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Motion Graphics Workflow
Howdy all,
I’ve been doing motion graphics now for a few years and one thing that I’ve always had trouble with is making my projects “friendly” when it comes to doing lots and lots of text captions. Previously, I’ve been going about things one of 2 ways:
1) Making a single master composition for on-screen text using a precomp containing all of the various lines of text, or;
2) Duplicating the animation for every single text caption needed.Both have pros and cons. Having a single master means making adjustments along the way is easy, but you can’t batch render anything, as there’s only one final composition. Conversly, you can batch render easily by making a duplicate for every caption, but if you need to tweak the animation, you’ve got to change every single duplicate you’ve created.
Sometimes it’s just as simple as having a single, “textless” master animation that you can put behind your captions, but sometimes the text is just too deep in the animation to make that workable.
Now that I’m working on some really big projects, and having to incorporate foreign language versions, it’s becoming a bigger issue, and I can’t be the first person to encounter this. Just wondering what tricks and methods other people have used to make this whole process smoother.
It would be great to see what you guys have come up with.
Thanks,
Tristan -
2 Replies
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Don’t forget that your ‘duplicates’ (with each of the different text items) can contain a nested pre-comp that points back to a single animation. That way you still only need to tweak one comp when changes are needed.
Cheers
A
Vertigo Productions
https://www.vertigo.co.uk -
I recently had a project where I needed to create about 200 different text comps.
The type of trivia you might see at the theater before a movie. Animate
question in…pause…animate answer in.I found this catfish Supergenerator by Steven Nicholson and once
I figured it out how to format my text correctly it took about
5 minutes to create all 200 seperate comps. It was a cool moment.I did run into some problems with text lines that were longer than 60 some
charectors or so but there is a 3 line version
as well if you scroll down. That fixed it for me.
I imagine it could be modified for as many lines of text as
you need.
here is a link
https://www.aenhancers.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1083I also ran into this cool looking one over at https://www.crgreen.com/aescripts/
that Im looking forward to trying out soon-A description from the site.
crg_Text_from_File.jsx* Dan Ebberts made a nifty script for importing a text file as text layers. This script is based on that, but it goes a bit further, giving you a few more options, like line spacing, or creating just one text layer containing all the text.
updated 3-29-2009 Now with “live leading” feature (expression-based adjustable line spacing option).
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