Disney style bouncing ball over song lyrics

[Steve Roberts]

Yes.

… and using “separate dimensions” for the ball’s position property might make it easier. Or it might not.

[Neil Weaver]

Yikes, I was hoping it would be easier than that!

Thing is, the ball needs to animate to the lyrics, not the beat, so looping an animation won’t work.

The issue I have is that this particular job is about as low budget as they come and so the solution I come up with has to be as simple and easily achieved as possible.

Perhaps animating a left to right colour change of the on-screen lyrics might be an easier fix?

[Steve Roberts]

Yeah. Lose the ball.

Animate the opacity of the overlaid text elements by character, with no smoothness, square, opacity at 0. I like to keyframe the Offset. Make the first key a hold, and the rest will follow. Keyframe according to what you see on the waveform (LL shortcut), then listen and tweak the key positions in time. Saving as a preset, or checking AE’s presets, should speed it up a bit.

Given that syllables aren’t always marked by detectable changes in amplitude, it’s folly to look for an automated solution. Ya gotta slog.

[Jeremy Allen]

As there always seems to be a million different ways to do something, I might try a slightly different approach. I would create the first line(blue), duplicate it and change the color(red). Now make a rectangular mask for the red layer. Drag it all the way to the left so you don’t see the red layer. Set a hold keyframe for the mask path. You can hold command to hear the music while you scrub the timeline. As each word is sang, move the playhead to that point in time and reposition the mask so the red words appear. A new hold keyframe will be created automatically. Now you have blue words turning to red whenever the words are sang. Obviously you can use whatever colors you want.

Once you have the first line complete, you could either start from scratch for each new line, or duplicate the previous line (both layers), change the text and tweak the mask keyframes on the red layer. Instead of duplicating layers, another option might even be to use only the first two layers, with a source text expression that changes the line at the appropriate times. You could also have a source text expression on the red layer that gets the text from the blue layer. Then you only have to change the blue layer for every new line and the red layer will change automatically. You will still have to re-animate the mask for each new line of course.

This method will eliminate splitting layers and having to animate the opacity of every single red word. Its still a bit tedious, but as the others have mentioned, there is just no good way to automate this kind of thing.

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Neil Weaver]

Thanks for the input all.

I think this might actually be one of those times when Final Cut has the advantage over AE.

First of all, I’m gonna lose the ball -budget’s just too low to bother with it. Then I’m gonna use a similar technique to Jeremy’s, with a duplicated subtitle layer in two different colours, keyframing a left to right crop in synch with the lyrics.

The advantage of doing it in final cut of course, will be the real time playback. Even at a quarter resolution, AE is gonna chew up too much rendering time.

Cheers!

[Ellery Rose]

I have an old Win 95 program that I use. It is very accurate.
It will still work with XP and limited with Vista.
Here is a youtube sample https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-jgz6U0dAE
and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6x5jwTDM3w

or you can read about it at LOMAHMUSIC.com

Ellery

[Philip Howarth]

Hi Elery, is it possible to download your bouncing ball programme, I have been asked to try to provide something like this for a roundtable dinner, and have no idea where to start!