The crashes are probably related to a bug in After Effects with custom workspaces. To avoid this don't save your own workspace ("New workspace") but instead use one of the default workspace like "Standard" for example. You can still re-arrange and customize the workspace however you want including docking TypeMonkey but as long as you don't rename it to something else you should avoid the crashes. If this works for you please file a bug with Adobe to encourage them to fix it. The more people that file the same bug the more likely it will be fixed. You can file the bug here: http://adobe.com/go/wish
Saving set ups is part of the plan...we weren't able to fit it into our first release - but its on the list, which also includes Motion Blur! Keep sending suggestions!
ok, my problem is when i installed the plugin typemonkey my color palette was changed, and i wanted back to normal
Hi Mykael- TypeMonkey doesn't change color palletes...it has it's own embedded (if you're on a mac then you can use the magnify icon as a eye dropper- this feature doesn't exist on Windows). Is this what you're referring to, or something else?
Just started using this product. I love the possibilities, however, after i build it, the program runs sooooooo slow I can't do anymore editing... period. I sent the built file to a couple friends who do computer animation for a living and they also are having the same problem with the composition choking bad enough to not want to go any further. I am using this for typographical music videos. The compositions are about 4 minutes long. I have a decent setup, win 8, 12 gig memory, ssd HD, Nvidia 660TI, i7 CPU. Is there any thing I can do to be able to speed things up here??? I am running CS5. My friends are all running CS6 and are having the same CHOKING issues as I am now. Thanks!!
we've heard this one or two other times. It might be the font, or just the way your computer deals with a ton of layers...which it sounds like you have. You should try a short test- just build something that 10 or 20 sec to see what happens. Change fonts too.
Either way, one technique you can use to work with very long comps is outlined in the knowledge base under FAQs. Check it out. You can also try to break it into shorter comps somehow and see if that works.
Motion blur and a save feature are next on the list and might be days or a week or so away if all goes according to plan.
And if u mean 3d as in dimensional text, it's far more complex and not on the horizon at this point. We've tried integrating the ray trace feature in ae and its not quite there - especially for the Mac.
Working on other possibilities right now. Well keep u guys posted.
Exciting news! We're putting the finishing touches on a new update that has a Save & Load preset feature, a Motion Blur option (yeah!) and a very cool Text Mod drop down box.
Text Mods are great way to use TypeMonkey in non-English languages, a much requested feature. It was impractical for us to do a version for each language, so we did the next best thing.
The Mods are being developed by 3rd party scripters, and will just need to be dropped into a folder titled (TypeMonkey_TextMods) in the ScriptPanels UI folder. Once there, it'll show up in the drop down menu.
We're waiting for Arabic and Hebrew to be finalized and we'll release the whole thing asap. It shouldn't be more than a few days. Thanks for your patience!
Quick question... new to the script and happy for the time-saving nature of it... but I'm having trouble with layers below the TM and camera showing up as if they are above them. Specifically, placing a solid for a background to the type animation. I'm working in AE 6. Never experienced layers acting as if they're out of order before, and imagine I'm making some silly error.
Quick question... new to the script and happy for the time-saving nature of it... but I'm having trouble with layers below the TM and camera showing up as if they are above them. Specifically, placing a solid for a background to the type animation. I'm working in AE 6. Never experienced layers acting as if they're out of order before, and imagine I'm making some silly error.
Hey Peter- It could be a couple things going on but my guess is that you're not putting your background on the bottom of the layer stack. you have to remember that most of TM layers are shyed - just unclick the shy button (the one that looks like Kilroy was here), and you see them.
You can also just send it to back under Layer/Arrange. You might need to turn it 3D...or not.
Not sure if this would be doable or not but adding a feature similar to AE brainstorm to a future version would be awesome! This way you could preview and choose from several animation/camera options.
one quick question... iwant to animate the camera by hand at the end of the animation..... how can i do this without breaking everything ?
