DIY text roll-in effects for video

[xjas]

I want to create my own text roll-in & roll-out effects for overlaying on video, taking inspiration from demoscene scrolltexts and diskmags mostly. I have no qualms about scripting up some effects in Python or something, but I need a painless way to incorporate what I make into video projects afterwards. I'd also happily take a stab at more WYSIWYG style animating. Obviously I'd prefer to work with scalable vectors and TTF/OTF rather than rasterizing everything beforehand.

What's a good way to go about doing this?

To be honest I'm still experimenting around with video production environments, I'm leaning towards Blender but have barely scratched the surface & haven't gotten 'set' on anything yet. Open to suggestions.

 

[VileR]

I have no qualms about scripting up some effects in Python or something, but I need a painless way to incorporate what I make into video projects afterwards. I'd also happily take a stab at more WYSIWYG style animating.

Not sure if you'd want to follow my example here, but I've done demo-like text animations in... Photoshop. Its frame-based animation support and the various transformation filters are perfectly adequate for that, and it can render the results directly to video (File → Export → Render Video in CS6). For flexibility's sake I choose "image sequence" as the format, which renders the frames losslessly to a series of PNG files; these can be fed to ffmpeg (or similar) to encode a video in a lossless codec of your choice.

Photoshop does have its own scripting engine if you need more automation, but I've found that its 'Actions' (macro recording) facility is enough for such purposes. (IMHO; OFC, YMMV, etc.)

Obviously I'd prefer to work with scalable vectors and TTF/OTF rather than rasterizing everything beforehand.

That's a good approach, but keep in mind that certain demo-like effects do need raster manipulation.

 

[xjas]

Hmm, I have CS6 and I've done some animations in it (pixel art, animated gifs), but nothing approaching a long sequence in 1080p at 60fps, and never anything advanced.

Does it let you animate things by creating motion vectors & calculating them automatically, or do you have to position them frame by frame by moving selections around? To be honest, I've been using CS6 for years but I've never gotten a handle on its vector or advanced animation features. Maybe I should take a course.

I'm not thinking of any complicated raster effects, I just want to move, skew, and rotate letters (as part of text strings) around in interesting ways.

 

[VileR]

Does it let you animate things by creating motion vectors & calculating them automatically, or do you have to position them frame by frame by moving selections around? To be honest, I've been using CS6 for years but I've never gotten a handle on its vector or advanced animation features. Maybe I should take a course.

You can 'Tween' frames to calculate certain motions and vectors automatically, but I guess that's not very flexible; for things more complicated than straight lines and/or variables for existing "transform" types, you might have to use Action macros (which are still easy) or scripts. Probably not ideal, though.

Sounds like what you need is a scriptable animation tool that lets you manipulate vectors and font outlines -- a few years ago the go-to answer would've been "use Flash". Today the popular alternative is HTML5/JS, which is supposed to be easy and flexible enough... and probably has a metric crap-ton of free available libraries that could do what you want. But I haven't actually used it myself, and I'm not sure how to go about converting the result to video (maybe forcing a lower frame-rate, so that your garden-variety video capture utility could grab everything losslessly?)