• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Text ‘Cursor’

  Posted by James Armstrong on May 18, 2009 at 4:49 pm

  Hi,

  I think I already know the answer to this, but is there a way of tying an expression to the position (x&y) of the ‘cursor’ (insertion point? playhead?) of an animated text layer.

  Let me explain:

  I have an animator on a text layer (blur in by letter). If that text layer is 1 line long, it’s easy to add a lens flare and animate its position to match the leading letter as the text animates in.

  Leftmost position of lens flare is animator offset 0% and rightmost is animator 100%

  If the text layer is more than one line long, the ‘cursor’ or leading letter then goes to the left of the second line. Meanwhile, the lens flare is lagging behind, because 100% offset has not been reached.

  If the text layer is not 1 line long, maybe a single word, the lens flare goes shooting off to the right away from the text, rather than sticking to the leading character.

  Make sense?

  I have about 100 lines of text to put into a project in 24 different languages. What I want to do is set up a preset that means the text can be pasted in from a word doc and no keyframes/positional data needs to be adjusted (we’ll be roping in a freelancer to do all the translations once the master is complete).

  Thanks in anticipation…

  Filip Vandueren replied 17 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Filip Vandueren

  May 21, 2009 at 2:41 am

  Not really,

  unless you’re using a proportional width font like monaco or typewriter,
  all fontsizes are always the same, and the leading is always the same.

  even then, you have to make an expression that reads the text-strings, parses where newline characters occur (if it’s a text-block layer that’s wrapping, you’re also out of luck)…

  etc.

  I think there was a plugin that would automatically flare based on brighntess, but I’m not sure what it was.
  You could make a copy of each text-layer where just 1 letter is visible by using a slightly different textanimator, and use that as a basis for a glow or flare. Folllow ?

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