Text Layer Spacing and Expression Voodoo

[jaydon_design]

Hi there,

Background:

I'm editing a video in Premiere that needs to have animated bullet points float in at appropriate times. Some bullet points will be single lines and others will be multi-line. I decided to create an AE comp that had 5 text layers that I could then edit from within Premiere. My plan was to then duplicate that comp in Premiere for each section of bullet points that I needed. I ran into a problem when I had a bullet point that exceeded the width of the comp in AE. I could use a paragraph text field and have it automatically wrap, but that presented a problem when I added another paragraph text layer below the first one for the second point and so on. I didn't know of a way to make the second layer automatically move downwards when the first layer exceeded one line. Another problem was automatically indenting the text after the text wraps to the next line.

What I tried:

I thought that I might be able to just manually add newline characters from within Premiere to allow me to position the text where I want it. This started out promising and turned into a nightmare rather quickly. I tried pressing the enter key while in the text field in Premiere. That just submitted the text field. I tried copying and pasting a newline character from a note into the editable text field in Premiere. That kind of worked, but it made the behavior of the text field in Premiere rather unpredictable and unwieldy. Then, I tried just putting a '\n' character into the field in Premiere. That resulted in a \n appearing in the actual comp instead of creating a newline. Then, I went into AE to try and write an expression that turned the  '\n' into an actual newline. I came up with this expression:

text.sourceText = text.sourceText.replace('\\n', '\n');

That worked. When I put a \n in the Premiere text field, I got a newline. However, when I tried to modify the script to include an indent, it continued to properly replace the \n with a newline, but it didn't add the spacing afterwards. I tried using '\s' characters, '\t' characters, and actual spaces. This is the script I tried for that:

text.sourceText = text.sourceText.replace('\\n', '\n    ');

I contacted Adobe support about that, and they really had no answer for me.

What I need:

I need a way to either automatically or manually change vertical spacing of AE comp text layers from within Premiere so that the text layers I'm using as bullet points don't overlap on one another and they can remain spaced properly as a single line point or a multi-line point. I also need a way to automatically indent lines of points that wrap onto more than one line.

I realize that there's probably a simple way to do this that will fix everything, but I certainly don't know what it is. I would love some help with this one. Thank you so much in advance.

Jaydon

[Mylenium]

Forget it. There is no "simple way to fix everything". Expressions have no access to the actual font information, hence it is impossible to even calculate the amount of indenting - a space is a proper character, not some abstract amount of hot air. You would need to know the bullet's actual size and kerning properties to get a correct result. Simply appending spaces, tabs or whatever therefore solves nothing. Depending on your font the space couldn't even be half the width of a regular letter (including its very own pre and post kerning spaces) and then what? This will never work and it would still be a nightmare to implement all the typographical calculations even if AE allowed font acces. So no, you have to think of something else like using multiple lines and adjusting their positions.

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

My approach would be to set the type in Illustrator, import the AE files into AE and create the animations, export a lossless with straight alpha from AE or if the animations are simple and render quickly, use Dynamic Link in Premiere Pro to bring in your animated bullet points. I actually do this kind fo thing a lot. 90% of the time I render everything and I give the animation handles so I have a few extra frames to play with in Premiere. This helps fine tune the final edit and it renders a lot faster than dynamic link ever will.