As abiding readers you might have noticed that we’re all about reducing repetitive tasks to a minimum. While we’re still working on a solution to administer coffee intravenously, we put together expressions to facilitate the creation of captions inside After Effects.
The concept is easy: you create markers where you want a fade-in or fade-out of the caption. Every odd marker determines a fade-in and will hold a comment with the caption’s text, and every even marker will create a fade-out.
Now bear with us. Download our file and change the appearance of the caption background, font, etc. – the expressions will make sure that the caption adapts its size to the content.
***UPDATE: We updated the package. A few more lines of expressions add the functionality of multiline text. This way, the caption box will always get the width of the longest line.***
Note that the average letter width works best with unispaced fonts like Courier or FixedSys.
Jake & Dan
Hi guys, great script. This is a major time saver for me. I have to do translations of the videos I produce in 5 different languages. Is there any quick way to make this support multiple lines of text?
Cheers
Andrew
Andrew,
There is. Please re-download the package, I added multiline support this morning after reading your comment. Thanks for your input and glad to hear you can make use of it!
Cheers,
Dan
Dan,
Thanks for that, didn’t expect you to update the file. That’s great! I’ve been testing it again, it works fine for 2 lines but seems it won’t go to 3. I’ve looked around in the code and played with a few numbers, but no success. I have no idea what I’m doing in there.
Cheers,
Andrew
Andrew,
we’ve simply set up the text field for two lines only. If you need more lines, double-click on the text field (“TITLE_TEXT” in our case) and extend its height to fit three or more lines!
Best
Ah, so simple. Great stuff. I will be using this script a lot!
Thanks
Andrew