• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Import markers to layer/comp from textfile

  Posted by Allard Rothengatter on August 3, 2016 at 6:54 am

  Hey Guys,

  Question: I am doing some production work for educational video’s where a host is explaining a specific subject. During his talk, he’s backed by some bulletpoints pointing out the most important pieces of info.

  For Automation I use markers to fill a text layer with the correct bullet text. I made a few scripts which keep looking for markers and either add the text in the comment field to the list of bullets, or create a clean bullet list.

  My client provides me with a timeline containing a timecode and the bullet text that needs to be added.

  Example:
  
00:00:21:00 *#Verschijningsvormen geld
00:00:39:00 #-#Chartaal geld
00:00:58:00 #-#Giraal geld
00:01:15:00 #-#Elektronisch geld (OV-chip)
00:01:25:00 #-#Digitaal geld (iDeal e.d.)


  NB: the hashtags are replaced with tab characters via the script.

  So for the above I would place a marker at 00:00:21:00 containing the text “*#Verschijningsvormen geld” in the comment field and noting that it is a new chapter so the list will be build up from scratch. Then at 00:00:39:00 I add a marker containing the text “#-#Chartaal geld” and so on.

  Since most videos take up to 30-35 minutes and containing more than 200 bullets, it’s quite “boring” to keep on copying the timecode into AE to scroll to the specific time, go back to my sheet and copy the text, add a new marker and paste the text and do the whole thing over again.

  Since I’ve come quite a way with the scripts for automating and triggering certain effects, I thought it would also be possible to import a textfile containing the timecode, text and “new chapter trigger” to automatically add these markers.

  Any of you guys have done anything like this before? Would be more than interested to hear from you…

  Cheers,
  Allard

  Allard Rothengatter replied 9 years, 9 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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