Transparent Text

[sdjames]

I'm a newbie in AE, and I am trying to use a layer I created in Illustrator, white letters on black background, luma keyed, to reveal video through the text. It works ok, but the text still has the jaggies and I can't rasterize it with the luma key effect on.

Is there a better way to reveal video through text like this to get a cleaner edge on the letters?

[Mimik]

The best way around it is scale it twice as big in AI as you plan to use it in AE. That way when you import it and try to scale it up no more than 200% it will look fine.

What happens here is, your AI object is small and when you tried to scale it up in AE it shows jaggies. I always make my comp in AI 720*486 so that way I can see what size AI object I will need so I can scale it properly. Otherwise use AE text tool to do your masking. It's pretty decent. ;) Hope that helps.

[Neil Rowe]

assuming you text layer has an alpha channel and a transparant background, you just use the text layer as a mask for the video layer, and set the transparancy of the text layer as desired.

[sdjames]

Do you create the alpha channel for the text layer in Illustrator?

[Neil Rowe]

sure. basically, if your text is just the text with no background and the only tangeable part of the layer is the text itself , you can use the layer as a mask. anyway anyhow you want to get the lext like that is up to you.. you could mask it out in AE if you had to. but i think its AE 6.0 and up( have vector based true type font text support anyway so you could just type your text layer in right in AE to make it easy if that would work for you. .. i mean , why bother with illustrator when you can do it in a sec in AE.

[sdjames]

Thanks - you gave me the info I needed. I got it. Created the text in AE and used stencil alpha transform to make it transparent. Jaggies are gone.

[Neil Rowe]

..an easier method to make it transparent would be to just slip the opacity down to 0 , but thats the beauty of people being able to work the way they want and suits them best.. you can do the same thing a number of different ways :)

[UncleBenji1977]

Always make your letters as big as possible. Keep your options as large as you can!