORD 28-4-1. The subtitles (36) got all four sentences with their punctuation intact, down to the apostrophe in Don't repeat what I say back to me.

1A film's end credits, 12 seconds, with exactly specified typography. BACKGROUND — Pure black #000000, full frame. CREDITS — Two columns, centred as a block occupying 62% of frame width. Left column right-aligned, in Trajan Pro, #C9C9C9, all caps, listing roles: DIRECTED BY, PRODUCED BY, WRITTEN BY, DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY, EDITED BY, PRODUCTION DESIGNER, COSTUME DESIGNER, MUSIC BY. Right column left-aligned, same face, #FFFFFF, slightly larger, listing names: NOOR HADDAD, PILAR ESTEVEZ, TOMASZ REY, ADAEZE NWOSU, MARGIT HALVORSEN, JUN-HO PARK, CLARA BENÍTEZ, SAMSON ADEYEMI. MOVEMENT — The block scrolls upward at a steady readable pace, roughly one row leaving frame per 1.4 seconds. No easing, no stutter, perfectly linear.2 3AUDIO — A single sustained orchestral chord under it, decaying. The two columns must stay in strict horizontal alignment row for row, the gutter must not drift, and every name must be correctly spelled with its accents intact.

Dates are right far more often than they have any business being. 69 of the 74 title cards I read carry a date that matches the record. Apollo 11 (6) stamped five UTC timestamps and every one is correct to the minute: launch 13:32, lunar orbit 17:21, landing 20:17, first steps 02:56, splashdown 16:50. The DNA take (12) rendered Nature 171, 737–738 (no. 4356) — the real volume, the real pages, the real issue number. Decimal Day (16) got six dates right and correctly called 15 February 1971 a Monday. The marathon take (13) gave both calendars — 29 March 1896 (Julian) and 10 April 1896 (Gregorian) — and both are right.

1An archival mini-documentary about the Apollo 11 landing, with period footage and dated title cards marking each milestone.

Legible but wrong is rarer than legible and right, and it fails on proper nouns. Eighteen of the 74 cards carry a word-level defect, and almost every one is a place or a person:

Common words survive. Names invent themselves. The Berlin Wall take (4) wrote Straße correctly three times, with the eszett, and still could not spell Bornholmer.

Garbled is now a minority failure. Where it happens it takes one of three shapes. The line collapses into glyph soup mid-sentence — the transcontinental card (14) opens MAY 10, 1869 — At Promotory Summit, Utah, Leland Stanford and then dissolves into ciercilon cecoiunially / drive ith tesald. Or the plate renders with no type at all: Apollo 11 held an empty black title bar for a full card. Or the text overflows its container — Sputnik (3) broke AND across two lines as A / ND and ran the sentence past both edges of the plate.

1An archival mini-documentary about the Wright brothers' first flight, with period footage and dated title cards marking each milestone.

Numbers-as-labels work. Numbers-as-state do not. This is the real fault line. Every failure in the graphics bin is a number that had to change correctly over time:

• Scorebug (21): every string exact — NORTHGATE, ASHFORD, 2 – 1 flipping to 3 – 1 on the goal frame, MARA OKONKWO, 3rd goal this season. The clock was asked to read 78:14 counting up. It read 78:13, then 78:11, then jumped to 78:39. Running backwards, then forwards by 26 seconds.
• Election (24): all four party names exact, the header incrementing to RESULTS DECLARED: 415 OF 650 exactly as asked. The seat counts underneath went 170/169/50/23 → 171/50/24/24. The Conservatives lost 119 seats in four seconds and the total stopped matching the header.
• Countdown (29): LIVE bug perfect, numerals cleanly formed, ignition landing on zero. The count went 10, 8, 6, 5, 2, 0 — it accelerates in the back half. The prompt explicitly asked for no skipped values.
• Leaderboard (38): all 8 driver codes and all 8 gap times exact, and HAM correctly updated to +4.688 when asked. But a phantom ninth row appeared between HAM and RUS — 4 LEC +46ALA5 — giving two rows numbered 4, which the prompt forbade.
• Ticker (25): AAPL, TSLA, MSFT all correct and correctly coloured green/red. Every price, arrow and percentage was dropped. AAPL 214.30 ▲1.2% rendered as AAPL. It also volunteered a caption nobody asked for: ILLUSTRATIVE / UNVERIFIED MARKET DATA.

Length is not the variable. The longest strings in the test came out perfect. The 45-character weather banner TOMORROW · SCATTERED SHOWERS EASING BY EVENING is exact. The Suez card (18) rendered a 110-character sentence naming Saïd Pasha and Ferdinand de Lesseps without an error, diacritic included. Meanwhile MANCHESTER — ten letters — became MErCELI0S.

What predicts failure is whether the text has to bind to a place in the picture. Text in a table, a list or a column renders: departure board 35/35, credits 16/16, tale of the tape 17/17. Text pinned to a spot on a map or the end of a bar drifts: on the weather map (23) only 2 of 5 city labels kept their own temperature — LEEDS 14° and YORK 12° are right, Manchester's 12° went to a made-up word, Hull's 11° went to Manchester, Sheffield got 11° instead of 13°, and a bare 13° floats unattached over the coast.

