Seamless, infinitely scrolling text in After Effects

[Music] the other day my friend Steven asked me do I know how to make infinitely scrolling text in After Effects and I said yes I do this is what we're going to be making so it's just text that goes from left to right forever you can make this timeline as long as you like and it will never stop to make a brand new project brand new composition in that project it's just 1920 pixels wide and that's important we're going to come back to that in a minute and just drop in a nice blue background I'm gonna put some text in here and I will put there it doesn't matter exactly where it goes at the moment I'll put that there and now I'll duplicate that by typing command D or ctrl D if you're on Windows and now I'm going to move that exactly the width of the composition to the right so we know that it's 1920 pixels I'm going to type a pea it's going to expose the position property and I'll click once on this one which is the X which is horizontal and I'll type a right arrow to get to the end of that and +19 to 0 which is the width of our comp press Enter or just click somewhere off and now we can see that there's a duplicate and it's off obviously off the stage but we know that it's there and that's going to be the one that fills in the gap as it keeps scrolling now the next thing to do is I will right-click somewhere on my comp timeline window here in the empty space I'll right-click go to new and make a null object a null object is something that doesn't render but we can use it to move other things around in this instance we want to I'm going to drag that to the top and we're going to make these to the parents of these two layers our text layers that null objects so on both of those and under this you could use the pick whip or I'm going to use the pop-up menu here select null one now they're both parented to no one which means if we move no one around then both of those layers move with it now I will select the null one I'm going to type P to expose the property in I'm gonna click the stopwatch on position which is going to set a keyframe now move the playhead to let's say 4 seconds that's how long it's going to take to scroll and it's exactly 4 seconds I can see over here and now I will click once on the number and I'm going to type the right arrow to get to the end of the number and this time I want to subtract 19 20 exactly the width of the stage which is going to pull everything over to the left and effectively is going to scroll it so it looks like nothing's happened but then if I drag in the tyre light you can see that it's scrolling from this keyframe over to this keyframe and importantly the text is in exactly the same place if we click on that keyframe all that keyframe the text is in precisely the same place okay time to make a sub comp or pre comp whatever you call it okay click on null one and I'm going to hold down shift and click down here which is going to select no one and our two text layers right click on any of those and choose pre compose that's going to put them all in a brand-new shiny pre comp I'm going to give it a name I'll call it scrolling text and I've got open new composition open here okay now the first thing I want to do is I'm going to type P again so that I can see my keyframe the playhead is exactly on that keyframe which is good that's what we want I'm just going to type in and that's going to make the work area I'm gonna bring the end of that work area down to exactly where my playhead is now I'll right-click on the work here and choose trim comp to work area so before I do that you can see that the overall duration of this now is 12 seconds when I choose trim comp to work area it becomes only 4 seconds long so we've just trimmed off all that other stuff at the end that we don't want so if I press play now you can see it's scrolling exactly how we like no problem and if I come back to comp 1 it's nicely trimmed down to that 4 second duration the next trick is to right-click on the scrolling text layer I'm going to go up to time and enable time remapping now let's automatically extended the duration out but if I drag over it now it disappears when it gets to that keyframe that's because it's not actually looping yet what I wanted to do is make sure that the playhead is exactly lined up with this keyframe so I it's to the right of the keyframe at the moment if I press this button to the left of the keyframe add and remove keyframe button it'll move the playhead so that it's exactly on that keyframe and I can tell that's exactly on key phone because now that rid that little diamond is filled in I'm going to hold down option Alt on Windows and click that stopwatch and that will open up the expression editor it's a little bit of JavaScript but don't be scared we're not going to do much I will type oh oh oh and it's automatically trying to guess what I'm trying to type I'm going to click on loop up or double click on it actually and then click somewhere down here just to deselect that now the last trick is sort blank here I just want to go one frame to the left there's a couple of ways to do that I can just type a page up key once and or if you're on a Mac you can type command left and then I'm gonna drop a keyframe in in this new spot which is exactly four seconds put a keyframe there go to the next keyframe and then I'm just going to delete it by clicking on that arrow it will take away that keyframe and now when I scroll you can see that the text loops and so we get infinite scrolling the one thing that I'm not crazy about is this big gap here so the text is still editable but I want to make it a little bit bigger to get rid of that gap so I'm just going to go back to the sub comp recon scrolling text I'm going to select my two text layers and now I'm just going to drag the size up a little bit so that both getting bigger and now when I go back to comp one you can see it's taken out maybe in a little bit a little bit bigger just to get rid of that space in there and make it look there okay good and now it Scrolls forever and every whenever and I can prove that by making the duration of this whole constantly ridiculously long like two hours zoom all the way out and if I select all and then hold down option and type a right square bracket to make them the duration of the entire composition even at 45 minutes or an hour and a half it's still scrolling happily away it's never going to give up it's never going to surrender what does undo to go back to where we were one more thing to note is that you can now change the speed of the scrolling just by dragging out the second keyframe so if I want it to slow it down we could drag it all the way out here and you can see that it's going to slow slowly scroll from left to right and when it gets to here it's still going to seamlessly loop there's going to be no problem and we can change the scrolling speed very easily by just dragging out their keyframe and that's it infinitely scrolling text looping out I hope that was helpful please don't be alarmed by the little plaster on the side of my head it's going to go soon if you found it helpful give it a like and subscribe and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Ian Haigh

Views: 59,983

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Id: r4R47Ihv_r4

Length: 7min 47sec (467 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020