Automated info video

[garyk1639025]

Hello community,

I've made a video for my employer that is quite similar to this [facebook video link], plenty of which seems to be going around on Facebook these days.

My colleagues are interested in producing many more of these and so I'm interested in speeding up my workflow. Currently, I have to manually type in all the text, and manually resize the animated boxes to fit the text, and then manually insert and animate background images, or video behind each box.

I'm therefore curious about ways to speed this or parts of this up. In particular I've seen some examples of using excel to simply type in text, and locations for images etc and then the video is simply produced in an automated fashion. However, I have been unable to find the right resources to teach myself to do this (probably searching for the wrong things).

Any advice/resources would be greatly appreciated. If there are other ways to speed up the workflow which might be easier than scripting, I'll take those too.

Thanks in advance

Gary

[Rick Gerard]

The first thing I would do is create animation presets for the text. The animation preset could scale the text to fit a specific size if you wanted but I think that things would look better if you added additional lines instead of scaling the text or using a text box. You could also create the preset so that the text layer moved in and out of the frame based on in and out points. I have about 200 of this kind of animation preset in my Custom library. Here's one that I give away for folks to take a look at. Dropbox - flyInBounceDropOut.ffx

Create a layer or use an image, Size, scale and position the image where you want it to end up, set an in and out point and the image will fly in from the left, bounce to a stop and then fall off the bottom of the screen just before the layer ends. Something like this and a text document with your lines of text already in them ready for copy and paste would make the job go very fast.

There are several scripts available that will take data from a spreadsheet or a CCV file and create text layers but they don't do the animation. You'll still have to animate and insert the background images, but then again, if you write up or purchase some animation presets that fly the background images into place similar to the present that I showed you. Using my custom presets I can take 50 prepared images and a produced audio track and create five-minute explainer video in about 10 or 15 minutes. Not one keyframe is entered. I just create a comp from the properly ordered images, set an out point at about 4 or 5 seconds, sequence the layers, CtrlCmnd select a bunch of the layers that I want to move in one way and apply one preset, then shift select a bunch of other layers and apply another preset, then adjust the in and out points and if necessary the "hero" position of the layer so it is in sync with the audio track and I'm done.

I don't think you can find a pre-built script that will do all of that for you based on a spreadsheet. You could certainly build one, but you would still need to sync things up with the audio track by hand or at least prepare some markers to help you line things up.

[garyk1639025]

Hi Rick,

Thanks so much for taking the time to write such a thoughtful reply. It's really helpful to know that I can streamline the process so much using presets. I will give that a go and see what I can do. 

Gary

[PGZ@Mobibase]

check out Dataclay | Automating Digital Productions

and After Effects automation with CompsFromSpreadsheet 5 - YouTube

Great tools for automation.

Have fun !