[Alejandro Benavente]

Ouch.
Simple, obvious, basic AE reasoning.

Well, thanks a lot for the swift answer, Dave. Mental note: give the problem some thought before posting next time.

Cheers!
Alex.

[Alejandro Benavente]

Well, I found a not perfect but quite decent solution; I’ll post it in case someone finds it useful.

I first changed my color space to Lab. Looking at the channels, the info in the Luminance channel can obviously be discarded, and the “b” channel is almost flat. So I copied the info in “a” channel to a new layer; get back to RGB and that’s it.
This worked for me because my image grades only from green to red, not getting down to blues nor up to magentas, which would both make use of “b” channel in Lab. I’m loosing some info nontheless, but as my work is not for scientific purposes I can live with it.

Hope someone finds it useful, or better yet, that anyone can post a more precise method.

Cheers.
Alex.

[Alejandro Benavente]

You’re absolutely right, Jason, that solves it.
Here’s the weird thing, though: the character alignment parameter does’t show up on my text layer. I’m not sure what I may have done during editing but I just lost it at some point. Now, if I start over with a new text layer and apply the character offset, it does indeed show up, and setting the “adjust kerning” option solves the whole thing for me.
Never mind about it, though.

Well, thanks a lot all of you guys for your help.
Alex.

[Alejandro Benavente]

Thanks for joining the thread, Jason.
Your tip seems to be spot on, that’s the option I was looking for… yet I can’t find it!
I might be mislead because my AE interface is in Spanish, but under Animation > Range Selector, the only properties showing up are Start, End, and Offset, all of them percentages…
Now, the Character Alignment property does show up if I set up a Character Value animation, yet that’s not the one I’m using, but Character Offset (slight but important different behaviour).
I can add an animation property for Character Separation (I guess this shows up as kerning in Eng GUI), but the property is numerical, I cannot set it to auto or adjust.

As for the character shifting location… yeah, I thought about that. The string is already alligned to center, and that hopefully will keep things reasonably steady, the animation is quite fast. I’d really have to try it to see if it looks right.

Thanks once more for your efforts, guys, I keep working on it.
Alex.

[Alejandro Benavente]

Thanks for the tips, guys.

The animation is controlled with a simple text animator (Character Offset), a fairly easy setup. As this controls the value for the whole string of letters, it might not be possible to achieve the desired effect.
If I don’t come up with an alternative, I think I’ll give Bogie’s solution a try, even though it requires rebuilding much of the work (there are several layers of effects and animations on top of this basic one).

Thanks once more.
Alex.