[Filip Vandueren]

I’m assuming that when you type Carl in B,

C shows:

Carl Jones (1), Carl Jones (2), Carl Smith…

but also:

Carlos Esperanz, Carla Rogers, Geoff Carlston…

The expression for C’s sourceText:

names = thisComp.layer("A").text.sourceText.replace("\u200B","").split(","); // this makes it an Array, (after removing any invisible spaces)
word = thisComp.layer("B").text.sourceText.value;
regex = new RegExp(word, "gi"); // ,"i" makes it a case insensitive search
if (word.length > 0) {
	names
		.filter(a => a.match(regex)) // only array elements that match the word
		.map(a => a.trim().replace(regex, "\u200B$&\u200B")) // trim extra whitespace, then surround the found queries with invisible spaces
		.join("\r"); // turns the array into a string 
} else {
	"";
}

Now, you can’t set the styling of individual characters, so we have to faux our faux bold with a text animator. That’s why we inserted the invisible spaces (Unicode character 200B = “\u200B”) around every match we want to highlight.

Paste these keyframes on the layer C, and resulting Animator should be a “faux bold”

Adobe After Effects 8.0 Keyframe Data
	Units Per Second	30
	Source Width	1
	Source Height	1
	Source Pixel Aspect Ratio	1
	Comp Pixel Aspect Ratio	1
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Selectors	Expression Selector #1	Amount
	Frame	X percent	Y percent	Z percent	
		100	100	100	
Expression Data
txt=text.sourceText.value.replace(/\r/g,""); // text without line breaks because the textIndex doesn't count them as a character
sel=false;
for (i=1; i<textindex; i++)="" {<br="">	if (txt[i-1]=="\u200B") sel = !sel;
}
sel && txt[i-1]!="\u200B" ? 100 : 0;
End of Expression Data
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Selectors	Expression Selector #1	Based On
	Frame		
		1	
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Properties	Stroke Color
	Frame	alpha 	red 	green 	blue 	
		255	255	0	0	
Expression Data
rgb=text.sourceText.style.fillColor;
rgb.push(1);
rgb;
End of Expression Data
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Properties	Stroke Width
	Frame		
		10	
Expression Data
text.sourceText.style.fontSize/24;
End of Expression Data
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Properties	Tracking Amount
	Frame		
		0.8	
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Properties	Tracking Type
	Frame		
		3	
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Properties	Stroke Opacity
	Frame	percent	
		100	
Expression Data
100
End of Expression Data
End of Keyframe Data</textindex;>

[Filip Vandueren]

If you create a dropdown menu controller, the result (.value) of those is an integer (1-n) of which item is selected.

So you need to set up a dropdown menu with the options “period”, “comma”, “space” and use the value of that to get a value out of a fixed array (0 – n-1) that is also defined in your expression, and uses the corrsponding strings like so:

dropdownValues=[".", ",", " "];
dropdownindex=thisComp.layer("control").effect("thousands separator")("Menu").value;
selectedValue = dropdownValues[dropdownindex-1];

[Filip Vandueren]

Cc blend time, which you can access via the animation presets available here:

http://www.cycorefx.com/dloads_ccfxhd.php

It’s an officially unsupported but lightning fast way to just copy the previous render buffer back over the frame. Which means it doesn’t do what you expect it to do if you quickly scrub around the timeline. So clear the cache often and just do straight ram previews from start to finish of the layer to get the actual effect.

[Filip Vandueren]

The easiest way is to parent the 3rd to the 2nd and the 2nd to the first word.

Then give 2nd and 3rd words position properties both this expression:

[20,0] + [parent.sourceRectAtTime().width,0];

20 in this case is the horizontal margin between the words.

[Filip Vandueren]

There’s no easy way to just get the position of the final character.

Your best bet is to create a duplicate text-layer where all characters except the last one are scaled down to be 0,0%, and then use sourceRectAtTime() to find the pixel-coordinates of the layer, and thus the single characrer.

[Filip Vandueren]

Forgot to mention: to get a perfectly looping wiggly text selector, you can do this:
Set wiggles per second to 0
add this expression to temporal phase:

loopTime = 10;
wigglesperSecond = 1;
a=degreesToRadians(time * 360/loopTime);
r=360*(loopTime*wigglesperSecond)/(2*Math.PI);
Math.cos(a)*r;

add this expression to spatial phase:

loopTime = 10;
wigglesperSecond = 1;
a=degreesToRadians(time * 360/loopTime);
r=360*(loopTime*wigglesperSecond)/(2*Math.PI);
Math.sin(a)*r;

So exactly the same except cos vs sin. This will get random values along a circle, so after loopTime we are back at the start of the circle and encounter the same randomvalues. Similar to two dimensions of a noise() function.

[Filip Vandueren]

If you use a font like Source Serif Pro that has unicode glyphs for triangle upa nd trianlge down, then you can do this with a text animator.

Make a new empty text-layer, then paste these settings on them.

This worked perfectly for me with these fontsettings:

Source Serif Pro Regular, 64 px /38px leading, tracking -74,

But you can tweak those to get more or less spacing. And you should use less repeats in the sourceText expression

Adobe After Effects 8.0 Keyframe Data
	Units Per Second	25
	Source Width	1
	Source Height	1
	Source Pixel Aspect Ratio	1
	Comp Pixel Aspect Ratio	1
Text	Source Text
	Frame		
Expression Data
(("▲▼".repeat(30)+"\r")+("▼▲".repeat(30)+"\r")).repeat(15);
End of Expression Data
Text	More Options	Grouping Alignment
	Frame	X percent	Y percent	
		0	-33.3333	
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Selectors	Text #1	Min Amount
	Frame	percent	
		0	
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Selectors	Text #1	Lock Dimensions
	Frame		
		1	
Text	Animators	Animator #1	Properties	Scale
	Frame	X percent	Y percent	Z percent	
		0	0	0	
Text	Animators	Animator #2	Selectors	Text #1	Min Amount
	Frame	percent	
		0	
Text	Animators	Animator #2	Selectors	Text #1	Lock Dimensions
	Frame		
		1	
Text	Animators	Animator #2	Properties	Opacity
	Frame	percent	
		0	
Transform	Position
	Frame	X pixels	Y pixels	Z pixels	
		-28	18	0	
End of Keyframe Data

[Filip Vandueren]

It’s not that easy I believe, because the brackets could span multiple lines and you have to test for that.

Like I hinted, usually just a bit of extra horizontal padding can bleed them together.

BTW: I haven’t actually tested it in Premiere ? I hope it doesn’t break there ?

[Filip Vandueren]

Oh yeah as a bonus: since the marker lines are textcharacters you can do all kinds of fancy reveal animations with them by varying the type of range selector and or adding different properties instead of just the horizontal scaling I did in the example

[Filip Vandueren]

Thanks Yoan 🙂

I use calculations here to copy some pixels from another layer to this layer and combine it with the alpha.

That way we get the words of the text layer, but matted by the alpha of the marker.

Then we colorize and finally, using cc blend, the original pixels of the layer (again, the marker lines) are composited under the words.

It’s a way to do compositing using effects rather than with extra layers. Usually you have to take care that the layers are of equal size, but because we are operating on continuously rasterized text-layers every layer is interpreted as composition sized.