Easiest way to create a stream of livestream comments?

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Andy, few questions:

1. By saying masking out old comments – do you mean you are creating everything from scratch / all comments, and then just add a mask to hide the old ones away? OR are you actually using real life video with stream comments already and have to mask out old ones / replace with new content?
2. How are you controlling Y position of every new message now?
3. Do you stop / hold every message manually or not?

2nd and 3rd points assumed that you are creating all from scratch.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Andy Zou]

1. All from scratch; the masking portion is actually pretty trivial, I got that figured out.
2/3. I copy pasted the keyframes from one move to a hold keyframe, then doubled that up, then doubled that until I got the entire timeline. Only trouble is if I wanted to adjust anything like text size, etc, I’d have to redo it all.

Here’s a preview of the basic effect I want to be able to streamline. I did this manually and copy pasting frames:

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Andy, thanks for the response, things makes sense. Few more things:

1. Do you plan on creating custom profile images too, or only improve the text as in example?
2. Will it be only comment or profile name too?

These two things above will give a clear path to follow – whether it should be a single text layer which scrolls/offsets, or each comment as a separate pre-comp in a controllable order.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Andy Zou]

Well, I was going to resign myself to just text, as that seemed most within reach, but the idea of being able to do the same effect with compositions would at least be something useful to know.

[Walter Soyka]

This is very fast and easy if you keep the same scrolling height and timing between elements.

Just set three keyframes for the Y position of your scrolling layer:
1) its first position
2) its second, scrolled position
3) a copy of the second keyframe

Then Alt+Click the Y position stopwatch and paste this expression:
loopOut("offset");

This will loop the position change, but each cycle of the loop will be offset, so the effect is cumulative and constantly building.

Quick sample project:
13338_scrollingfeed.aep.zip

In this example, I’ve recreated your text, but that precomp for scrolling could just as easily contain profile images, emoji, etc.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Andy Zou]

Thanks Walter, that should work well for any future iterations! I remember reading about it but not knowing when I’d use it.