Hi Steve-Theres something like that in the FAQs- check it out. It involves putting an extra word at the end of the text string that you reposition and turn invisible. Let me know if that helps.
Hello, hope you can help, just got TM a couple days ago and all was fine!
Today the "spacing" is not working, Ive adjusted it to various sizes but it seems frozen, tried restarting nothing seems to work, it is set at a rather large leading and looks awful....please help....LOL!
Hello, hope you can help, just got TM a couple days ago and all was fine!
Today the "spacing" is not working, Ive adjusted it to various sizes but it seems frozen, tried restarting nothing seems to work, it is set at a rather large leading and looks awful....please help....LOL!
Love it Monkey though !!
Randy
Hey Randy- First thing I would try is trashing the preferences. Then, restart, open up a new comp and try it again. You might want to try a different font, some poorly put together (dafont in particular) does some weird stuff sometimes.
I have gotten TypeMonkey, and I am amazed by how well it works. One question, though. How can I switch fonts in between like in some of the TypeMonkey tutorials?
This is an album that contains two images. Basically the first one says that I have to rightclick te script, go to the general tab, then check "Allow script to write files and access network." The second image has the properties>general tab. I even clicked the advanced button but there is no option for that. What should I do? By the way, the advanced button had 4 boxes, and only one option looked like "Allow script to write files and access network.". However, it's not, because it said "Allow this file to have contents indexed in addition to file properties."
There is only one image in your link but it sounds like you are not looking for this preference in the correct place. You need to do to the After Effects preferences then under the General tab you will see the "Allow script to write files and access network" preference which needs to be checked for TM to work.
Hello Lloyd, Dan, or Orrin, I would like to know if this kind of camera effect is possible with TypeMonkey. If so, how? Also, I would like to know if images can be put into the composition with the typography. This is an amazing AE script that helped me finish a large amount of my project. Thank you, and please respond!
You can put a subtle wiggle expression on the x,y & z axis of the monkey cam, but theres no inertia effect right now...hopefully on another version in the future we'll work that in.
This looks like it was done with Sure Target, so you could build it wiith TypeMonkey, and use Sure Target (from VideoCoPilot), use the control layers as your targets and do it manually.
You can put a subtle wiggle expression on the x,y & z axis of the monkey cam, but theres no inertia effect right now...hopefully on another version in the future we'll work that in.
This looks like it was done with Sure Target, so you could build it wiith TypeMonkey, and use Sure Target (from VideoCoPilot), use the control layers as your targets and do it manually.
thats the best I got right now.
Thanks man, great job with the script, I love it. Can you also input images with the typography or no? So, if there was a line about a country, could I use a .png or .jpeg of the country with it?
Thanks Ryan- Lloyd did a tut about how you can you use animated fonts with TypeMonkey. The same technique holds true for images...basically build a TM project, pre-comp text and swap it out for an image...heres a link:
Are you guys going to do a tutorial on TextMods? How can people create their own scripts? Maybe give source code for the one example you have for TextMods so we can learn from it. Also, can we save our panel settings so when AE restarts then we have the last settings we used. Also, I have text bracketed in which I want to keep same size text moving right to left in English with smooth stop and go but want the text word which is coming in to be left aligned instead of center when it stops. Is there a way to do that and right aligned if its text in R-L language. I'd want the option to choose the left or right alignment with or without title safe. I don't want it to stop in center. And the word that is starting to move out of the frame, to fade away or reduce in opacity so the focus is on the new word when it comes. Hope this makes sense. Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance. BTW awesome script.
Hi Usman -
Yes, tutorials on TextMods are coming. Briefly, TextMods were our way of dealing with Right to Left languages (tho other applications for them might be coming). You can't really write your own, unless you really know your coding.
Currently there are two in development (Hebrew and Arabic), and as I understand it, just about ready for release (they're 3rd party, so it's not in our control).
