3rd noobish question in a week... have patience with me AS community .
What would people suggest as the best way to animate a 'typing' effect? I want a shot of a computer screen while a character is typing, each letter of text appearing in sequence after the other, much as it looks to me right now as I type this post.
Like I always say, there are many ways to do this. For me, I would type out the whole message first, progressively mask each letter, (starting at the end and working back to the front), then run the sequence backwards.
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
Here's another way joel, don't know if it's any easier than jahnocli"s way. Create your text over your background with the same fill color as the bg, no stroke applied. Then double click on the layer in the layer palette to call up the layer settings and check off the allow animated layer effect option. now move to the frame where you want the text to start appearing and use the select shape tool to select the first letter of the text. Change the color in the color palette to what you want. Move forward in the timeline to the next letter and repeat color change. Do this for all of your letters. Then drag select all keyframes in timeline and right click on them to call up the sub menu, select the step option. Here's an example. hope this helps
Thanks guys, I really appreciate your answers, both of which make good sense. I should have mentioned that one of the things that has been causing me grief in this is the way that AS deals with text. I guess it makes sense as an animimation program, that it turns text into vector objects but i feel like it's overkill for what I need for this effect.
Maybe the thing to do is to create my text in another program and then import it?
I guess if you don't like the text vectorized, you could make the text like you want in another app. then turn it into either an AVI or QUICKTIME movie then import that into AS. Scale and place the mov. where you want and then you have only one little file to deal with. Or make your text in another app. turn it into an image , import it and use a simple vector shape to hide the text and then reveal it one letter at a time. This would be the easiest.
An easy way would be to just type what you wanted in a Gimp or PS and save as PNG with an alpha layer. Import that to AS and just mask it and slide the mask layer to show text like your typing. I think that the eye will not pick up the translation and it will appear that each text will pop in like you are typing.
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