ASCII Art & After Effects

Easy-to-use scripts and other resources...

ASCII art, pioneered by Victorian female stenographers, has enjoyed brief periods of interest and cobbled together solutions for After Effects, but there's now easy-to-use AE scripts to speed solutions.

Read the article at PVC... ASCII Art & After Effects.

Typewriter effects in After Effects

Typewriter effects in After Effects at PVC crashes the "typewriter week" party of Video Copilot unfashionably early with a few tidbits on typewriter or type-on effects in After Effects. Highlights include 2 Red Giant plug-ins, 2 built-in presets, other free presets, and tutorials of various levels of intricacy. The status of Right-to-Left writing systems like Arabic and Hebrew is also mentioned.

SearchAndEdit Bundle on AE Scripts

The SearchAndEditBundle from Paul Tuersley on AE Scripts puts 3 scripts together for the price of two: pt_EffectSearch, pt_ExpressEdit, & pt_TextEdit. These 3 scripts lets you search and edit Text, effects, and expressions throughout AE projects at once -- handy for complicated projects.

The much anticipated ExpressEdit is brand new. The 2 others are newly updated; EffectSearch now has the option to do effect instancing, which was a popular feature request. Here's Paul Tuersley on ExpressEdit:

Kinetic Text Expressions for AE

Lester Banks notes an animation and expression on Vimeo by Danny D, Kinetic Text Expressions for AE (embedded below). Lester also points out a resource on another source on inertial bounce by Harry Frank (with downloadable presets), and by extension a thread on MoGraph.

Some related resources can be found at Motion Graphics Exchange and in recent posts here on presets and tutorials for gravity and bouncing (without the tweaks for rotation of course) . There's probably more on expression source AEnhancers. Here an example from Danny D:

Kinetic Text Expressions for AE from Danny D on Vimeo.

Wrapping text around a circle in After Effects

Angie Taylor posted a quick tip on Wrapping text around a circle in After Effects. There's another intro tutorial on the "newer" way to do path text at AEtuts, Animating Text Along A Path In After Effects – AE Basix.

Some addition details at the AE Help page Creating and animating text on a path, and Eran Stern posted a more complicated video tutorial, Tornado Text, that shows how to use per-character 3D text animation to animate text along a path in the shape of a 3D tornado.

The "old" way to do text-on-a-path was with the now defunct Path Text plug-in. It was very easy to use, and if you are working on a project that was created in an older version of After Effects and the Path Text effect was applied, CS5 lets you continue to use the Path Text effect. By the way, the first vertex of a closed mask affects control of mask paths.

More generally, Focal Press has free video intros to the AE text engine "Textacy" from After Effects Apprentice by Chris and Trish Meyer. Here's a sample:

More writing text in After Effects

Write-on text (or stroke or unmasked) has been a very common task in After Effects, and here's 3 more tutorials.

QuickTip – Fast And Easy Text Writing With Particular by Antwan at AEtuts shows:

"the quickest technique for typing words with Particular. Its really handy and easy to setup and it will save you tons of time especially when you want to write a longer word or even a sentence."

Shortformvideo also has a new one, similar to one long out-of-print from Total Training, AE Tutorial – Laser-etched metal title (part 1 embedded below):

"Here’s a new two-part tute on how to create a laser effect that burns your text into a sheet of metal. While this can be achieved using CS3, it’s a lot easier with the Convert Text to Masks option in CS4 and CS5, so I’m using CS5 for this one.

I ran over a bit on part two and had to butcher it to fit into the 15-minute limit – so it’s a bit choppy, and I cut out the parts where I added a flicker to the laser highlight, masked the smoke layers, and re-adjusted the keyframe positions on the Opacity values."

See also Animated Handwriting in After Effects by Corey Barker (uses a stroke effect), Mattrunks' Light Painting Tuto After Effects: Light Effects without plugins, QubaHQ's resurrected Efficient Method for Text Reveal in After Effects, and [later] another tutorial yielding a common look, Laser Writing in After Effects, by Rob Mize.

There's more in the mists of the past and on YouTube, depending on search terms, but here's 1 more related resource, Light graffiti in AE on demos by Aharon Rabinowitz and Andrew Kramer.

Here's Mr. Grayson:

Shop Vac (kinetic typography animation)

This kinetic typography music video incorporates familiar brand shapes without really stepping on the brands themselves. Adobe people noted it, as it was created using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere and Toon Boom Animate. A labor of love by Jarrett Heather, it took somewhere between 500-1000 hours to finish.

For tutorials and other examples, see Kinetic typography as storytelling.

Kinetic typography as storytelling

Type in motion is increasing popular, as seen in Kinetic typography as a storytelling technique a new survey by Lauren M. Rabaino at the journalism blog 10,000 Words...

Read the rest in Kinetic type in After Effects at Pro Video Coalition.

Tagxedo: tag clouds with styles & stencils

Taking tag clouds a step beyond Wordle to tag clouds with styles & stencils is Tagxedo, which seems to have been done in Microsoft Silverlight (via jnack). You can add a custom stencil in the 2nd pass edit.

Update: Wordlings from Pete Warden seem similar at first glance, http://wordlin.gs/.