You can now Save your settings to a folder of your choosing, but the settings won't just be there when you restart. You'll have to Load it. Unfortunately it won't save the text- you should save that in a separate text file so you can cut and paste it in there. These are some basic limitation of a Script vs a Plug In, but on the other hand, there are some benefits as well (including taking less time to develop and therefore we can sell them for less).
As far as your specific issue, I'm not sure I follow- can you send me a visual (still or vid) and we'll do the best I can to help. You can open up a ticket if you'd like.
My office just bought a License for Type Monkey and everything seems to be working very well.
But is their a reason why every words right after hitting the "Do it!" button, each words has the letters not in their proper order and have 2 small caps letters at the end of each words that they do not belong in the words.
My office just bought a License for Type Monkey and everything seems to be working very well.
But is their a reason why every words right after hitting the "Do it!" button, each words has the letters not in their proper order and have 2 small caps letters at the end of each words that they do not belong in the words.
Hi Mat- Sounds like the Pig Latin text mod is somehow enabled. It's just a test modifier we included in the latest download. Text mods are currently mainly used for Left To Right languages like Arabic and Hebrew.
Try uninstalling the Pig Latin script from the (TypeMonkey_TextMods) folder and restarting AE.
Can you tell me if there is a way to skip a word after you've created a layout? I'm currently working on a project where I setup a layout, modified the camera movements, and incorporate external graphics in 3D space that are on screen in conjunction with the type. However, my client has asked me to skip some words. I obviously don't want to modify the script and have Typemonkey spit out a new layout since it will change up my custom camera moves and make the external graphics out of alignment. I've tried unshowing the words they want removed, but I found that the camera movement for those words are still active. How do I turn off those camera moves without breaking the rest of the animations? Thanks!
Can you tell me if there is a way to skip a word after you've created a layout? I'm currently working on a project where I setup a layout, modified the camera movements, and incorporate external graphics in 3D space that are on screen in conjunction with the type. However, my client has asked me to skip some words. I obviously don't want to modify the script and have Typemonkey spit out a new layout since it will change up my custom camera moves and make the external graphics out of alignment. I've tried unshowing the words they want removed, but I found that the camera movement for those words are still active. How do I turn off those camera moves without breaking the rest of the animations? Thanks!
Hmmmm...first suggestion would be to move whatever word (or words) you want to hide behind the nearest word and turn it invisible. You might have to readjust the layers below it so it matches as best you can the original layout. If that doesn't work, you might want to change the Movement of the camera to one of the continuous modes so it doesn't stop on any point, it just continues thru it. Hope that helps.
Hello Orrin! I followed the tutorial on how to sync Typemonkey with my voiceover. I finished everything and even deleted the extra markers. (duplicated markers). However, I couldn't get TypeMonkey to work, because when I checked sync to marker layer, and pressed Do it, there was an error message saying that "typemonkey will be inaccurate with non-square pixel comps. I checked ok, and then there was another error message that said "The marker guide layer needs to have at least 2146 markers, but it only has 2110. How can I fix this?
This is an album that contains two images. Basically the first one says that I have to rightclick te script, go to the general tab, then check "Allow script to write files and access network." The second image has the properties>general tab. I even clicked the advanced button but there is no option for that. What should I do? By the way, the advanced button had 4 boxes, and only one option looked like "Allow script to write files and access network.". However, it's not, because it said "Allow this file to have contents indexed in addition to file properties."
There is only one image in your link but it sounds like you are not looking for this preference in the correct place. You need to do to the After Effects preferences then under the General tab you will see the "Allow script to write files and access network" preference which needs to be checked for TM to work.
This is an album that contains two images. Basically the first one says that I have to rightclick te script, go to the general tab, then check "Allow script to write files and access network." The second image has the properties>general tab. I even clicked the advanced button but there is no option for that. What should I do? By the way, the advanced button had 4 boxes, and only one option looked like "Allow script to write files and access network.". However, it's not, because it said "Allow this file to have contents indexed in addition to file properties."
