Text Tracking Problems

[Mike Clasby]

I see what you mean, the tracking in AE6.5 does the same thing, pushing the letters right from a stationary first letter.

For tracking I used this expression on Animator 1, Tracking Amount (Alt Click the Tracking Amount Stopwatch and Paste in the expression). There also needs to be an Animator 2 (Position):

temp = text.animator(“Animator 1”).property.trackingAmount;
m = 1; // multiplier, use this to tweak center
[ – temp * m, value[1]]

The expression tells the text to move the position in the minus X direction, the same amount as the tracking.

The “m” in line two is what I call multiplier, it adjusts where the center of your tracking is and happens to be “how many letters are to the left of the center letter”. In otherwords, If there are three letters in the word you want to track evenly, m = 1 (1 letter to the left of the center letter) will make it work perfectly. If there are seven letters in the word, m = 3 (3 letters are to the left of the center letter). For a word with 8 letters, m = 3.5 works perfectly. There is probably a way to do this with expressions and a little math, but I don’t know how to find out how many letters there is in the word via expressions, so you need to do a little math to make “m” center your tracking spread.

I got the original expression by creating an Animator 1 (clicking the little Triangle next to “Animate”>Tracking, then creating a second Animator, Animate>Position. Then pickwhipping the Position to the tracking and making it X only (replacing the Y “temp” with “value[1]” in line 2). I changed the X temp to – temp. I then added that whole ” * m” (times m) for a multiplier to make it center correctly. Counting the number of letters to the left or right of the center letter solves that.

You could have done this with Anchor Point instead of Position but that would have messed up any rotation you might want to add.

Good luck.

[Mike Clasby]

I’m sorry, the expression above is on the Animator 2, Position Stopwatch, not on the tracking.

The expression is telling the position to adjust to the amount of tracking in Animator 1.

My bad.

[Darby Edelen]

[floodjlc] “I am trying to simply make my text track out left and right.”

I don’t have AE near me right now, but I’m pretty sure all you need to do is Center align your text in the Paragraph tab.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Mike Clasby]

Bravo. Brilliant, and so much easier than my round-about Rube Goldberg solution. Maybe I need to get better aquainted with text.

[Jason Corey]

Thanks for the info. My editing computer has been down for a couple days but I will try it later tonight when I get home from work.