Two 3D Text Crawl Questions

alfl's picture

NSFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bdr_2IAJWU

Two questions about that type piece:

1) What is that type of text crawling called? They were really popular a couple of years ago, and I'm sure there are lots of examples, but are they called something in particular?

2) How would you go about making one in QC? 3D Transforms, Image from Strings, and Timelines?

Thanks!

jersmi's picture
Re: Two 3D Text Crawl Questions

It's called "kinetic typography", and After Effects is the tool used 99.9% of the time.

alfl wrote:
2) How would you go about making one in QC? 3D Transforms, Image from Strings, and Timelines?
Add the Iterator, as you could set up your comp and animate the iterations to add elements sequentially. Then if you drop the iterator into a Render in Image patch, I could see animating across the entire scene. Good luck with it. Unless you're doing real time text crawls for broadcast or similar, kinetic typography is a lot of work in QC. Not necessarily to best tool for the job.

Achim Breidenbach's picture
Re: Two 3D Text Crawl Questions

My suggestion is to use an accumulator patch to store the current layout as pixels, rather than iterating over all words of your text all the time, even if they aren't visible on screen.

  • Use an Accumulator patch to store the current layout (make its canvas bigger than your screen, so that you can rotate it, without showing the borders.
  • have some logic (Java or LUA) to select one word by another and control the incoming animation of it
  • just render this word with an Image With String patch
  • display the Accumulator image (animated) and animate the incoming word to it.
  • once the incoming animation is done, render the new scene and store it into the accumulator
  • now get the next word, choose a different transition and start over.

With this technique you are able to do endless animations and not stalling for having too many iterators. Also you don't have to care about storing all the layout information for each word, etc. However, I think it can be difficult to choose the right animation for the current word. That what you showed in the video is heavily depending on the content. I don't know how you can incorporate that. Maybe you can have some instructions for each word what the animation should look like.

alfl's picture
Re: Two 3D Text Crawl Questions

FACEPALM! "Kinetic typography" -- thanks! I'll check out the iterator as well.

Cheers!

alfl's picture
Re: Two 3D Text Crawl Questions

Thanks! I was worried that storing everything per-word would get really complicated, yeah -- accumulator it is!