There is only one image in your link but it sounds like you are not looking for this preference in the correct place. You need to do to the After Effects preferences then under the General tab you will see the "Allow script to write files and access network" preference which needs to be checked for TM to work.
Thank you so much! I forgot to thank you but you helped me out a lot!
Hello Orrin! I followed the tutorial on how to sync Typemonkey with my voiceover. I finished everything and even deleted the extra markers. (duplicated markers). However, I couldn't get TypeMonkey to work, because when I checked sync to marker layer, and pressed Do it, there was an error message saying that "typemonkey will be inaccurate with non-square pixel comps. I checked ok, and then there was another error message that said "The marker guide layer needs to have at least 2146 markers, but it only has 2110. How can I fix this?
Hello Ryan!!
TypeMonkey's spacing gets thrown off when you don't use square pixels. Go to your Comp controls (command K) and change the settings to square pixels. After you build your project, and you need it as non-square pixels, drag the whole comp into a new one - don't precompose- it'll give you a warning that it messes with the expressions (tho it actually doesn't).
As far as your other problem, when TM doesn't have enough markers to sync to, it won't be able to sync. You can do a couple things- see where the missing words are and add markers manually, or go back to Premiere and see if theres a problem there.
Before you do that, you might want to see if you can break your project into smaller comps. Thats a whole lot of markers (remember that for ever word theres 2 layers created - bringing the comp to over 4000 layers!). I wouldn't go there if I were you. See if you can break it into several comps, then figure out a way to transition between them in a master comp. Prerendering might help too.
Hi there - great script, just bought it yesterday for a project I'm working on. Everything seems to be working as expected, but this morning when I fired up After Effects I got an error message that I can only attribute to one of the UI Panel scripts that I have load up automatically:
Unable to execute script at line 304. Invalid image data.
I can't figure out which script might be causing it - any idea if this might be a TypeMonkey error?
Hi Steve--that line number doesn't correspond to anything in TypeMonkey that would generate a message like that. I would recommend removing your script panels one at a time and restarting AE each time to see if that reveals the culprit.
Is there a way to centre justify each line of text?
For my current project I'm using it to simply write on each word in sync, no camera or rotation,
but it defaults to left justify. I can of course edit after the monkey does it's thing but that seems tedious.
Thanks
Hey Raymond-
I assume you're talking about TypeMonkey? Hard to tell now that we have another monkey around.
This might be another case where combining it with LayerMonkey is the way to go. What I would do is build each line as a pre-comp in TypeMonkey, cropping the comp to the height and width of the line of type, and making the length of the comp no more than the time it takes to animate on.
Then bring all of them into one comp (in order) and set LayerMonkey to Justify Vertical and Play Full Clips in the distribution setting.
....Or you can do it by hand in TypeMonkey using the [ ] to separate lines. If you have a ton of lines this might be the easiest way since setting all those pre-comps will take some time.
You should also look into the Auto Sync with Premiere Pro tutorial to help with syncing.
Why is there still no option to fade text in?? It's literally the same expression as the "Fast Scale" option, but applied to Opacity. It's quite annoying to have to go in and change this manually. Please! Pretty please!!
A few questions: Are you talking about TypeMonkey or LayerMonkey? Also do you want to apply it to everything across the board or be selective about it?
I've been working with Typemonkey for a few days now, and I keep running into one big problem that doesn't seem to have a workaround. I'll list the steps, and maybe you can point out my mistake, or the plugin's mistake, if there is one.
1) I have the text formatted appropriately, and execute the "Do It" 2) I reposition everything how I like it. Some nulls I rotate 90 degrees, some I rotate -90 degrees, etc. 3) Once I have everything positioned, I scrub through the timeline. 4) On certain instances where I've rotated the null governing a block of text, it rotates a full circle until it reaches the position I had intended.
Obviously, rotating a full circle rather than a simple 90 degrees makes the animation look bad. I've tried Undoing and Starting over several times... and every single time, after I've rotated a block of text via the null.... when the animation reaches that point on the timeline it does the 360 instead of just the 90 rotate.
