Video to ASCII effect

[Patrick Deen]

This is probably the easy way… download my source file and see what you did wrong. Please post your findings it might be helpfull to other users… remember “sharing is hapiness” 🙂

Download the source here:
https://rapidshare.com/files/67890829/ASCII_EXPERIMENT.aep

[Justin Porter]

Ok, thanks Patrick, step in the right direction. I was missing the slash on the return tag.

I now have some text that looks like it’s being driven by the video. The issue I’m having now is that it seems to be having problems justifying it. The variable width of the characters make it so the lines come to different lengths.

I thought the way to overcome this would be to set the field to “justify all” in paragraph, however when I do this I get what looks sort of like some weird word wrap which screws up the whole deal.

I thought maybe the cause of this was that the characters were too closely spaced so they were getting pushed onto the next line despite the justification, but this seems to happen until I set the number of collumns down to a ridiculously low number (like 10) and there’s huge spaces in between each letter.

You’d think maybe that would be a problem with my tracking being set too high, but it’s set to 0.

Any ideas?

[Justin Porter]

Here’s a picture of what it comes up with. I don’t know if I can post the source image, but let me assure you, this in no way replicates it.

[Patrick Deen]

This expression is set up to use the most dense character to represent black (@) and the most open character for white (space). If you use white type on a black background your image will look inverted. To overcome this you could invert the order of the characters in the density variable or invert your sample image (and use black type on a white background)

I see some outlined characters in your image and extreme variation in the spacing.
I suggest you use a more ascii like character like courier or some typewriter font…

You can’t seem to make out what is represented by the ascii art….
I had the same kind of results when I used a colour image.

I made a pre-comp with my video and boosted the contrast with the levels filter. I desaturated the video with the hue/saturation filter and to get a more predictable result I applied a posterize filter to bring it back to six levels of gray… in the main comp I inverted the colour of my pre-comp.

Did you get a chance to use my source file?

[Justin Porter]

Yes, got a chance to use your source file. It fixed the text not showing up problem. Thank you again.

I’ll try a different font, see if that fixes the weird spacing problem I’m having.

As far as reducing the image to black and white and playing with the contrast, I did that, I’ll play with it some more though.

[Patrick Deen]

Small correction on the setup of this expression:

This expression is set up to use the most dense character to represent white (@) and the most open character for black (space). If you use white type on a black background your ascii art will look inverted. I like ascii art better as black type on white paper.

[Justin Porter]

well, I got it working. Thanks a lot to Dan Ebberts, Moldyboot, and Patrick Deen. I know a lot more about After Effects scripting than I did a week ago, and I’m pretty happy with the results.

The trick for the spacing problem was the font. As soon as I set the font to Courier and the justification to left, it solved that problem completely.

[Olivier Vincent]

I am such a beginner here…
Could anyone help me by chance understand what are the step by steps for transforming a short video to ascii?
i have imported by 10 seconds video but the script does not want to run.

I must be missing several big things…

Thanks!
o

[Olivier Vincent]

I have downloaded your source file. But I can’t seem to be able to replace the “REPLACE ME” layer with my to-be-asciied own movie.

Any help welcome!

Thanks, o

[Patrick Deen]

Well, replacing the layer is the easy part… Just import your video.
Place it in the comp and make sure the layer is just above the text layer with the script. You can delete the “replace me” layer. I you’ve read the thread you probably have seen my comment on the “index-1”.

OK, hope this helps 😉