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etienne38
Participant
July 17, 2025
Answered

How to animate a text highlight without shapes ?

  • July 17, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 365 views

Hi,

 

I made this kind of animation for a company : https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vM9NglbeT80

I did it with a classic shape animation and a track matte showing/hiding blue and white text.

Now the company wants me to produce a lot of  animations like this. I would like to automatize the production, not to adjust each time every shapes under the text... tedious work 😕😕
I can't use any plugin, as the clients asked me. Anybody has an idea on the way to achieve this ? I tested multiple ways to animate text boxes but no way, for now I couldn't achieve this effect...

 

TIA !

 

Correct answer Gary Reisman @NBC

That should be relatively easy to pull off on a line for line basis with some manual tweaking.
You'd start off using an expression (or a script) that will automatically create a perfectly sized box to match the lenght of your line of text.  Then you could just animated it's horizontal size (or get fancy with another expression that animates it's scale based on width, and then use as a track matte to reveal the type.  Also, rather than use two lines of type, you could set a solid on top that uses the type as a matte, and then reveal that solid, so you'd only have to use one line of type (vs doubling up)

 

1 reply

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Gary Reisman @NBCCorrect answer
Inspiring
July 17, 2025

That should be relatively easy to pull off on a line for line basis with some manual tweaking.
You'd start off using an expression (or a script) that will automatically create a perfectly sized box to match the lenght of your line of text.  Then you could just animated it's horizontal size (or get fancy with another expression that animates it's scale based on width, and then use as a track matte to reveal the type.  Also, rather than use two lines of type, you could set a solid on top that uses the type as a matte, and then reveal that solid, so you'd only have to use one line of type (vs doubling up)

 

    E
    etienne38Author
    Participant
    July 18, 2025

    Thank you for your answer. I am going to explore the way to design a script for this. 

    I have to create a shape that fits perfectly with text size, indent, leading, etc. Anybody knows where I can find documentation / tutorials about that ?

     

    PS. I also work with Da Vinci / Fusion and doing such a thing needs no scripting with the advanced text decoration features... 😕😕

    G
    Gary Reisman @NBC
    Inspiring
    July 18, 2025

    Plenty of tutorials and stuff online:
    here's one:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-vouVobMpE

    But if working with expressions is duanting, this will work well for you no doubt, and probably give more control/options


    https://aescripts.com/dynamic-textbox/

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