• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  looping news ticker template creation

  Posted by Tobias Pfeiffer on October 20, 2010 at 7:32 am

  hi,
  i wanted to create a template for easy lower thirds news ticker creation. the template should be used by people not too familiar with after effects.
  the main problem that im stumbling upon is that i cant access the actual width (character count would be another valuable information) of the textlayer. the width of the text layer is changing on a weekly basis. without this information im not able to script an ever repeating ticker.
  any thoughts?
  thanks in advance,
  tobi

  Clayton Glenn replied 7 years, 10 months ago 5 Members · 5 Replies
• 5 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  October 20, 2010 at 5:37 pm

  You can get the character count of a text layer this way:

  thisComp.layer(“your text”).text.sourceText.length

  This thread discusses a hack, using sampleImage() that will give you the left or right edge of the text:

  https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/227/15135

  Other than that, you’d have to use a script, which does have access to the actual extents of the text in a text layer.

  Dan
• 

  Kevin Camp

  October 20, 2010 at 7:36 pm

  if i under stand what you are trying to do — just have a line of text crawl across the bottom of the screen — then i don’t think you need to know the width.

  i think you could time to offset the position with an expression like this:

  offset = 2; // value in pixels per frame
  x = timeToFrames()*offset;
  value – [x,0]

  it will march across the screen for as long as the comp’s duration.

  and to make the source text string loop, you could use an expression like this:

  value + ” ” + value + ” ” + value;

  just keep adding + ” ” + value to make the string loop.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
• 

  Chris Wright

  October 20, 2010 at 7:59 pm

  if you want a ticker to look like fox news where it wraps around, just add effect-distort-offset and add this to shift center, creating an infinite wrap-looping ticker.

  [time*1000,value[1]]

  https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/
• 

  Tobias Pfeiffer

  October 21, 2010 at 9:57 pm

  thanks to everyone here.
  great suggestions.
  fixed it.
• 

  Clayton Glenn

  June 28, 2018 at 9:03 pm

  Did you try something like this?
  Seems like what you are trying to do….

  
txt = thisComp.layer("text");

  w = txt.sourceRectAtTime(time,true).width;

  border = 10;

  s = (w + 2*border)*100/width;

  [s,value[1]]

  Saving the world one pixel at a time.

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