Taran Van Hemert Profile picture
Video editor extraordinaire. Macro king. Robotics enthusiast. Future supervillain. Ex-Linus Media Group. Don't @ me on your sh*tcoins.

Jun 26, 2023, 9 tweets

I am very late to this, but remember how @iilluminaughtii accused @LegalEagle of plagiarizing this highlighter effect? I'm the editor who implemented it. And I didn't get it from her... I got it from Coffeezilla's editor @HarryRBagg, who got it from Envato Elements.
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See, I was in the process of standardizing the LegalEagle Dropbox, frame .io, .mogrts, file structure, etc, and writing documentation. We needed a method of highlighting court documents. I tried so many things... here are some: (tweet 2 of 12)

Next, I tried just having an after Effects composition that is completely full of different size highlighter strokes, pre-animated. Pick the ones you want, position & resize, and delete the rest. It was better, but still took too much time.
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...But that was still too tedious to use. It wasn't just me editing Legal Eagle videos. I needed something everyone could use, easily. That's when I saw a Coffeezilla video with a highlighter effect in it that looked pretty good. (7 of 12)

Fortunately, Coffee has credits. I messaged the editor, Harry Bagg, and he told me about the Envato template. Bingo! https://t.co/41Adr0nU7Uelements.envato.com/document-highl…

But there was a problem. It's at 1920x1080, at 25 FPS. I need 3840x2160, at 23.976 FPS. So, guess what? I had to completely rebuild the template, one comp at a time. I also added a bunch of my own pages (original has 6) and camera animations for editors to choose from.

Though I feel a bit bad... the original was 4x faster to render. This one is slower... not everyone has a machine as powerful as mine. And it's even slow on mine sometimes. But anyway, that's the origin of the Legal Eagle highlighter stroke.
(Tweet 10 of 12)

BTW, for highlighting text on a WEBPAGE, I use a transparent .mov. Huge filesize, but basically it's just a 1080p yellow block that animates itself. You can reposition and rescale it easily because the anchor point is at 0,0. I have it already set up in all my .prproj templates.

The end. It was from Envato all along! Anyway, don't forget to check out my dynamic highlighter. I decided not to make a video about it. But maybe I will if I figure out the keying problem. (tweet 12 of 12) github.com/TaranVH/TaranA…

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