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Topic:
Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
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saber_holder
Registered:
Apr '02
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Date Posted:
7/7 8:28am
Subject:
Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
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Hey guys, I've been trying to figure out an easy/fairly procedural way to do an effect with little luck.
Basically, my company is doing a job for a major client. The effect that we're going for is a body comprised of scrolling financial data that makes up a persons form as they
walk and go about other activities. We're working off of footage shot on a greenscreen stage, and for the first shot we've been working on, it was a fairly wide shot, and I was
able to acheive it through some roto, track mattes, and tricks. The problem comes when you get too close in. You can just tell it's text scrolling past a matte. The big thing
that I'm trying to achieve is having the numbers cut off cleanly in whole integers to make up the shape. Here's a simple example of what I'm trying to get in motion:
[image=http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a50/saber_holder/School/circle1.jpg?t=1215442350]
Instead of:
[image=http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a50/saber_holder/School/circle2.jpg?t=1215442376]
Now, I'm not really up on expressions much at all, but I've seen some of the capabilities of using the scripting, and I feel like this might be what I have to look into. Does
anyone have any suggestions or expression examples that could help? Also, what are my options for animating the numbers/type to cycle (other than range sliders and character
offset), and to get multiple rows of type scrolling at varied speeds? I've just been rendering out rows with horizontal scrolls at adjusted speeds, but I know there must be a more
intuitive way to do all of this.
I'd post an actual still of what we're doing, but I'd probably get fired :-p
Thanks guys... I appriciate any ideas!
-Kevin
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drewjmore
Registered:
Aug '07
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Date Posted:
7/7 9:37am
Subject:
RE: Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
- Date Edited:
7/7 9:38am (1 edits total)
Edited By:
drewjmore
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I've done some expression work, and looked at scripting and plug-in writing to compare their various capabilities. I think I can confirm your intuition: you need something more than just expressions. Those allow you to 'program' the animation of an animatable (i.e. has a 'stopwatch') property. Expressions don't really expose much in the way of image data, and it sounds like you need a routine that 'measures' the width available for your lines of text to fit within. I don't think that even the scripting language exposes enough layer/image data for you to process your chroma-masks the way you want here: I think you're describing a custom plug-in that can 'see' the edges of the masks and then force-fit lines of text inside. If there's money in it, I'd suggest looking on-line for an experienced coder to write that up for you. On the other hand, I'll see if a simpler 'trick' comes to mind in my down-time.
From a blank-slate, CG-mannequin mapped-over with your animated text seems like the best way to achieve the desired effect.
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Padawan of prj1
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Ryan_W
Title: Fan Films: Emmy-Winning Lightsaber Geek
Registered:
Aug '01
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Date Posted:
7/7 12:18pm
Subject:
RE: Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
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Interesting challenge.
If you used a monospaced (consistently fixed width) font, then you are dealing with something much more predictable. It may look strange for letters, but if you were doing numbers, it would be the way to go. If you think about your text as each character occupying a square on a grid and no character ever goes half-way off of their square (and they can scroll, as long as they go at a speed which keeps them fitting in the squares on every frame (moving by square width amounts)) then you could run your matte through a mosaic filter (or whatever they call it these days) that matches the size/spacing of your text, crush it to be white or black, and use that as your matte. It would never "cut off" any characters because they would be either completely in a square that is on, or is off.
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drewjmore
Registered:
Aug '07
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Date Posted:
7/7 12:43pm
Subject:
RE: Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
- Date Edited:
7/7 12:45pm (2 edits total)
Edited By:
drewjmore
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Riffing off of Ryan's thoughts...
What if you take your chroma-matte and pixelate it, say by dropping the resolution a bunch, and then upsampling the pixellated matte back to the project rez such that each text-character fits into one super-sized-pixel of the 'mosaic'?
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Ryan_W
Title: Fan Films: Emmy-Winning Lightsaber Geek
Registered:
Aug '01
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Date Posted:
7/7 2:10pm
Subject:
RE: Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
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drewjmore posted:
Restating Ryan's thoughts...
Fixed it for you. 
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drewjmore
Registered:
Aug '07
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Date Posted:
7/7 3:21pm
Subject:
RE: Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
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Ryan_W posted:
drewjmore posted:
Restating Ryan's thoughts...
Fixed it for you.
hmmm. not exactly, I'll see your and raise you a  .
The mosaic effect (as it was/is called in AE 7.0) seems to be what you were suggesting as the solution.
My suggestion was a little more complex (possibly unnecesarily so).
I just tried our two methods in a pepsi challenge:
The mosaic effect's strength is that it pixellates the mask in a single, uncomplicated step. I chose settings of 72 vertical blocks and 48 horizontals, and of course checked the 'sharp colors' box. My loopy bezier test-mask developed a 3-tone black-gray-white border. Set the layer to low quality, and the gray turns to white. Very easy to do, but the visual-center of the matte seemed to move up and left compared with the original matte-border.
The down-sample-then-re-up-sample method required nested comps:
Comp1 to hold the matte-image-layer,
Comp2 (at 72 x 48 resolution) containing comp1 scaled to fit, (ctrl-alt-F on my PC)
and Comp3 (back at NTSC rez) containing comp2 scaled to fit,
all of these set to 'low-quality' to preserve the jaggies.
This method does not move the matte's center-of-whatchamacallit, although it admittedly takes some extra "doing."
as I said, me-> .
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Ryan_W
Title: Fan Films: Emmy-Winning Lightsaber Geek
Registered:
Aug '01
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Date Posted:
7/7 6:07pm
Subject:
RE: Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
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Why would you set it to half-quality? That's probably why it moves, I'd guess. Just crush the levels to get rid of gray tones, like I said in my post. See if it "moves" it then.
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drewjmore
Registered:
Aug '07
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Date Posted:
7/7 9:08pm
Subject:
RE: Deceivingly simple scrolling text effect?
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It "moves" regardless of the quality setting, but crushing the gray out would serve the same purpose. It just seems to me that adding effects will slow the render, while reducing the quality setting should speed it up some. Visually, we're skinning the same cat.
The movement seems to be 1/2 the length and width of the unit cell, toward the origin. In my example above the mosaic-boxes are 10 by 10, and a 5x5 offset of the matte layer's position fixes it, but then you need to expand the edges to fill in the upper and left edges.
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