Monday, June 3, 2013

Import your text with each word as an individual layer in After Effects

Step 1: format your text file to have a paragraph after each word (easy way - in Word, find and replace (ctrl/cmd h) the Paragraph, found under special characters, with a space, then replace space with the paragraph mark.  This will stop you from getting extra blank layers from duplicated paragraph marks.

Step 2:save this file (select all and paste into a notepad document, save as a .jsx file)
http://www.crgreen.com/aescripts/actual_scripts/crg_Text_from_File.jsx

It doesn't matter where you save it initially, so long as once you have it, you move it to the scripts file under After Effects.  On a school computer in the lab, you must have Prof. Souther use the admin password before it will copy in.

You'll find the scripts folder here:
  • (Windows) Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS5\Support Files
  • (Mac OS) Applications/Adobe After Effects CS5



Step 3: Restart After Effects if it was already running.  Start a new comp, then go to file>Scripts>and select the script you saved.  You'll get a popup window asking you to change settings.  Don't click anything there, just click ok, unless you want to make some global changes to spacing and leading.

Step 4: Select the text file you saved with the words you want to import.

Step 5: Wait for it to import, the more layers the longer it will take.  When the pop up window goes away, all your layers will be in the project.  Select and group into pre-comps as needed.

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