hi i'm james and today we're going to be talking about textdelay what is it
why it's way better than the default text animator
and we're going to be talking about the nuts and bolts how it works and
how it could be better
textdelay exists because i wanted to apply a transformation to my text layer
and i want to delay that transformation per character
after effects has an inbuilt text or character animator as you know that
can essentially do this but the controls are super clunky and it can do
very basic easing and that's about it if you want to add a physics expression
if you want to add ease and wiz if you want to add flow you can't do that
you're restricted to this one slider that is basically
smoothness text delay exists to fix that one issue
so firstly a bit of a disclaimer text delay is a bit of a hack
to separate the characters text delay is using a very ghetto method since there's
no inbuilt method to for the plugin to know
which character is what and so it's essentially drawing a little
box around each character to separate them and that's why you need to use the
threshold slider if the characters are too close together
then you're gonna have to tweak the threshold to make sure that the plugin
is correctly separating each character
because unfortunately there's no way even though after effects i know
internally knows which character is which it doesn't provide that it
doesn't expose that information to me the developer so that's why we have
to use this ghetto method and it's why sometimes you'll
have to do a little bit of setup with text delay
but with that said how does text delay work essentially you apply it to your
text layer and then if your text layer transitions to the left the plugin kind
of like cartoon mobler takes every other character and then
reverses the transform so it looks like only one character is
moving at a time if you scale down your text layer then
text delay takes the characters and scales them
back up a problem occurs if your layer has motion blur for
example if you've transformed the text and it's
getting motion blur because you've moved the text and then the plugin has shifted
some of the characters back those characters still have motion blur
applied but they appear as if they're not moving as a
wise old man once said you can't unmilk a cow so once the motion blur has been
applied we can't fix that so the way the way we
get around that is you don't have motion blur turned on on
the layer and then for the one character that's actually
moving the plugin will apply its own motion blur so at least
the the motion blur is now correct this sort
same sort of issue happens when a user was like this plugin is cool can you add
opacity i was like yeah i can that sounds pretty easy
but then i thought if you have the layer at 100 opacity and then keyframe it down
to zero opacity now the entire layer is invisible but i
wanted to delay that so i wanted most of the characters to still be
visible and once the layer is invisible there's
nothing you can do so to get around that we've added
another opacity slider which is not the master opacity of the layer but
just a slider that you can animate and essentially wants that zero opacity
only the characters that should be affected are invisible
or transparent that's another uh complication we have to overcome a new
feature that is currently unreleased is we have hue shifting so now we've got
an angle slider which controls the hue of your layer and if you animate that
you can then delay it so for example if any of you were old enough to have
played the game runescape and you could type that wavy text that's sort of
like rainbowing you can now create that inside of text delay and the reason that
that feature exists is literally because i wanted to
create the runescape animated text and i thought actually this is actually
pretty difficult to do but text delay is perfect for it
um we created a promo video of matt in fortitude valley which is where old
office was um acting out a runescape scenario and
we'll show that now it's pretty embarrassing but yeah so
hopefully we'll be releasing that um feature soon but it's pretty much
only useful for runescape text i'm not sure if um if
you'll be able to come up with an actual proper use case for that going forward
i would i've been contacting adobe saying hey i know after effects can
separate the characters perfectly can you give that information to
the developer which they haven't yet but fingers crossed
because that would allow the plug-in to perfectly separate each character
instead of you the user having to sometimes tweak it if you've got some
other ideas for how to make this plug-in better or
some new features let me know don't send me a support ticket
and enjoy text delay