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Spawn black rectangle behind text (subtitle)
Hi I wonder if its possible to automatic show a black bar behind the text.
Im thinking like in word etc you have one option that is like a mark pen. Is it any similar effect in AE? -
7 Replies
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That feature isn’t built in to AE, but you can fake it:
Duplicate your text layer.
Tie the duplicate’s source text to the original with the pick whip.
Apply the Levels effect to the duplicate.
Go to the Levels channel drop down and choose alpha.
Crank it way up.
Apply Generate>Fill.
Choose black as the fill color.That should work. My AE machine’s in the middle of a render or I’d test this, but that sounds like the recipe I used when I had to do that. Now, you have to be sure the font, formatting, etc. is the way you want it before you do this. The only thing linked between the layers is the source text – not any formatting.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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michael’s method may work, but if you just want a solid bar/plate behind the text that changes size based on the text length, then this is the simplest recipe that i’ve found:
- add set channels to text layer and change ‘set alpha to source:’ to ‘full’
- add the fill effect
- add cc composite
if you need to expand the rectangle around the text, add fast blur before the set channels effect and increase blur as needed.
to change the opacity of the bar/plate you can adjust the opacity of the fill effect and uncheck the ‘rgb only’ option in cc composite.
this method will add the bar/plate to the whole text field, if you need to add it to just a selection of text, like to highlight a word in a sentence, then you’d want to use a separate layer and create a mask to reveal just the portion around the text that you want to ‘highlight’.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I like Kevin’s method better. I always forget about CC Composite!
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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of course as soon as you do it with cc composite, somebody will ask ‘could we put a drop shadow on that text?’ and then you’ll be splitting it up onto two layers… 😉
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks Kevin and Michael! I did use Kevins suggestion and it worked perfect!
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The only little setback is when you have two lines of text the black bar will be the full “textbox” (wich is always rectangular). So unless the second line of text is the same length ass the first you get a longer blackbar.
This I can live with or fix using two layers and mask away. I can also try not to use two line of text at the same time.
Cheers!
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I think one solution could be if you would have a font with all characters is just a solid square. Then perhaps you could choose this font and not use the full textbox channel but instead the alpha of the text wich in this case would just be solid squares.
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