do text behaviours always scale from baseline?

[Noah Kadner]

have you played with the anchor point in your attribute settings?

[Lu Nelson]

Yep, I’ve tried modifying anchor point, baseline and offset — in any combination of either the properties inspector or the text inspector.

Take a pre-built behaviour like “Behind Camera” in the “Text-Zoom” category of Text Sequence behaviours and you’ll see what I mean.

The characters are being scaled from their baseline and there’s no way around it. It looks really dumb IMHO

LMN

[Martin Baker]

Yeah the default does look kinda ugly but there is a way to change it. In the Behaviors tab > Behind Camera, scroll down to the end and choose Parameter: Add > Format > Baseline. This will add a new Baseline slider below the Scale slider. If you set the Baseline to a negative value (depending on the font size) then the zoom will not be centred around the original baseline.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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[Lu Nelson]

Thanks Martin, — great tip.

Adding a Baseline parameter to any Sequence Text-based behaviour that has scale changes, and scrubbing the baseline value to -50 makes the scaling (zooming) look centred.

You DH guys know your stuff

LMN

[Lu Nelson]

Oops — no, the -50 value is not absolute. Martin is right, it depends on your font size. You have to scrub this value until it looks centred. If you change your font and/or font size after, this will probably be thrown off and have to be adjusted again.

thx LMN

[Lu Nelson]

aah — one more caveat…this seems to work well for the scale changes; but if you have a glow on your text that is also scaled, it seems you’re out of luck. It’s probably an order-of-operations thing; but it does not observe your altered baseline parameter. Too bad…but I never used that scaled glow anyway

[Lu Nelson]

OK, I’m making a fool of myself. I am wrong again on that. I just saw the way to do this.

If you want to have a glow parameter in there too, and scale it, you must ALSO add the Glow>Offset parameter to your sequence behaviour and modify the vertical offset, to compensate again for the baseline scaling, like you did with baseline above.

[Martin Baker]

For the Behind Camera behaviour as an example, to get the zoom centred, the Format>Baseline value is affected by both the original font size and the Format>Scale value.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
AutoMotion – 0-60 graphics in 5.2 seconds – Now Shipping

[Kyle Jenkins]

Have you discovered a way to align text on the y-axis in motion without adding a camera? So that when you adjust the scale of the text in a FCP template it doesn’t scale up from the baseline but scales up from the middle of the word (and downwards for that matter)?

[Lu Nelson]

I’m not sure that’s possible, unless you are using Motion 4, then you could apply a parameter linking behaviour to the offset value on the text, which is linked to type size. It would require some arbitrary multiple factor in the behaviour as well, to get it right and this would be different for every font I think.

Lu Nelson
Berlin, Germany
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[MacProQ2.66, 8GB, Sys10.5.6, FCP 6.0.5, AE 9.0.2]