Read aloud text

Thank you so much for all solutions!

Ch does support blend modes, simple clipping masks, and there is also a Fader behavior (only affects opacity, though, so it won't change colors except via blending), so there are probably ways to use those to accomplish this, though Alan's suggestion about creating a duplicate of the text layers in a different color and using swap sets to control the timings for showing each word/words is probably the easiest way.

In any case (assuming you don't just go the Ae route for the text), I expect that you'll want to use a swap set to control it since that means you can edit the transition times in the timeline relatively easily.

DT

I would add that if this is a music video (a few people have done that), then I would strongly suggest After Effects or Premier Pro etc as I would typically expect to have multiple scenes. To get the music track I would layer that on top in AE/PP across all the scene boundaries, rather than joining music snippets from different scenes (which can result in popping noises at transitions). I would want the words aligning with the music track, so I would put the two of them together.

If just voice with a separate voice track per CH scene, I would probably consider using a swap set.

My only thinking is to keep the sound track in the same software as the writing on the screen, to make it easier to keep them in sync.

One approach would be to create a puppet for the text, put a swap set in it, then have a child layer for each bit of text with different word in red. Then bind keys 1, 2, 3, 4, etc to each child layer. So you record 1, 2, 3 etc keys to go to the next layer with a different word in red.  You can repeat the same pattern for different puppets (reuse 1, 2, 3 etc keys) for consistency.

If you had a MIDI keyboard, you could put multiple lines of text in and use lots of different MIDI keys to cycle through the lyrics (or whatever the words are).

Your approach might also be possible - I have not tried. Have a rectangle puppet that you move along and use a different color blend option, but I suspect this would affect the background as well. So it would only work if the background was black and text was white. And you would have to move and resize the rectangle each time, which could be labor intensive.

I suggest the swap set approach as reliable, although painful. Otherwise look at Prem Pro etc to superimpose the text over the top.