Wiggle Transform text

Andrew Devis posted a new tutorial, Wiggle Transform & Text in AE: which shares some basics on Wiggle Transform and converting text to shapes with the Layer menu command "Create Shapes from Text."

See also the CMG video on Wiggle Transform and Alter shapes with path operations in AE Help. Chris and Trish also posted overviews on Shapes in AE Apprentice #9: Shape Layers and The Shape of Things to Come: Shape Layers Introduction.

Wiggly Text selectors are described in AE Help, along with an example found in Examples and resources for text animation. In some earlier video tutorials, Chris and Trish Meyer explained animating text in After Effects, and Aharon Rabinowitz explored Text animators in After Effects Text Tips 2 and After Effects Text Tips 3 and has a few tuts on Shapes too.

“Right To Left” languages in After Effects

UPDATE: Creative Cloud incorporates RTL text in the release of June 2016 (Arabic video; Hebrew demo).




UPDATE:  Typewriter effects in After Effects at PVC (August 2013) updates the status of Right-to-Left writing systems like Arabic and Hebrew.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Saqib Naqvi shows off many tips for Accessing “Right To Left” Languages Within After Effects, a video tutorial at AEtuts:

'Right to left languages are widely used in After Effects, but traditionally these languages are not treated like text in After Effects. We have to instead covert them to vector graphics which limit many possibilities that are only possible with text layers. In this Quick Tip we will learn to enable languages and manipulate “RTL” text right within After Effects [and Photoshop and Illustrator].'

Simpler but limited solutions might be had by using After Effects scripts from AE Scripts: TextReverser (which reverses the direction of selected text layer), ArabicText (which maintains the integrity of Arabic medial letteforms), and RTL Animation Preset Typewriter-RTL. Hebrew users might look at this tutorial from Eran Stern for an alternate way to enter Hebrew into After Effects.

By the way, check out DecomposeText from AE Scripts, which breaks up text by character, word, or line into separate layers.

ASCII art in After Effects

This article was updated on Pro Video Coalition as ASCII Art & After Effects.

ArabicText: script for Arabic text flow in AE

UPDATE: Creative Cloud incorporates RTL text in the release of June 2016 (Arabic video; Hebrew demo).



 
UPDATE:  Typewriter effects in After Effects at PVC (August 2013) updates the status of Right-to-Left writing systems like Arabic and Hebrew.

____________________________________

AE Scripts has another script for text manipulation in After Effects, ArabicText, by Salahuddin Taha. Arabic, Hebrew, and other texts are written from right to left, but AE flows letters from left to right in the Composition panel (oddly, the Layer Name stays correct).

TextReverser, from LLoyd Alvarez fixes the flow when the letters are standalone, but broke the letter back into individuals. Arabic is cursive and has medial letterforms, and needed another approach.

Later: There's now an Animation Preset, Typewriter-RTL, that "only works with 2 keyframes that reveal the text from beginning to end."

An Alphabet Soup of Fake Text Particles

Lester Banks noted a new 65-minute After Effects tutorial by Quba Michalski, Tutorial: Alphabet Soup (Fake Text Particles). Quba says:

"Rather than using Trapcode Particular (which many of you may not have installed) or CC Particle World (which really could use an update to its coordinate system) the project fakes particle simulation through use of text animators. This quite lengthy tutorial is derived from another Video Bits project I created a while ago."

Alphabet Soup Tutorial Preview from Quba Michalski on Vimeo.

Two tutorials for changing Source Text and numbers

VideoHive has a new video tutorial by Topher Welsh , AE Quicktips #5 Changing Source Text. Topher discusses using a single layer to animate a variety of Text Layer messages by changing the Source Text parameter, and hiding the Hold keyframe changes in motion blur.



Meanwhile over at Red Giant in Look Ma! No 3rd-party plug-ins!, Aharon Rabinowitz skips the Hold keyframes to share workarounds for using numeric Text (for game scores and other digital readouts). You can do what he's doing with just the Numbers filter, but a door is opened to other purposes as the tutorial uses a Null, a Slider Control, and 2 expressions by Dan Ebberts:

1. (Not sure why it was needed) Round to the nearest whole number:
s = thisComp.layer(”Null 1″).effect(”Slider Control”)(”Slider”);
Math.round(s)

2. Layer marker triggers addition to current value:
s = effect(”Slider Control”)(”Slider”);
n = 0;
if (marker.numKeys > 0){
n = marker.nearestKey(time).index;
if (marker.key(n).time > time){
n–;
}
}
s + n

Update: in another approach Colin Brady helps you in Overcoming limitations of the Numbers effect in After Effects.

Motionworks redesigned

Motionworks is back and looks nice. They've leveraged the old content in categories with room to grow.

The 3D motion tag cloud for Word Press is cool.

Leveraging tools for journalists

Wordle for tag clouds and more,
mostly via Andy Dickinson:

• Invisible Inkling's Online Tools List,
• Tools You Can Use group at Wired Journalists,
• How to create graphs and charts that pop,
• Embeddable slides and other tools for journalists,
  
• Flickr’s superior slideshow tool.

Update: Fact checking resources like PolitiFact, SourceWatch, and FactCheck.org can be handy too. See the recent Moyers Jounal segment for a summary and discussion. FactCheck missed an EIA summary of oil production per state when criticing McCain (who got it wrong anyway), so not all conclusions are bulletproof.