hi guys, im doing a visual research project, i have chosen music through visual representation (Thrilling i know), but it was the best choice, anyway, i have done my project it is finished, all my stuff is ready to go on the wall, BUT, i have had an idea to do somethings in after effects, like have the words DISCO for example, sort of booging away on screen, each letter doing something different in a disco kind of way, just to be playing on a pc/mac by my work.......my point is, would affter effects be the best to do this type of thing in....i know there is flash, but after effects seems to make it easier with the effects you can add etc,etc, flash seems hard, and you need to know your way around it to produce something brill, and i dont know it that well, so just some advice from people who use it would be great.
The new text tool in AE kicks ass.. I'm terribly familair with Flash but I can assure you that the text tool will be much more fun to work with unless you are really famialir with flash.
Hmmm, flash seems to have to much layers, keframes etc,etc......puts me off cause i dont know it really well, can do basic things, but not impresive, so thanks for the advice, will definatley give AE a blast, hear Version 6 is brill.
AE6's texttool sucks... big time. (it is kind of like the Paint tool)
It has lots of nice features but the quality of the interpolation (visual quality) is horrible. (paint having great features but no way to make use of them) I still use Illustrator text for for animating text because of this.
But... There is this company (think they are called Anarchy FX) that make a massive suite of plugins for all sorts of nasty text manipulations. Check them out.
You're crazy .. I can can reduce practically any text animation to one layer whereas with Illustrator files you need to break everything into multple layers to aniamte text. I don't think you understand how the text tool works. In regards to the paint tool well that's another story alltogether.
I am fully aware of the features in the text tool... They ARE great. What sucks is the "edge smoothing" / the interpolation of the outline when moving and scaling text. On both Mac and Win versions of AE6 I get really nasty flickering problems when texts are scaled and moved. This is really obvious on smaller texts (ofcourse). Using the old Basic Text effect of illustrator texts do not have this problem.
I don't know what they have done but it does not look good enough for me.
I compare this to the Paint tool since it too has some amazingly advanced features. Really top notch stuff... BUT... You can only get at thouse features by folding open them in the timeline. There is no "interactive" GUI aids to see how you are using them. The Paint tool cant even paint in the comp window only the layer window so you cant see what you are revealing with the eraser (nice going).
Look at the vertical lines on the "N" in "New text" or any vertical lines. You can see them flicket slightly. Depending on the size and type of transformation this can be more of less obvious but every time I have tried to use the new text tool I have had to redo it because of these problems.
That does not really matter since adding an "animator" for the text produces a flickering too. Just in a slightly different way. And that scale value scales each letter individually not the whole text.
I have even tried making huge texts (1500px wide) and then scaling them down, put them in precomps and then scaled the precomps. This lessens the effect but does not compare to the old text or Illustrator files.
Using the "normal" scaling should not produce this type of result though. It does not happen with any other type of layer I know of.
I think Adobe copied the code for Photoshops text and put it in AfterEffects without adding the ability to choose "Smooth" interpolation as in Photoshop.
No i actualy think they are rasterized after the text functions are run, i must test this as soon as i get time, because it looks like a classic pixel scaling prob. But you could try to export as swf and import thet back offcourse?
Or use the "workaround" of selecting "Create Outlines" for the text layer. Ofcourse any and all animations done to the text are lost so...
What is different about this problem from any "classic" scaling issues is that the transition of a pixel lighting up looks slightly uneven and jerky. It is like they have somehow got a rounding error in there somewhere of something.
Put up an example some where. So far I have not run into any issues and I have done a good deal of stuff with them. If you scale the layer at all then you will pixel. In fact it will be totaly jacked. but If you increase your font size instead, it'll remain smooth. The flicker I have no seen yet, but maybe I'm not doing the same thing you are.
I found you can get the AE6 text engine to not flicker by doing this: -Layout your text normally in main comp. -Create double size comp and paste text in, scale to match what is in main comp. -Render, but resize to normal size in render menu. -Composite rendered text into main comp.
This worked really well for me on a project where I was moving the tracking very slowly. No more crawling. I know this is an old post, but I just found it.