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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Green text/console – military film style

  • Green text/console – military film style

    Posted by Alberto Bedin on August 29, 2010 at 2:31 pm

    I’m new to After Effect.

    I would like to create a Green text on the video. Each char should appears from a cursor (a dotting green rectangle) which moves from left to right.

    Like a man who writes a text on a consolle, or a military text at the beginning of a lot of films (with, for example, time or date). Or like the “follow the white rabbit” on Matrix.

    So, is AE the right program to do this? is it difficult? Could you tell me where I have to start? Some guides? Tutorials?

    Any ideas is really appreciated.

    Thank you

    Alberto Bedin replied 15 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
  • 5 Replies
  • Tudor “ted” jelescu

    August 29, 2010 at 6:04 pm

    First thing you need is a “military looking” font – maybe LED could do it for ya.
    Write the text you need.
    Animate a simple rectangle mask to reveal the text over time- good speed is about one frame per character.
    Create green shape layer- a rectangle about the size of a letter.
    Animate that- a few frames of on and off at the beginning, without moving (turn opacity to 0 and next frame to 100 for a few frames), then animate to follow the edge of your mask as it reveals the characters. Stop one space after the last letter, make blink again.
    Add sound fx for best result.

    Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
    Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
    Bucharest, Romania

  • Chris Wright

    August 29, 2010 at 8:20 pm

    also, if you want cascading opacity with whole letters, then read this post. It would also make it easy to add scrambling effects or blinking as each layer has its own individual letter already setup.
    https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/227/16306

    https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/

  • Alberto Bedin

    August 31, 2010 at 11:08 am

    Very useful, thank you a lot!

    I’ve wrote a small expression in order to make the green rectangle (cursor) blinking (opacity):

    length = 26; // frames
    counter = timeToFrames() % length;

    if ( counter < length/2 )
    value = 0;
    else
    value = 100;

    I have some questions:

    1) Is there a way to create a loop without writing an expression? It would be useful to creare a loop of… for example… 4-5 keys.

    2) How can I set up a position to follow a path (e.g. you said the mask)?

    3) Where can I download free or buy good sound fx for this text?

  • Tudor “ted” jelescu

    August 31, 2010 at 1:52 pm

    https://www.findsounds.com/

    Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
    Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
    Bucharest, Romania

  • Alberto Bedin

    August 31, 2010 at 4:01 pm

    Oh, sorry I’ve just seen that there’s also an AE basic forum. In the future I’ll post there.

    However thanks for the link.

    Maybe moving this thread to the AE basic forum will allow me to receive an answer also to point 1) and 2)

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