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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Make bars from text rows

  • Make bars from text rows

    Posted by Andrei Popa on October 9, 2024 at 11:26 am

    Hi community, I need some help with a task of mine…

    I want to create some alpha masks from a text layer, to use with a duplicate of the said layer. I need every row to be a bar with the height dictated by the highest/lowest point in the respective row. I do not really care how big in width this will be, I just need it for some vertical alpha masking.

    Right now I am using “Minimax” effect, with a big radius (around 700-800), “Maximum” operation and “Just horizontal” direction. This works, but this seems to work slow on render, my project feels heavy even if I have only a few of these layers. I was wondering if there was an effect that used less resources and basically creates a long horizontal shadow of my entire row of text.

    Thanks

    Brie Clayton
    replied 4 months, 1 week ago
    3 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • John Cuevas

    October 9, 2024 at 6:06 pm

    If you wanted to do each line as a single layer, you could lookup and use an automated shape box. Just google, there are lots of tutorials.

    If you want to do it with just effects. I did it by Adding a channel blur to the alpha, a levels effect to the alpha, a fill effect and then CC Composite. Please see my example project.

  • Andrei Popa

    October 10, 2024 at 9:24 am

    Hi John,

    Thanks a lot for the response. This is perfect. It looks a lot cleaner and it seems to take 10ms less per frame to render.

    I have only used the blur and level effects, since I use this as alpha, and don’t really care for inside colors.

    Thanks again for your response,

    Andrei

  • Brie Clayton

    October 10, 2024 at 7:46 pm

    Thank you for solving this, John!

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