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Pasting text into after effects
I do about 5 to 7 thirty second advertising animations in After Effects every week. Since I work a full time job, in school full time, and have a 9 week old baby, so I’m usually up late into the night/morning working on these animations to meet deadlines. Problem is I’m sending projects out with spelling errors. There should be no reason to have spelling errors because the marketing company sends over a word document with all the on screen text in it. If I copy and paste all the text into after effects I would have no spelling errors. When it’s already 3 am and you have to wake up at 6 am to go to work but you’re working on an animation it’s hard to tell the difference between “compatibility” and “campatiblity.” I’m half sleep trying to type in words and screwing up.
This is what happens; I copy the text from the word doc and then attempt to paste it into a text layer in AE. Sometimes it works and that good, most of the time it will either have the paste option grayed out in AF or do nothing when you press Ctrl + V. I understand you have the have the text layer selected and “l” looking line in place as if you were going to type on that layer in order to have paste feature not grayed out. Even when doing so it does not always paste from the clip board. I’ve even tried copying from word then pasting the text into notepad so there would be no code linked to the text, then copying from notepad and then to AE but this still does not always work. Many times when I try to paste into AE it will paste the last thing that was in the clipboard in AE almost as if its clipboard worked independently from the rest of the computer. For example if “Big Sale” was copied from a layer in after effects, but now I copy “Order Now” from word/notepad, I can even confirm by pasting my copied text in to word many many times and it will paste “Order Now” But When I go to AE and attempt to paste “Order Now” AE will paste “Big Sale” the previous clipboard text. I have tried everything purging everything from memory in AE before I copy/paste but still will not consistently work.
This drives me crazy! I can be working on a project and copy/paste 3 lines of text just fine and then it will start this crap again. Sometimes I use flash when I have an animation that’s going to have a lot of text because it doesn’t have this problem. I’m much faster with AE and I like how smooth stills scroll across the screen in AE vs flash. Anyway, PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP ME!
Sorry if I was long winded but I’m very passionate about this issue and I want you know where I was coming from with this.Working with:
After Effects CS3 (whole CS3 master collection)
Windows XP system pack 2
Something like 3.2GB of viewable ram by my 32bit OS
Core 2 Quad processor -
4 Replies
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Restart After Effects, it’s common knowledge that there is a bug with After Effects where after a while it stops reading the windows clipboard. It’s been around for forever yet Adobe don’t want to seem to fix it.
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You may want to ask the folks at the COW’s AE Expression Forum on ways to import a .txt into a Text Layer.
UNtil you get an elegant solution, I recommend importing ALL the text into a single text layer. Then copy what you need from this layer onto other Text Layers as and when needed. This way, you’ll only need to copy and paste once between Word/Notepad and AE.
HTH
RoRKbroadcastGEMs.com – the leader in customizable royalty-free animated backdrops
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Hummm… that’s a great idea! I wish I would have thought of that earlier. It always seems to work the first few times I paste from another program but I always can copy/paste within AE.
Great solution!
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Hopefully mom and baby gets more quality time. 🙂
RoRK
broadcastGEMs.com – the leader in customizable royalty-free animated backdrops
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