quick way to overlay text to display the file names?

Question

someone has send me a load of photos of wedding coupled to edit into a montage

they have carefully named each of the photos with the name of bride and groom

they want me to overlay some text onto the video, as each photo appears, the name of the couple will appear

its quite a lot of photos, about 100.

im just wondering , is there any quick way to get AE to do this without having to do this manually?

Rick Gerard · Accepted Answer

Select the type tool and then click and drag in the Comp Panel to create a fixed size text box. Your text will now wrap. Just duplicate the layer and drag it above the next image for each image that needs a name so all of them look the same and are in the same prosition.

Rick Gerard · Answer

Add a text layer above the photo then reveal the source text property and Alt/Option click on the stopwatch to add this expression:

thisComp.layer(index + 1).name

That will give you the name of the layer below the text layer. If you select the Source Text property you can save this as an animation preset to make it easier to use. I have it in my collection of over 200 custom presets that I use all the time.

I should mention that if there is a file extension on the layer name you'll have to delete it. I've been going to write some code to strip file names automatically but I have not gotten around to it because I rename almost all of my layers in a comp anyway.

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