Stability: type either locks or gets rewritten. It does not warp. Where a graphic holds, it holds completely — the name card (32), the certification card (33), the departure board and the tale-of-the-tape are pixel-stable across their whole run. The certification card was asked to be absolutely static for nine seconds; between 2s and 8s only 0.4% of the frame shifts by more than 16 grey levels, and all of it is on the glyph edges. The words hold; the outlines micro-breathe.

When it fails, it fails by replacement. The Wright brothers take (11) is legible in every frame and says something different in each: Wilbur: 175 ft in about 12 seconds → Orville: 120 ft in 12 seconds → Orville: just over 200 ft in 15 seconds → Wilbur: 852 ft in 59 seconds. At 10 seconds both the correct and the incorrect card are on screen at once, contradicting each other. Nothing blurs. The card simply re-authors itself.

Incidental world text is still noise. Requested overlay graphics are treated as first-class objects. Signage inside the picture is texture: stadium hoardings read Notencra, the Cambridge pub sign in the DNA take reads EALGILOY EAGLE, map graticules read M A ? Y D I D N. If it matters, put it in a graphic, not in the world.

Notable takes

• 30 | Airport departure board | 35 fields, every one exact, and only the two the prompt allowed to change actually changed.
• 31 | End credits | 16 roles and names correct through a live scroll, accents intact — the clearest refutation of "video models can't spell".
• 26 | Boxing tale of the tape | 17 strings including 6'1", 74" and 28-4-1, rock-steady from build to hold.
• 6 | Apollo 11 | five UTC timestamps, all correct to the minute — and one title plate that rendered completely empty.
• 36 | Burned-in subtitles | four full sentences with correct punctuation, timed to the dialogue, never over a face.
• 11 | Wright brothers | perfectly legible and wrong four different ways: 175 ft, then 120 ft, then 200 ft, then 852 ft.

What this means if you're prompting FLUX.3

Write the string out in quotes and it will very probably come back exactly. That is now the base case, not the lucky case.

Put it in a table, a list or a column. Grids are where this model is strongest — a six-row departure board is safer than two labels floating on a map.

Don't ask a graphic to do arithmetic. A clock that counts, a score that totals, a leaderboard that reorders — those are the failures, every time, and they fail while the words beside them stay perfect. Specify the start state and the end state as two strings rather than a rule the graphic has to follow.

Spell-check the proper nouns yourself. Place names and surnames are where it invents. Everything else it gets.

Don't rely on signage inside the shot. If the audience has to read it, it belongs in an overlay.

Give the type its own space. The failures that aren't numeric are containment failures — a line breaking mid-word, a badge running off frame, a banner clipping to RROW · SCATTERED SHOWERS. Ask for generous margins and keep the string short enough to sit inside its box.

1A boxing broadcast tale-of-the-tape graphic, 12 seconds. GRAPHIC — Full-frame graphic over a darkened arena plate. Split vertically down the centre by a 2-pixel #D4AF37 rule. Left half tinted #7B1113 at 55% opacity, right half #10316B at 55% opacity. LEFT — "RUBEN 'THE CLOCK' MARTELL" in Impact, all caps, #FFFFFF, upper third. Beneath, five stat rows in Helvetica Bold white, right-aligned toward the centre rule: AGE 29, HEIGHT 6'1", REACH 74", WEIGHT 168 LB, RECORD 24-2. RIGHT — "IDRIS KANE" in the same treatment, left-aligned from the rule: AGE 33, HEIGHT 5'11", REACH 71", WEIGHT 167 LB, RECORD 28-4-1. CENTRE — Stat labels running down the rule in #D4AF37 Helvetica Bold small caps: AGE, HEIGHT, REACH, WEIGHT, RECORD.2 3ACTION — The graphic builds: rule draws top to bottom, then both halves wipe in from their outer edges, then the stat rows fade up in sequence from top to bottom over four seconds. Announcer voice over arena ambience. All figures must be legible and the two columns must align row for row.

1A foreign-language scene with burned-in subtitles, 12 seconds. SCENE — Two women argue quietly across a kitchen table, in Portuguese, keeping their voices down because someone is asleep in the next room. SUBTITLES — Centred, bottom, sitting at 11% frame height above the lower edge. Arial Bold, #FFFFFF, with a 3-pixel #000000 outline and no background box, maximum two lines, never more than 42 characters per line. Line breaks fall at natural clause boundaries. TIMING — Four subtitle events across the twelve seconds, each appearing on the speaker's first syllable and clearing within 4 frames of their last:2"You told her before you told me."3"I was going to tell you tonight."4"You were going to tell me tonight."5"Don't repeat what I say back to me." The subtitles must be correctly spelled, correctly punctuated, never overlap each other, never sit over a face, and must change exactly on the dialogue rather than drifting early or late. Natural kitchen light, handheld, no music.