Handwriting – with a pen and wacom

[Erik Waluska]

That’s pretty clever. If you’re writing with the Wacom tablet in photoshop you could make your background white and the brush black and then when you bring it into AE set it to multiply mode and it will knock out the white BG. Also, you could use the invert effect to flip the black and white and set it to screen mode. OR use the free Knoll UnMult plug-in, which will remove the black without having to blend with the background layers. Just stick the invert effect in front of the UnMult effect if you need to flip the colors.

One word of warning though, is that you may run into some weird behavior or bugginess in AE if you use a highly compressed video format, which most screen capture apps do use. I would bring the movie into AE, precomp it and set the size so it crops out the parts you don’t need, then render to a quicktime animation or PNG sequence and use that in your project and not the compressed format.

[Erik Waluska]

Here’s the link to the UnMult plug-in
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/free/

I should have also mentioned that you can use the paint tool in AE to write on as well and it will animate it as you wrote it, but the brush is pretty limited in that it doesn’t taper according to tablet pressure and you’re stuck with a basic round brush.

[Erik Waluska]

Correction, paint does respond to tablet pressure but you have to write pretty slow or it will come out looking jagged. Sorry, it’s been a while since I’ve messed with the paint effect.

[Tero Ahlfors]

Use the write on setting in paint.

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a9d3c597-7c66a.html

[Joseph W. bourke]

Or you could buy ArtRage Studio Pro for 59 bucks:

https://www.artrage.com/artrage-studiopro.html

and have a set of some of the best natural media tools out there, and you can record your animations from a Wacom tablet, bring them in to AE, then do what some of the answers above suggested – I particularly like Unmult – use it all the time.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Darby Edelen]

You can do this with the brush tool (cmd-b/ctrl-b). It’s on the tool bar. Every time you stroke with the brush tool you will create an instance of a “brush” in the effect applied to the layer. In the brush there are stroke options, these allow you to animate the brush stroke on and off in addition to a wealth of other options.

The brush tool doesn’t work in the composition viewer, you’ll have to use it in layer view.

Darby Edelen