[Jason Guest]

Amazing! Thanks very much guys, this is one I definitely wouldn’t have figured out by myself.

Alex, I tried yours first and it worked straight out of the box. I’ll have a play with yours too, Dan and hopefully I’ll be able to make sense of how they both work!

I really appreciate your efforts, thank you.

Jason

[Jason Guest]

Hi there,

I have made a little progress with this problem, and my solution has been to use the “create shapes from text” command from the layer menu. However this handy little tool only does one frame at a time, so I decided to have a go at writing a script that would go through the work area one frame at a time, creating shapes from the text as a new layer (and preferably changing the in and out points of the new layer so that it lasts for just one frame).

However, I am new to scripting and what I’ve written still only does one frame. I’ve cannibalized part of a script called framesplitter to do this. I know why it doesn’t work; there’s nothing to tell it to change the current frame, but sadly I can’t find anything similar enough to adapt to my needs:

{
function ShapeMaker()
{
var proj = app.project;
var comp = proj.activeItem;
var activeLayer, workAreaStart, workAreaEnd, duration;

if (!(comp instanceof CompItem)) { // check if a comp is selected
alert("Please select a composition.");
return;
} else if (comp.selectedLayers.length != 1){ // check if a single layer is selected
alert("Please select a single layer.");
return;
}

activeLayer = comp.selectedLayers[0];

workAreaStart = comp.workAreaStart;
workAreaEnd = workAreaStart + comp.workAreaDuration;

if (activeLayer.inPoint > workAreaStart) workAreaStart = activeLayer.inPoint;
if (activeLayer.outPoint < workAreaEnd) workAreaEnd = activeLayer.outPoint;

duration = workAreaEnd - workAreaStart;

for (i = 1; i < duration/comp.frameDuration; i++) {
app.executeCommand(app.findMenuCommandId("Create Shapes from Text"));
}

}
ShapeMaker();
}

Can anyone tell me how to tell the script to move to the next frame? I can probably figure out the rest for myself.

Thanks,

Jason

[Jason Guest]

Thank you both; Walter I do have Mir, so it looks like we are on version 12 — very good news indeed.

Jason

[Jason Guest]

Yes, that’s right; I need the individual parts of the letters to be different colours. I’m in the process of learning Cinema 4D, but I’m not up to speed with it enough to turn around this job in the time available.

Thanks,
Jason

[Jason Guest]

Thanks Dan! That’s smart.

— Jason

[Jason Guest]

Hi Dan,

I might have moved the whole clip along the timeline. I find that if I start the clip on frame one (or pre-compose it) the problem goes away…

Jason

[Jason Guest]

Thanks, Dan, I hadn’t thought of that! Looks better now.

– Jason

[Jason Guest]

That’s perfect, and a lot less complicated than I expected!

Thanks Dan.