[Gareth Randall]

We pronounce the “h” in “herb” because that’s the correct way 😉

Actually I think the real reason is that the Pilgrims left England at a time when “herb” was pronounced “erb”. Over time the pronunciation changed in the UK, but obviously not in America.

Similar reason as to why you guys don’t celebrate Boxing Day after Christmas Day – the Boxing Day holiday wasn’t invented until some time after the Pilgrims left.

As for Norwich… there’s a Norwich in Vermont, and according to Bill Bryson, older Vermonters still pronounce it the British way, despite a general push towards “Nor-witch” 🙂

[Gareth Randall]

Hi Andy,

Great tutorial, but just FYI, Norwich is pronounced “Norritch” 😉

[Gareth Randall]

Thanks Stephen. I was hoping there’d be some whizzy secret way of automating it, but by hand it is 🙂

[Gareth Randall]

Thanks guys. Looks like the animated mask revealing each letter just as it begins to rotate is the approach that works best.

[Gareth Randall]

[Mark Spencer] “I’ve never been able to overwrite files, FWIW.”
Most of the time I can, sometimes I can’t. I’m not sure what makes the difference.

[Gareth Randall]

Hi Ann,

Just for future reference, it would be really helpful if you could include some kind of illustrative material, such as a frame grab or a video clip of what you’re working on. It helps us get a better handle on what you’re trying to do, which hopefully leads to advice and suggestions that are more useful to you 🙂

[Gareth Randall]

I’m with Andy here, you haven’t really explained what you want very well, but I’ll take a stab at what I *think* you mean 🙂

You’ve got a dog’s nose moving around, and you want the text to come out of the nose in some animated way before settling in a straight line. I’m not in front of Motion right now, but there are two immediate ways I can think of to try.

First off, a text path. Draw a shape that’s a curved line turning into a straight one – I’m thinking of an S-shape, with the top part of the S extending straight out to the right as far as you need.

Now apply that shape to your line of text as a path. Animating the path offset parameter should mean that you can make your text slide along the path, so that it curves around the curvy parts of the “S” before ending on the straight line. Position the shape so that that the bottom part is in line with the dog’s nose, and then track or keyframe as necessary to keep it in the same relative position as the nose moves. You should end up with your line of text curving out of the dog’s nose before settling in a straight line.

Of course, that will mean that the text will emanate from the dog’s nose with the last letter first, unless you’re using a reversed S-shape with the line extending to the left. I guess it depends on the way the dog’s nose is oriented in the frame.

It also means that the text will slide on in one piece. If you want the text to build up one letter at a time, perhaps with a pause between each one and with each letter following the same path, I think you’d have to do it with each letter as a separate layer. Not difficult to build, just boring.

[Gareth Randall]

[Mark Spencer] “it seems Motion is acting up on you and I’d suggest trashing prefs”
Doesn’t make any difference, I’m afraid.

[Gareth Randall]

Hi Mark,

Check out the final paragraph of my original message 🙂

[Gareth Randall]

[Noah Kadner] “there’s a Ramp behavior you can connect to most parameters- that help?”

The AE ramp that Praveen is referring to is a gradient generator, it has no relation to the Motion ramp behaviour. Check out some of Andrew Kramer’s fantastic AE tutorials on Video Copilot and you’ll see it used a lot.

On a related note, it does seem that AE’s ramp creates nicer-looking gradients than Motion’s gradient generator. Or maybe you just have to do more work in Motion to get the gradients looking as good.