Laurence Grayson from ShortFormVideo with a look at a method he has come up with for automating outline effects in After Effects by using the stroke effect and the After Effects Tracker… clever really.

Laurence Grayson writes: Over a year ago I posted a tutorial on how to create a laser-etched metal effect, which is still proving pretty popular. However, it involved a fairly large amount of manual keyframing to produce, so I’ve come up with a way that you can automate this process using the Stroke and Tracker tools in After Effects. Using this technique, you can automate the tracing process, allowing you to create position-based effects (like Particles and Flares) that follow the outline of an object or text without having to spend hours creating keyframes.