John Colombo’s After Effects Tool Text Anchors Lets You Set Anchors for Text for Easier Animation.
The default for After Effects text is the baseline. If you are animating text, scale, rotation and position movement will happen from the baseline of the text, which isn’t always ideal. Motion Designer John Colombo (1resonant.com) has a pretty good tool to fix this: Text Anchors.
Text Anchors is a free and dockable Ae script that lets you set the anchor points for text, fast. With it, you can make your text scale/rotate from the lower-left of every line, or the top-center of each word, or the left side of your text as a whole. An added bonus of the tool is that when you hold alt/option to set an anchor point, it will also create a keyframe for it too.
The script is free to download. Visit John Colombo on Gumroad to learn more.
Alex
I used to love AE in the beginning, but after a few years i’m really tired that AE is basically a shell application where Adobe offset what should be their job to plugin makers, seriously if you want to do anything remotely good or interesting you need 200 plugins, you can’t do good motion blur without RSMB, you can’t do good DOF without Lenscare, you can’t have a nice lens flare without optical flares, you can’t do inertia without an expression, you can’t do anything good with particles without particular, you can’t do any true 3D without Element or Stardust, the camera tracker is incredibly basic, the performance in render is dirt poor not keeping up with new multi core processors and GPU acceleration, I really want someone to do real competition, someone should create a direct AE competitor because Adobe has been sleeping in the comfort zone for far too long.