Help: how to make typing effect with a blinking cursor?

Welcome to the discussions, Kevin. I don't know of any way to do this unless there's a LiveFont with a blinking box/line to use as a cursor...

Patrick

After Effects has several different ways you can achieve this but there is a specific text filter from Pinnacle Image Lounge that includes many cursor options. I have no idea what has happened to Image Lounge these days since the original has changed hands so many times.
If you have After Effects, start looking at the text filters. If you don't have After Effects, buying it for this single effect is silly so start looking around for someone who can do it for you. They will be able to tell you if they've got the filter set you need.

bogiesan

You might try duplicating your text layer and adding a "cursor character" to it and oscillating it's opacity to get a blinking cursor kinda thing...

Patrick

Yah, I'm not sure about that either, just trying to spark out some ideas...

Patrick

Once you've got your blinking cursor, you can key frame it to match the text type on. Set it's interpolation to Constant and it'll then jump from KF to KF.

Yeah, so's roto.

Since I'm just responding to his question of:
"Not to sure how the cursor can appear after each letter as it's being typed out."

I think offering up the manually KF approach as a solution isn't off base.
I don't know how many text elements he wants or needs to be typed on, but I can pop em out in 2-3 mins.

You do rotoscoping? Cool. Beyond my patience level these days. Never tried to do more than a few frames worth of hand-masking in After Effects.

The only rotoscoping I've ever done was in school in the 70s and we worked on antique rotoscopes. Wonderfully clunky machines, reminiscent of the Moviola.

bogiesan

3 minutes times 20 means you could have it done in an hour...

Patrick

I just tried this and it's fairly simple and pounding on the keyframe button gets automatic within a few strokes. Pretty easy, really.

BUT... big but...
The effect is not really convincing. It works, yes, but it's obviously not the text entry you would see on an ancient Wang word processor. The movement and blinking of the cursor box layer are completely linear because the type-on effect is linear. If there is a way to sync the movement and blinking of the cursor box with a variable type-on effect in Motion, I admittedly do not have the chops to figure it out.

I performed the same operation in After Effects with my Image Lounge filter and there is simply no comparison. Image Lounge also lets you add raster lines and other screen effects right inside the filter. And you can set the effect to mimic realworld typing with pauses and speed changes.

Image Lounge is an expensive toy even if you have After Effects but it is completely appropriate to this particular task.

bogiesan

Image Lounge does work in Motion, just for the folks who are wondering. As David pointed out, though, it isn't exactly cheap.