[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Max, thanks for your interest, great questions.

1. Feathered reveal – its yes, and no at the same time. If you make boxes not visible at all (by disabling in the comp shape layers), then reveal becomes ‘hard-edged’. However, if you make a comp, do a duplicate, apply blur for the top layer and use set matte for reveal, it could be sufficient for the purpose.
2. Boxes aka lines, start time – it depends. Animation is controlled by markers – distance between startIn and startOut marker in the comp dictates how long animation will take. Inside controllers, there is a Delay parameter which allows to delay upcoming line any time you want. With that said, it has two way control over animation duration and upcoming line(s) start time.

Its just a matter of tweaking controllers and getting the result you want to achieve. In case if you decide to give it a go and stuck at some degree, do not hesitate to get in touch – happy to help accordingly either way. Cheers!

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Morgan, thanks for an image – thats a lot more clear with a visual!

Few questions:
1. How line’s animation IN relates to the keyframes? Is it going to change, or always remain the same few frames earlier from text?
2. The same about line’s animation OUT – how it relates to the keyframes in text layer?
3. You also mentioned that duration should remain the same (15frames). You mean line animation between keyframes, right?

I believe this should be done by interpolation among keyframe times. Will drop you a suggestion once answers provided. Cheers!

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Paul, happy to see your positive attitude – well done! If you are up to the challenge, then I strongly suggest you to go through all of those course. Definitely, it won’t be the fasters learning curve, but it will give you the most of clarity and helps to get a feet wet. From that point – no limits (well, allllmost! ???? )

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey TJ, basically, there are two general paths to take.

1. Render in AE render queue just as you normally do, but with ‘Animation’ codec instead of Quicktime with H.264. This is obsolete format and known as causing a lot of problems, quality wise. When rendered into lossless, you could encode with Handbrake or AME to web-friendly, .mp4 with h.264.

2. Render in AME directly to web friendly .mp4 with h.264.

People say that rendering through AME directly affects quality. But in my humble opinion, waiting while render takes place in AE render queue (without use of 3rd party plugins) is a lot more painful act and is not worth the difference you might get ☺

With that said, if this is just a casual type of render for the web, then I would go with direct AME output generation 99% of the time.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Max, don’t want to sound too much selling, but you could check the project I done for auto-fitting multiple text lines with their text boxes, automatically. Based on what you have written, it could be beneficial by all means.

Here you can find a description accordingly:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/81286643/Boxer-Multi-lined-Text-Boxes-with-a-Live-Preview

Cheers.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Chris, I just checked that script, and my questions are, assuming that pre-comp is built, and is auto-added in the main comp, and with these sample conditions:

Main comp length: – 60s long;
1st layer in point – starts at 10s;
xth layer out point – ends and 40s;

Now when script executed:

1. Would you prefer that ‘pre-comp’ actually would have its start point at the area where current in point belongs? Because now, pre-comp turns out to be the same length as main comp, but in/out points are trimmed to 1st and xth layers times.
2. Accordingly, in this sample above, pre-comp shall turn out to be 30s long instead, or not necessarily this way?

From what I see, and how I like things to be pre-composed, is that every pre-comps starting layer, would begin at 0s, instead of matching main-comp length. Is this is the same behaviour you are after?

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Paul, to be honest, its completely unclear what, project wise, you want to be affected with these controllers.

And to be even further honest (sorry!), this GUI is 1/100 puzzle piece from the whole picture!

Now after I finished this moment of pure honesty (haha), here is what you should or could do, assuming you have prior programming experiences:
1. Learn how to access .aep project items & layers;
2. Learn how to connect them with the event handlers from GUI (button click, checkbox check, etc)
3. Plan functionality how and what should be affected by controllers, build the logic.
4. Connect everything into one puzzle.

The best place to start if you are curious – Extendscript Course by David Torno. One of the best to grasp extendscript 🙂

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Morgan, welcome to the expression world! While your description is pretty detailed, any chance you could add an image sample of your lower 3rd, to get a better understanding what should be affected when? Cheers!

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Chris, below is a different approach which might be a bit easier to work with.

1. Add ‘*’ to the end of your texts layers source, by hand, or by expression to text source text.sourceText + “*”
2. Apply Text Animation to the text layer.
3. Set ‘Units’ to be ‘Index’, based on ‘Characters’.
4. In ‘Range Selector’, to start add text.sourceText.length-1. To end text.sourceText.length
5. Add ‘Scale’ and ‘Position’ properties to animator.
6. Adjust their values to properly fit position.
7. Alternatively, you could adjust anchor point position of the group, but above option will be easier and more convenient.

Now if you want to add ‘*’ only at certain time, you could affect this by adding animation.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Alex, thanks for a notice, this seems to be working somewhat similarly as my expected functionality!

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview