[Chris Olsen]

Found this in the scripting guide:

app.project.rootFolder

Also, it turns out you can just pass in the project itself, because JavaScript is a voracious monster with no sense of decency.

[Chris Olsen]

A couple ways to do this spring to mind. One would be using C4D to affix a light source to an object (to achieve that ‘glow’) and animate its color value. Also, Video Copilot recently released a free plugin called Color Vibrance, which you could combine with a pretty soft Glow effect to copy that, too. Either way, I think you’ll want to animate the color value, maybe with colorization from the Hue/Saturation effect?

[Chris Olsen]

Okay, thank you for the great advice. I’ll make this adjustment!

[Chris Olsen]

The reason I’m not taking the prproj file is that this way, I don’t need all the clips that the project depends on. The file I get is an MPEG (so, not uncompressed, as I previously suggested), encoded in H.264.

I’m using Premiere Pro CC 8.0.1 (21), the 2014.0.1 release.

[Chris Olsen]

Hi Kelly,

I’m not familiar with 8-Bit’s process, but I’ll assume you’re using Keylight (and even if you’re not, any keyer worth its salt will have similar controls, and this advice ought to help).

In a case like this, with a lot of flyaway hair and detail, I like to use the Alpha view to see what exactly I’m keying. You’ll probably want a little semi-transparency around the hair, so I’d navigate to a good reference frame (where the issue is manifesting itself), and adjust the Clip White until the hair is a faint grey.

You can also increase the Despot Black by a very minor amount (maybe 2?) and that will sort of ‘glue’ the key together in those areas where the hair seems to break off.

I’d also say using Screen Pre-Blur instead of Screen Softness will likely serve you better here… Can’t say for sure without seeing your project, though.

In conclusion: Semi-transparency, clip white, despot black, view the alpha. Hope this helps!

[Chris Olsen]

Hi Alex,

I recently had a similar issue, specific to kerning. How I ended up solving it was creating an animation preset with the kerning I wanted (and whatever other basic character styles you want to start with), and then altering the remaining layers in a script I wrote, which generates a bunch of text layers and applies that preset to them. Then I used the myTextLayer.property(“Source Text”).value.whateverPropertiesYouWantToChange to alter those specific text layers. If you’ve never written a script before, this sounds like a good entry into that world.

The only reason I mentioned kerning specifically is because it’s an example of a text property that you simply cannot access via scripting, so the preset is a workaround.

Hope this helps!

[Chris Olsen]

One way to do this without external plugins might be to use Particle World, set the particle texture to the image of a sheet of paper you want to use, give them a long lifespan and change the opacity map so they don’t fade in or out, and then keyframe the velocity/gravity/etc. so they rest on the effect’s floor until the forces change.

I don’t have particular, so I can’t say exactly how’d you’d use this plugin in this case. Good luck!

[Chris Olsen]

Just an update:

Having moderate progress here creating an animation preset out of a text layer with optical spacing, and then changing the (“Source Text”).value properties, but doing it this way means I can’t use resetCharStyle(), which screws things up in unexpected ways, but I think I can set the values after loading the preset.

I hope this can be helpful to somebody in the future, but more than this, I hope Adobe gives us access to kerning via script 🙂

[Chris Olsen]

Thanks Dan, I’ll test this out this week and let you know what I find out. I appreciate your prompt reply!