[Justin Porter]

I’ve been holding my pitchfork, waiting, for a while now…

As a Motion Graphics artist who uses both PCs and Macs, I want to strangle Steve Jobs every time I go to the Apple store to configure a Mac Pro and see that the best (and only) pro video card option is a 2 generation old Quadro 4500 and they’re still charging $1500 for it as an add-on!?!

Typical Apple behavior, and none of their users seem to care, or maybe even know any different, so they keep on doing it.

[Justin Porter]

well, I got it working. Thanks a lot to Dan Ebberts, Moldyboot, and Patrick Deen. I know a lot more about After Effects scripting than I did a week ago, and I’m pretty happy with the results.

The trick for the spacing problem was the font. As soon as I set the font to Courier and the justification to left, it solved that problem completely.

[Justin Porter]

Yes, got a chance to use your source file. It fixed the text not showing up problem. Thank you again.

I’ll try a different font, see if that fixes the weird spacing problem I’m having.

As far as reducing the image to black and white and playing with the contrast, I did that, I’ll play with it some more though.

[Justin Porter]

Here’s a picture of what it comes up with. I don’t know if I can post the source image, but let me assure you, this in no way replicates it.

[Justin Porter]

Ok, thanks Patrick, step in the right direction. I was missing the slash on the return tag.

I now have some text that looks like it’s being driven by the video. The issue I’m having now is that it seems to be having problems justifying it. The variable width of the characters make it so the lines come to different lengths.

I thought the way to overcome this would be to set the field to “justify all” in paragraph, however when I do this I get what looks sort of like some weird word wrap which screws up the whole deal.

I thought maybe the cause of this was that the characters were too closely spaced so they were getting pushed onto the next line despite the justification, but this seems to happen until I set the number of collumns down to a ridiculously low number (like 10) and there’s huge spaces in between each letter.

You’d think maybe that would be a problem with my tracking being set too high, but it’s set to 0.

Any ideas?

[Justin Porter]

thanks Patrick, that’s a great learning tool.

I’m still having trouble figuring out why my text isn’t showing up though. I had dummy text in the field that when the expression is disabled shows up fine, text size is set to 72px so it seems like it should be showing up. Any other ideas? Where should the text field be placed? would that affect the expression?

[Justin Porter]

I’m trying to deconstruct this expression a little bit so maybe I can troubleshoot it myself.

Is the backslash that got left out in this statement: ” s += “r”;”, should it be ” s += “/r”;” instead to add a return character to the string?

Also, does the solitary “s” at the end of the expression put the final string into the text box?

[Justin Porter]

K, finally got a chance to punch this into After Effects.

I must be doing something wrong though. The result Patrick got is exactly what I’m looking for, so I’m excited to figure out what went wrong and fix it.

I created a text layer above the “target” video layer, put some dummy text in there and pasted the expression into the Source Text attribute of the text layer.

When I do this, my dummy text disappears and is replaced by nothing, only a set of fully retracted bounding box handles. Any idea what I could be doing wrong?

Again, thank you to all of you for your help, there’s no way I could have done this project without you guys helping me out with this script.

[Justin Porter]

Thanks a lot Dan, I’ll try that one.

[Justin Porter]

Thanks again for your Help Kevin, I’ll post this quagmire in the scripting forum and I’ll post back here as soon as I’ve worked out a solution.

Justin