• Adobe After Effects

  Advancing monospace text on path by single character increment

  Posted by Terry O’brien on March 10, 2014 at 10:31 pm

  I am doing a “computer” graphic of a wall of zeros and ones text. I am using a monospace font, so the 1’s and 0’s should occupy the same horizontal spacing. I want to pop the text along a path every 3rd or 4th frame so that it looks like the numbers are not only moving but it also looks like they are changing values.

  You’ve seen this effect a million times before and I thought that there was a simple text command that I could use in AE that would let me do this (I thought that “Offset” would let me offset the character position, but instead it offsets the character value).

  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

  PS. If this involves scripting, I am lost unless you can provide a sample.

  Thank you.

  Terry

  Roland R. kahlenberg replied 12 years, 1 month ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Walter Soyka

  March 11, 2014 at 12:07 am

  I published an AEP which does a randomly-changing block of binary. Perhaps you’ll find it useful:

  https://f1.creativecow.net/7082/ae-random-binary-block-aep

  (Also available as an FFX [link] which should be applied to a text layer.)

  When you say you want to “pop the text along a path” — what exactly do you mean?

  Walter Soyka
  Principal & Designer at Keen Live
  Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
  RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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• 

  Terry O’brien

  March 11, 2014 at 1:51 am

  By “pop” I was envisioning that the text would advance in one monospace character increments (I’m probably going to use the OCR font, where the 1 and the 0 occupy the same space). I don’t want the motion to be smooth.

  Thanks for the AEP. I will check it out. I should mention that I am still in the stone age and using AE CS3. I own CS6 but just haven’t mustered the $$$$ to buy the 64 bit workstation.
• 

  Roland R. kahlenberg

  March 11, 2014 at 10:13 am

  Ensure that your Text is Left Aligned. Ensure that Path Options is set according to your needs. Adjust the value for First Margin to suit your needs.

  Create a keyframe for First Margin at the time where you want the text characters to move. Move the Time Inidcator forward 3/4 frames and adjust First Margin’s value such that the text characters are now at their second position.

  Select both keyframes and convert them to Hold Keyframes. Do this by either right-clicking directly above either keyframe and selecting Toggle Hold Keyframe OR press CTRL+ALT+click on either keyframe.

  Create an Expression for the First Margin prop – ALT+click on the prop’s Stopwatch icon. Type in the following script –
  loopOut(“offset”)

  That’s it!

  HTH
  RoRK
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