Hi Michael- Yeah- this is a known issue thats been around since the beginning. It has something to do with the math...very complex stuff that Dan has explained to me that I can't pretend to understand, but if you want a technical explanation I'd be happy to dig it up.
Anyway, try rotating the control layer a little less than 90 degrees - you can also make up the difference by rotating the camera manually (keyframe it) ....thats the best workaround I can give you.
Sorry- complex math at work....and if we were to fix it, it would take forever and would cost a heck of a lot more!
I also grabbed the Chameleon script so that I could load Kuler themes in TypeMonkey. I'm not understanding though how to transfer the colors into the color boxes in TypeMonkey. Chameleon opens fine, I see all my colors, but how do I get these into the options in TypeMonkey? I'm sure it's very basic but I can't seem to find the answer.
Hi Steven- If you're on a Mac, you can click one of the the color boxs in the UI and a pallete window will pop up...click on the magnifying glass icon and it becomes an eyedropper. Click on your color.
But unfortunately, as far as I understand, that feature isn't available on a pc.
Ok, I'm manually entering values to get the colors now. Just wish there was an automatic way to save time when I change palettes.
Another question, will TM rotate the order the colors are used? As I'm building comps I see that the colors appear word by word in the same order over and over. I'd like it to be random so they don't look the same every time.
Thanks for the fast response, particularly on Saturday. Much appreciated as I'm under a huge time crunch!
We've got that slated (along with Kuler Palette integration) for a future release, but in the meantime, manual is the way to go.
One possible work around is to parent a 3D Adjustment layer to the layers you want to switch colors and apply a hue/fill/tint etc to that....just an idea.
Just wanted to ask if there's any news yet about when 3D text, motion blur etc..will be integrated into type monkey?
Cheers...
Motion blur and a save feature are next on the list and might be days or a week or so away if all goes according to plan.
And if u mean 3d as in dimensional text, it's far more complex and not on the horizon at this point. We've tried integrating the ray trace feature in ae and its not quite there - especially for the Mac.
Working on other possibilities right now. Well keep u guys posted.
Not sure if this would be doable or not but adding a feature similar to AE brainstorm to a future version would be awesome! This way you could preview and choose from several animation/camera options.
I would like to know if this kind of camera effect is possible with TypeMonkey. If so, how?
Also, I would like to know if images can be put into the composition with the typography. This is an amazing AE script that helped me finish a large amount of my project. Thank you, and please respond!
Lloyd did a tut about how you can you use animated fonts with TypeMonkey. The same technique holds true for images...basically build a TM project, pre-comp text and swap it out for an image...heres a link:
https://aescripts.com/learn/TypeMonkey-and-Animated-Typefaces-Tutorial/
We're working on other stuff that'll make this easier...stay tuned.
Can you tell me if there is a way to skip a word after you've created a layout? I'm currently working on a project where I setup a layout, modified the camera movements, and incorporate external graphics in 3D space that are on screen in conjunction with the type. However, my client has asked me to skip some words. I obviously don't want to modify the script and have Typemonkey spit out a new layout since it will change up my custom camera moves and make the external graphics out of alignment. I've tried unshowing the words they want removed, but I found that the camera movement for those words are still active. How do I turn off those camera moves without breaking the rest of the animations? Thanks!
that reveals the culprit.
1) I have the text formatted appropriately, and execute the "Do It"
2) I reposition everything how I like it. Some nulls I rotate 90 degrees, some I rotate -90 degrees, etc.
3) Once I have everything positioned, I scrub through the timeline.
4) On certain instances where I've rotated the null governing a block of text, it rotates a full circle until it reaches the position I had intended.
Obviously, rotating a full circle rather than a simple 90 degrees makes the animation look bad. I've tried Undoing and Starting over several times... and every single time, after I've rotated a block of text via the null.... when the animation reaches that point on the timeline it does the 360 instead of just the 90 rotate.
Thanks for your help!!!