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reading content from a tab-delimited text file
Hello,
I need to read sixty thousand names from a spreadsheet file, treat them and output them to png’s.
I wonder if there is a expression for the text layer in after effects to read the spreadsheet file and change the source text every frame to a new name.
That way I could output the comp into a png-sequence and every png would carry a different name with the same treatment.
Thanks for any suggestions
Til
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3 Replies
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That would be a pretty straightforward job for a script, but I don’t think there’s a practical way to do it with an expression. It might be possible if you could reformat the text file to something that could evaluate as an expression, but I think that would be more trouble than creating a script.
Dan
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Hi Dan,
that sounds promising. I’ve never written a script. Could you hint me in the right direction?
Thanks
Til -
If this is your first script, you’ll want to search for examples of each various pieces you need. You also need the AE CS6 Scripting Guide, and Adobe’s JavaScript Tools guide (available through the help menu of the ExtendScript Toolkit).
Basically, you’ll need to prompt the user for the location of the tab-delimited file. Then you need to read the file, and process each line to extract the name. Then you would update your text layer with a keyframe for that name. There are lots of details to take care of, but it’s a pretty good choice for a first script.
This is an outdated example that my still be useful for part of it (but I’m sure there are better examples available):
https://www.motionscript.com/ae-scripting/create-text-layers-from-file.html
Dan
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