After Effects automation and annotation tools (scripts) for student work

Question

I need a professional advice for self-assessing among students. I am searching for a tool (script or scripts) that helps annotating very long videos in After Effects. I also would like to automate the process without repeating myself.

I have long speeches (narrations) of students with subtitles. Subtitles are edited in Subtitle Edit. In Subtitle Edit at the beginning of some words or sentences I add symbols like [#] or [$]. After importing video and subtitles (pt_ImportSubtitles) with added [#] and [$] symbols I would like a specific lower third (simple text annotation or feedback) to be automatically activated (appeared on screen) (for 3 sec) for each imported word or group of words (marker or timestamp) with specific symbols.

Let us say that I have two lower thirds. First lower third is associated with words starting with а [#] (valid argument ) symbol and other set of words are associated with any words starting with [$] (invalid argument).

Examples [#] Moscow is the capital of Russian Federation [$] Moscow is not a capital of Russian Federation

If [#] is repeated 30 times then the firt lower third must also be appeared 30 time. Same logic is for [$] symbol.

Texts for lower thirds preferably must be stored outside of AE in a spreadsheet for example (Text2Spreadsheet)

Please let me know if a tool (script or a set of scripts) that I am searching is indeed exists or not. If not. How can I do it manually with scripts that I mentioned above ? Thank you all

Answer 1

As I've written on my blog, you can use the function evalFile to load the contents of an external file as data or executable code.

So if you have a file called titles.txt that looks like this

var titles={
    {startTime:1.23, endTime:2.23, textContent:"this is the first subtitle"},
    {timestamp:2.34, endTime:3.45, textContent:"this is the second subtitle"},
    {timestamp:4.56, endTime:5.55, textContent:"and so on…"}
}

…you can evaluate it as part of the source of the expression, so that the titles array is now available to the expression.

So you could do something like this with the source text property of a text layer:

try{
    myPath = “/path/to/my/titles.txt”; //obviously the path to the file
    $.evalFile(myPath);
    for (var i=0; i < titles.length; i++){
       if (time > titles[i].startTime && time < titles[i].endTime){
           titles[i].textContent;
       } else { ""; } //blank text
 }catch(err){
 “ERROR”;
} 

What that does is:

• load up the subtitles file,
• scan through the titles and look at each one to see if the current time is between its start and end points
• if the time is right for the subtitle to display then it sets the source text to the subtitle content, if not sets it to a blank string.

Other layers could use the startTime and endTime variables to drive other properties such as opacity or anything else you can animate.

If your subtitle time stamps are represented as smpte timecode you'll have to add a converter to the expression. There's one here.

You can use a capable text editor (notepad++, atom, sublime text, vim etc) to reformat the subtitles file, or you could use JS text processing tools (eg. regex, string.split, string.replace etc) in the script to parse the subtitles file. I'd recommend against the latter, they're going to be a lot slower. Remember that the expression is evaluated every time the frame is rendered, which includes reading the subtitles file from disk. If you have motion blur on, that could mean dozens of times each frame.

Answer 2

Check out Marker Remap at www.aescripts.com/marker-remap . It takes the principles you mention above and adds a powerful After Effects panel to control marker additions and timing. You won't be able to customize it to your tags, but I think it offers the functionality you're looking for.