Open & Close Animated Text Box

anon78133251 · November 19, 2020, 10:58pm

Can this be done in SC? It looks kind of complex and I only have experience animating text titles. How can I get a text box to open and close like the one seen here @ 0:06-0:07

MusicalBox · November 20, 2020, 11:39pm

Hi @anon78133251.
I didn’t have the time to do it exactly as in your example. The moving borders aren’t as fancy. But it can be done. There are a few ways to do it in fact.

Here’s what I came up with:

I used simple color clips (orange and black) that moves with keyframes, hiding and revealing the text. I used the Text: Simple filter for the text. That needed 3 tracks (V2, V3, V4), one for each line so I can get a separate background for each line. If you don’t care for that background effect, one track would be enough for the text. Or you could create text blocks in Photoshop or Gimp and use that instead. That would also use only one track.

This way of doing it involves using a lot of tracks, but less mental juggling than, say, doing it on one track and using masks.

This may look like a lot of work when you look at this screen capture. But once you’ve figure out how to create the effect for one block of text, you only need to copy and paste clips to add as much “blocks” as you need.

So yes it can be done. But evidently, you need to know how the filters works and how to use keyframes in Shotcut. There is no magic button that will create this effect in a few click.

Just ask yourself how you’d do it if you needed to create a similar thing using real pictures, scissors, pens and paper. The tools in Shotcut kind of work the same way.