• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Anyone know of a fully keyframeable text generator?

  Posted by Lu Nelson on January 26, 2009 at 11:33 am

  Hi all,

  I’m trying to use linking (through expressions) to create a Master/Instance system of building text comps where I can change the scale, position and other parameters on the Master version, and therefore avoid changing each Instance when I need to tweak the design —

  however as you know, one can only link parameters that are keyframe-able, and aside from text.sourceText this means just Transformation parameters. This is good, but I’d love to be able to for instance globally change the font, alignment, etc. of say a few hundred text comps. And I’m not quite savvy enough to write a script that’ll walk through and do it so I was wondering if there was an alternative to AE’s text layers, where one could access *all* the properties of the text with expressions?

  A 3rd party product?

  Thanks,

  LMN

  Lu Nelson replied 17 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Will Cavanagh

  January 26, 2009 at 7:40 pm

  This is definitely a case where scripting would be a good option. Expressions for something on this scale get hefty, and I’m not aware of a third party product to let you control these properties through expressions (that’s a pretty small market.)

  You could probably write a script fairly easily that changes properties based on labels… Just have the user specify all text layers with “X” labels (e.g. Pink)

  Then the script would just iterate through all the layers with that label applied. You could also set it up to grab settings from a layer, say the currently selected layer and apply them to all the layers with the specified label.

  Check out Adobe’s documentation for more info.

  getnmd.com
  nationalboston.com
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  January 26, 2009 at 8:43 pm

  It’s worth pointing out that scripting access to type attributes (like font) is new for CS4.

  Dan
• 

  Lu Nelson

  January 28, 2009 at 10:38 am

  Thanks for both of those responses. I found Todd Kopriva’s “Region of Interest” blog and the post on CS4’s new scripting additions, I’ll start there:

  https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2008/12/after_effects_cs4_scripting_ch.html

  Lu Nelson
  Berlin, Germany

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