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Character Scale Animation based on length of text
Hello
I find it really irritating when I choose a “text animate in” preset that it is a pre-defined duration and I have to alter the keyframes to get the timing as I would like it. It is especially frustrating when you are working with many pieces of text that you want to animate on in the same way – short sentences pop on slowly, long ones come on fast.So – is there an expression that I can use to 1. deduce the number of charaters in a text layer (I already know there is: n = text.sourceText.length;) and 2. to use this figure to time the duration of the animation?
So, if the text layer contains 25 characters, the animation takes 25 frames to complete, from 0% to 100%. If it contains 50 characters, it takes 50 frames, etc.
Any thoughts?
Thanks – Chris
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4 Replies
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yup… you should be able to switch the value from percentage to index (twirl down options, it will be in ‘advanced’), this should allow you to specify the character count for completion (ie, 25 would equal 25 characters).
then you could use an expression like this in the offset:
timeToFrames();
to advance one character per frame.note, you could use percentages and change the offset expression to:
100*timeToFrames()/text.sourceText.length;
which would then return a percentage based on the text length.Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
That’s fantastic! I knew there would be a way, but when it comes to working out new expressions I’m lost!
I think this is a really valuable expression (it’s going to save me hours) and worth spreading around – thank you so much. -
Ah – found an issue.
This expression only works then the text is at the start of the comp – i.e. Zero frames.
As soon as you move it along the timeline, the expression screws up.Any thoughts?
Chris
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Where you’re using timeToFrames(), change it to timeToFrames(time-inPoint).
Dan
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