I’ve been told in the past that a certain company that makes the “volkstool” for color/edit/vfx (B_________c)
is in some degree of cahoots with Adobe.
I’m going to say something controversial here.
I actually like a whole lot about the current text tool. It would be nice if the antialiasing was better, if you didn’t have to enter it as a module, if the styles worked as intended (where you could save/load them and the information was retained) plus a master styles functionality. Then some simple animation tools such as type on and off (which you regularly need to do when doing phone & computer screen inserts where someone is typing). Then that’d do.
I actually find the tex module really good for end credit builds, where photoshop can be a pain. It’s slow to render but good. Problem is, we are mastering out of Resolve now so the team uses Photoshop as they don’t want to learn Flame just to do end credits (and it would be an expensive titling tool).
So I think if the current tool could be updated then it is totally useable. It is screaming to be updated and I don’t think this should be delayed for one more moment. It is SLOW rendering for starters. But only give it enough love to do the basics well and forget all the motion graphics aspect of it apart from some simple type on. Most of the other creative text design things we probably all have workarounds for. Like for a 2D extrude I use a directional blur and a histogram to resharpen the edges and control the size.
I hunted down a script to deal with adobe fonts after one-too-many painful sessions:
if you don’t want to deal with the command line the font files themselves are just hidden, renamed .OTFs that live in C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CoreSync\plugins\livetype\r (on windows at least)
there’s an XML here that pairs those numbered files with the font’s metadata: C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CoreSync\plugins\livetype\c\entitlements.xml
if you search that XML for the typekit font you’re looking for, the <id> tag above the font’s properties is the number its been given in that \r folder. Once you’ve found it you can just copy it out and add .otf to it and it should work as a font. (though for sanity you’ll probably want to rename it)
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I will definitely be looking into this. Thanks.
Whoa. Sweet.
Personally i use text node and 3d text on pretty much every job.
Its not an easy set of tools and there is much to improve but just because some never get asked to use it doesn’t negate the need for others.
I have the adobe suite but avoid it if i can…i prefer being able to do all my work in a single app (and that does include quite a bit of design work). I have not used AE for nearly a decade except for breaking down layers from other vendors.
Nowadays Flame is far more than simply a comp tool, and for some users like myself, comping is hardly ever a major requirement….text work is.
Just my 2p
Adam
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I want to be able to take text animation a few more levels higher that this
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I think that any improvements to the text tool would be great, but I think as has been mentioned the baseline is really that we have to be able to match the text that an Art Director is laying out or creating somewhere else, likely being Photoshop or Illustrator.
So maybe another way to think of this is not just tools that generate text but tools that are aware of text.
One of the most common things I personally run into is taking an end frame that either comes in as a .png or .psd and having to mask and break those down by character, word or line for animation. If the gmask tracer were “text aware” and could automatically separate text into individual component masks (with some control like being able to create a bounding box as opposed to a tight character masks), that might be just as useful as rebuilding text in Flame’s text tool for some animation. You would lose out on the ability to quickly update if the copy changes, but we’re used to that now.
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What you are basically asking is to be able to create vector art (SVG) from an alpha. This would be a great thing for more than just text. I think there was an old 5D spark that did this back in the 90’s. It was clunky, but I’d bet 30 years of advancement in the area of digital design has probably overcome its issues. Illustrator already does this. It would be a really cool thing to create the vector and use some sort of ML to create a type and assign it to the keys, as well as make up the ones that might be missing. In other words, build a full font base from limited input. And if the font already exists, then identify it with better accuracy than “What the Font?”
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Doing this for a single frame is not impossible (even though it is not always perfect), but doing this on a frame sequence is a challenge (yes, we have tried it in the past).
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I don’t think we need it for a sequence. I’d be happy with a single frame. And I would be happy if it did it as well as Illustrator, which isn’t perfect either. But it’s a lot faster than doing it by hand. And I wouldn’t consider this a “text” feature. I think it is a broader feature that can be used with text.
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Agreed a single frame would fantastic.
Also I’d definitely acknowledge this is not strictly speaking a text tool. But I think there are a number of things that can tribute to that decision tree of: do I retype something and match the sizing kerning etc, or do I just work with the layer with alpha as given.
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Will this long awaited text-tool already be avalable in 2024 or rather next year (2025)?
I heard it’s going to be in the release with a new particles system.
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At NAB, they talked about this. They might be serious this time.
Talked about Text or Particles or Both @ALan?
A more accurate and easy to use kerning tool…please and thank you.
Text only.
Particle module has been a thorn in our side for a long while now and @GPM was being sarcastic…
Personally I do not even bring it up any more - although I would LOVE IT if there was a new native implementation. Maybe with the upcoming USD update 
My comment was meant tongue in cheek @Sinan but that probably didn’t come across.
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Particles calls the text module "Grandpa . . . "
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