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rickys37680177
rickys37680177
Participant
November 18, 2017
Answered

Changing text layer contents frame-by-frame

  • November 18, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 311 views

Firstly, although I've used After Effects rather a lot, it has been for one-off projects and I only use it when I need to, therefore my technical knowledge and after effects vocabulary aren't great. I always try to work out how to do things myself but I'm just completely stuck on this.

I have an animation that represents, layer by layer, the rise in global population from the year 1712 to present day. To accompany that animation I would like a counter that displays the year and the population value, changing year-by-year, frame-by-frame over 304 frames. I have the values as lists in Excel, the text separated by line returns.

<a href="https://images.creativecow.net/324411/population4.20000000_3.jpg"><img src="https://i1.creativecow.net/u/324411/population4.20000000_3.jpg" border="0" /></a>

I could use the slider control to alter the year value, but the population value does not increase in a linear fashion and therefore needs to precisely follow the values in the Excel list.

I thought I'd found a solution in the DecomposeText script but it took over an hour to run and left me with 100s of Frames, making the project very difficult and slow to work with.  As I need to do this for at least 5 similar animations, it's not really feasible.

Excuse my extremely wordy first-ever post, any help is much appreciated!

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Mylenium

    Export the data as Text/ CSV, paste it into an expression array and use something like this:

    mArr=[1,2,3,56,676,567,899];

    mFrame=timeToFrames(time);

    mArr[mFrame]

    This could be modified in a million ways depending on how you use it in your comp. There are also other alternatives like using string processing.

    Mylenium

    1 reply

    Mylenium
    MyleniumCorrect answer
    Legend
    November 18, 2017

    Export the data as Text/ CSV, paste it into an expression array and use something like this:

    mArr=[1,2,3,56,676,567,899];

    mFrame=timeToFrames(time);

    mArr[mFrame]

    This could be modified in a million ways depending on how you use it in your comp. There are also other alternatives like using string processing.

    Mylenium

    B
    Barat5E7E
    Participant
    September 27, 2021

    Hi Mylenium, This expression is very helpful. Could you help on furthering the expression where we can display the text/string in array based on its corresponding frameNos arrary.

     

    Example: Text to display = Text 1, Text 2....so on but based on frame numbers i.e. Text 1 to appear between frame range 10 to 50 and Text 2 to display between frame range 20 to 40.

     

    Any help appreciated.

     

     

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