-
Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
Hey guys, I’ve been trying to figure out an easy/fairly procedural way to do an effect with little luck.
Basically, my company is doing a job for a major client. The effect that we’re going for is a body comprised of scrolling financial data that makes up a persons form as they
walk and go about other activities. We’re working off of footage shot on a greenscreen stage, and for the first shot we’ve been working on, it was a fairly wide shot, and I was
able to acheive it through some roto, track mattes, and tricks. The problem comes when you get too close in. You can just tell it’s text scrolling past a matte. The big thing
that I’m trying to achieve is having the numbers cut off cleanly in whole integers to make up the shape. Here’s a simple example of what I’m trying to get in motion:
Instead of:
Now, I’m not really up on expressions much at all, but I’ve seen some of the capabilities of using the scripting, and I feel like this might be what I have to look into. Does
anyone have any suggestions or expression examples that could help? Also, what are my options for animating the numbers/type to cycle (other than range sliders and character
offset), and to get multiple rows of type scrolling at varied speeds? I’ve just been rendering out rows with horizontal scolls at adjusted speeds, but I know there must be a more
intuitive way to do all of this.I’d post an actual still of what we’re doing, but I’d probably get fired :-p
Thanks guys… I appriciate any ideas!
-Kevin
-
2 Replies
-
Not sure exactly how you want to text to scroll, but as for the effect with clean edges, this is one way to achieve that result. There are probably easier ways with expressions or other tools, but here is what came to my mind.
1. Figure out the size grid of numbers you are using for the shot. ie 50×30. Make a new comp with your animaged numbers the size of your final comp. Call it “number source.”
2. Create a new comp. Call it “alpha mask.” Put your greenscreened footage in the comp and add a mosiac effect. Change the mosiac grid to equal the grid of your numbers comp. Next, turn on the “sharp colors” feature of the mosiac effect. Also, apply an alpha levels effect and turn the Input white value to 1 from 255.
3. Drag the alpha mask comp into your final comp.
4. Place your number source comp into the final comp, below the alpha comp. Change the track matte of the numbers comp to Luma of the alpha mask comp. Now, the numbers should only appear in full digits.This method requires spacing out the numbers so that each is the same width and size. Manually adjust the leading and kerning of the numbers layer to fit.
I hope this helps. Like I said, there may be better ways to do this, but it will work.
-
Cool.
I don’t have a good idea how this would be written but you should be able to control a text glyph selection based on grayscale values. If you apply a blur to your alpha image layer, precomp it, and use that a control source for a text filter, varying levels of gray would return smaller text characters.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up