Chris Hatton's Projects

The Automatic Overlay Animator was first created as the answer to a challenging client request. They had already tabled a full disc design, comprising 40+ music videos which had been bit-budgeted onto a DVD9. With very little room to spare, they then asked if we could include facts about the songs and artists that could be switched on and off over the videos as they were playing. While the obvious solution was always to use the subtitling system, we were left with the problem of how to make the look congruent with the rest of the design on the disc. The menus’ were all good-lookers and it would have been a shame to lower the tone with plain subtitles.

The Overlay Animator was born. It’s likely you’ve seen subtitles on a DVD movie that flick by almost too fast to read during a period of intense dialog on screen – but just how fast can a DVD switch those slides? I first created a test by using photoshop batching and manually writing an SST script. I determined that most DVD players could, in fact, cope with full screen 25fps subtitle switching… usable just like another graphic layer! To exploit this with any degree of convenience, a tool would need to be made that could take an existing graphic, in this case a ‘designed’ block of text bearing the logo of the disc, automatically reduce it to 3 colours in the most graceful (read: least ugly) way possible and render both the TIF slides and SST file necessary for Scenarist import. The Automatic Overlay Animator was born.

Using the After Effects environment to implement this idea made immediate sense given its instant graphical and scripting capabilities, leaving more time to coding the important stuff!

Here is a run-down of how the Automatic Overlay Animator works and how would be applied to a composition you have created:

1. We start with a composition you or the design team have have made; in time honoured DVD tradition, we’ll say it’s a White Rabbit hopping across the bottom of the screen.
2. Make sure this is the selected, active composition on screen and load the Extendscript Toolkit (File -> Script editor).

…TBC

You may download this script and its supporting files here: Auto_Overlay.zip

Please note that this script is still a work-in-progress and while it is in a working, useful condition, has not been fully tested and comes with no guarantees.

If you are particularly interested in employing Animated Overlays in one of your DVD projects and would like support, please feel free to contact me via this website.