Song title fades in AfterEffects

I’ve been working on a video of our live performance in Winston Kingdom using Adobe AfterEffects. To show the title of a song at the start and end of the song, I used a script to automate the fading. Assign it as an expression to the opacity of the text layer and it’ll automatically show for a few seconds at the in-point and out-point of the layer, including nice fades:

fade_time = 1
show_time = 5
if (time < inPoint + fade_time) {
    linear(time, inPoint, inPoint + fade_time, 0, 100)
} else if (time < inPoint + fade_time + show_time) {
    100
} else if (time < inPoint + fade_time + show_time + fade_time) {
    linear(time, inPoint + fade_time + show_time, inPoint + fade_time + show_time + fade_time, 100, 0)
} else if (time < outPoint - fade_time - show_time - fade_time) {
    0
} else if (time < outPoint - fade_time - show_time) {
    linear(time, outPoint - fade_time - show_time - fade_time, outPoint - fade_time - show_time, 0, 100)
} else if (time < outPoint - fade_time) {
    100
} else if (time < outPoint) {
    linear(time, outPoint - fade_time, outPoint, 100, 0)
} else {
   0
}

fade_time is the duration of fade-in and fade-out, show_time determines how long the text layer is shown at 100% opacity, both are in seconds. You can make an animation preset by adding a “Solid Composite” effect, setting opacity=0% and assigning the expression to the “source opacity” property.

dr. Sybren A. Stüvel
dr. Sybren A. Stüvel
Open Source software developer, photographer, drummer, and electronics tinkerer

Related