Animating real handwritten text?

[fotograf_pal]

Hi, 
I am about to scan/photograph handwritten texts on paper and then cut out the text, perhaps alter the thickness, color and shape of the letters, animate the text in different ways - both indivitual letters and words etc. Finaly I am going to put the animations on video footage. When I search for inspiration and workflow methods I only end up with differnt handwriting effects that aims to mimic handwritten text. Perhaps my english is not good enough to find the right search words? Could anyone in here point me in any direction? 

For instance - do I need to cut out the text in Photoshop before bringing it to AE? Also it would be great to see some different artistic ways to work with authentic handwritten text in AE.

/Paul

[Mrtn Ritter]

You can animate a brush following the letters, but the brush tool don't have any nice strokes in AE. That's why usually you paint on a mask, which reveals the actual letters. But this might reveals strokes at a time, you wouldn't have made if you actual wrote it. Mostly intersection parts where one stroke cross another. This can be limited by detailed settings of stroke width and soft edge and those settings can be animated as well to fit different situations. It's a lot of detail work.

There might be a better approach - but that's the one I know and used to mimic handwriting.

*Martin

[Mrtn Ritter]

The same method works with paths. Paths have better control in curves, but no good stroke options as well.

*Martin

[fotograf_pal]

Thanks but I do not want to mimic handwriting. I would like to use real analouge handwritten text, digitalize it and animate it. 

Kindly,

Paul

[Mrtn Ritter]

Ah, sorry. I misread your question.

*Martin

[fotograf_pal]

Ok, I have been diving in to this topics some more and it seems as one way to do it would be to:

1. Photograph the texts.

2. Bring the pictures to Photoshop, adjusting contrast and whatnot.

3. Then move to Illustrator and vectorize the text images using Image Trace.

4. Exporting them as a PNG.

5. Bring the PNG's to After effects for animations.

6. Exporting them with alpha channels for final use in Premiere.

Any other thoughts? 

/Paul

[Mrtn Ritter]

When you do point 3, you will be able to animate the vectors in AE.

By doing point 4, point 3 becomes pointless, since PNG is not a vector format.

If you want to animate the shape of the letters, you need to vectorize your scan and pass over an *.ai file to AE or copy/paste the paths.

If you want to animate scale, position, color and things like that, you can just mask the text in Photoshop and export this as PNG with transparancy. No need for Illustrator and vectorizing.

If your scan/photo has a high resolution, your letters will be large enough for any scale animation. If you want to crank it up, vectorizing the letters would be helpful since you can scale them up in large amounts without quality loss.

*Martin

[fotograf_pal]

Ah, thank you! Then I could cut some steps. Great!

/Paul

[ShiveringCactus]

Most tutorials out there have you ising the path tool to reproduce the shape of the letters.  You can then make the stroke wide enough that it blocks out the lettter.  You can then animate the paths's end point and use the shape layer as an alpha matte to reveal the letters.

But there is another option if you're more comfortable with Photoshop than After Effects.  You can paint a gradient over the letters, tracing them with your brush.  You'd save this gradient separately to the handwriting and then use the gradient wipe effect to reveal the text.