Aligning icons to text & Text Styling across multiple projects

[JamesWade_SID]

I'm animating a large number of menu screens for a client (100+ projects & exported video files)

Each video is essentially a short piece of footage followed by a static (ish-background elements "wiggle") screen with the menu content on it. - I have the menu content as a static pre-comp which I insert into an animated background comp and do a basic opacity fade to bring the menu content in.

Each menu item displays the Item, Kcals, Price, description & a set of Icons denoting healthy choises and dietry indications (vegetarian etc) - Screenshot attached for clarification

I have 2 questions to aid in my workflow:

- Is there a way to save Paragraph & Character styles as per InDesign to keep spacing consistent and make formatting the menu quicker - if this is possible is it possible to import these styles from one project to another?

- Is there away to align icons to text baselines (currently these are imported PNG icons) or insert them inline with the text layer

Formatting the text line by line and placing the icons by eye for each of the many videos is tedious and I'm willing to spend a little extra time on project setup to avoid this.

Any tips massively appreciated

Cheers

[Mylenium]

You can import prtojects into projects and use sourceRectAtTime() expressions to align stuff with text. That basically answers both your questions. You'd create a template project with the sourceRectAttime() all set up to reference the text width and baseline (not directly accessible, so you may have to add soem extra pixels here and there) plus the values for the icons and then from there save animation presets ore import the project over and over, renaming the base comp as needed. The icons can also be animated by placing them staggered in suitable pre-comps and enabling time-remapping, then control that value, directly or by whatever expression-driven means you deem suitable to display the correct icons. And if you want to go even further you can also create motion graphics templates/ essential graphics, though those come with their own limitations and caveats. the big words are all there and you can research the techniques using the online help or finding tutorials.

Mylenium