by
David Nagel
Executive
Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com
Compositors
and editors faced with the prospect of creating text in their
compositions often rely on applications like Adobe Illustrator
or Macromedia Freehand, rather than creating the text directly
in programs like Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe After Effects.
Why? The text tools in NLEs and compositing applications are
simply too time-consuming. Plus, creating text in a graphics
application is quite simple.
Most compositors
also work in Photoshop to create and edit their graphics.
But they don't use it for text. Why? The text created in Photoshop
isn't scalable. At least it wasn't until After Effects 5 came
out.
See, if
you create your text in Illustrator, you can import it into
After Effects and scale it to your heart's content, never
losing any quality whatsoever. This is because Illustrator
text is vector-based. True, Photoshop can export vectors and
generate EPS files and even paths to Illustrator. But you
can't import Photoshop's Illustrator paths into After Effects,
and working with Photoshop's EPS files in AE has problems
of it's own, namely the difficulty of generating a matte.
Enter
PDF.
Adobe's
PDF—Portable Document Format—is becoming popular
for low-end print work; but you would never think of using
it in After Effects. It's just for print, right?
Wrong.
After
Effects 5 has the ability to import PDF files, and Photoshop
has the ability to generate PDF files. A perfect match for
bringing vector data created in Photoshop directly into After
Effects. Are there problems with this? Well, maybe one little
one. You have to crop your Photoshop file manually to keep
layer handles manageable once it's in AE 5. But that's it,
at least that I've found. PDF files retain alpha information,
and, at least for now, nobody's written any code to prevent
After Effects from reading PDFs created in Photoshop.
I don't
mean to be cynical. But let's face it; there's only one reason
that After Effects hasn't been able to handle Photoshop text
correctly to date: Adobe wants you to buy Illustrator. Now,
if you're using AE 5, you don't have to. Here's what you do.
1. Create
your text at any size, but make sure to crop it manually so
that your layer handles in After Effects will be manageable.
2. Select
File > Save As...
2. In
the Save As dialog, select Photoshop PDF, and check the Layers
box.
3. An
option window will open up. Make sure you check Save Transparency,
Include Vector Data and Use Outlines for Text.
4. Place
the PDF file into After Effects just as you would any other
graphic file. You can now drop it into your Comp window or
timeline and rescale it all you want.
The
original PDF file (top) along with the scaled-up version.
5. Make
sure in the timeline window that you switch to full resolution
and continuous rasterization. (Both of these options are independent
of your composition settings.) To do this, just go to your
timeline and click the backslash until it becomes a forward
slash and click the asterisk until it's filled in, as pictured
below.
Resolution
and rasterization options should be checked as shown here
in
the columns to the right of the layer name.
Now, with
all of this said, I can't in good conscience tell you that
Photoshop is a perfect replacement for Illustrator in terms
of text. Illustrator (or your vector program of choice) is
easy to work in when it comes to text, and, in general, the
work will go a little quicker. But Photoshop is also fine
for smaller blocks of text. So have fun.
