So... I thought about it.
The truth is, the rounding has bothered me since the beginning - it's just an extra design step that I doubt the artist would go to. I say that because a lot of basic design issues are already present with the typography - tracking errors, baseline errors - stuff that would never have made it past an actual design firm that would be hired by a mega-corp. like Stark Industries. You know how it is: stuff made for movies tends to break down upon close scrutiny, and this is no different. It just seemed excessive.
But on the other hand, anti-aliasing doesn't lie. You can't get those anti-aliased patterns from squared corners, as I told TMP.
...unless the anti-aliasing
itself was corrupt. Corrupt, perhaps, because of compression issues? I decided to investigate a bit. Sure enough, the compression of the signal causes a sort of warbly distortion of the image, when seen at the resolution I'm trying to pull lines from. It looks a bit like the logo is underwater, the result being that with each frame, the profiles of the letters change radically. Two successive frames yield two different profiles!
Here is a small movie to illustrate:
Stark Industries Logo Analysis
Look closely at the curves on the "S" in particular and you'll see them dancing all over the pace, bloating and shrinking. The more you look, the more you'll see, and if you actually step through an animation like that, it's really pronounced and impossible to miss.
So I'm having a friend of mine write a small tool to analyze a sequence of frames, and determine the shape of the letters as they appear "most of the time" during the sequence. If the algorithm finds that 70% of the time certain lines match, it keeps those, for example. I'll use those results as a baseline for the next set of revisions.
_Mike
