Separate Text to individual Character layers

[Dan Ebberts]

I don’t know about quick, but I can think of a couple of possibilities.

I’m assuming that you want each letter-layer to maintain its relative position. You could convert the text to shapes, duplicate the resulting shape layer a bunch of times and eliminate all but one letter from each layer.

Or, you could add an opacity animator that just exposes one character, duplicate the text layer a bunch of times and adjust the animator to expose a different character in each layer.

Both methods could probably be scripted.

Maybe someone will chime in with a better idea.

Dan

[Adam Buritsch]

Well, I wasn’t able to use those for what I needed, but your response did get me poking around in the right direction. I’m using a series of Animators to get the effect I was looking for. Thanks for the help!

-Adam

[Kevin Camp]

both would work pretty well…

converting the text to mask and then using this script to make separate layers from each mask might work for you:

https://www.crgreen.com/aescripts/

i do think that the ‘holes’ in letters like O will be put on a separate layer too, so you’d probably need to go back in and correct those… either recombine them with the ‘hole’ as a track matte for the outer portion, or copy/paste the hole mask onto the outer mask layer.

going the character animator route: add an opacity text animator to the text and set it to 0%, then add another opacity text animator (with a separate range selector) and set it to 100%. twirl the ‘advanced’ down for that range selector and set units to index. also set the end to 1 and add an expression like this to the offset:

index-1;

then duplicate the text layer out to build the string — note: the expression assumes that the first layer in the comp will be one of these text layers, if that not the case change the 1 value to layer index of the top most text layer. also, if layers are added above these text layers, the expression will need to be modified, or choose to convert expression to key frames to bake the values.

you could also create your text in illustrator, convert the text to path/outlines there, ungroup them and then, from the little menu in the corner of the layers palette, choose release to layers – sequence. then remove the layers from the parent layer and import the ai file as a comp.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

oops, to late….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Dan Fredley]

Don’t know if it’s too late, but here’s a script that separates out characters, words, lines, etc.

https://aescripts.com/decomposetext/

Dan Fredley

[Adam Buritsch]

Never to late! I come across this a bit so the all replies are quite appreciated.

[Hannah Hill]

What did you do?

[Lucas Schwartz]

Too late? Never. Your ghost is helping me years down the line. Thank you!!!