At the risk of gilding the lily, I’m also looking at using the marker comment property to generate the subtitle text instead of Source Text keyframes, i.e:

marker.nearestKey(time).comment

This method has the advantage that the entire Captions layer can be reformatted in one go – also some subtitle importers create the text only in the marker…

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Ah yes, this is perfect – I did see the opacity trick somewhere when I was hunting around!

I’m so grateful for your time in helping me with this. It’s a truly elegant solution.

All the very best…Shaun

That’s incredible, thank you so much for your swift response – amazing! I’ve learned such a lot from you.

There’s probably no way round this but I’ve now noticed that if I import the subtitles centred in the frame, After Effects centres each partial line as the the line builds – so with each new word the line jumps around as it gets centred. If…

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Also to clarify, each subtitle is a single line of text and the next subtitle appears where the previous subtitle was. The effect is a bit like when you see live subtitling on a news prog, each word appears after the last, then the whole line disappears when the next line starts.

Thanks for your reply Dan.

For any given line of Source Text keyframed on a text layer, I’d like to be able to build it word by word, timed using markers that I put on that text layer or a null. I’ve attached a grab; the first word of each subtitle already has a marker, and I’ve manually added extra markers where I’d like the remaining words to…

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I use TypeMonkey, the Rolls Royce for creating whizz bang captions, but recently a client wanted *subtitles* animating in the in vogue word-by-word fashion. Whilst TypeMonkey can do this, it’s overkill for the job – needs a lot of setup outside Ae for the marker track and it takes a long time realign each line into the lower subtitle… Read more