Harry Frank of Gray Machine who was spoke at the Chicago Motion Graphics Festival this passed weekend has some incredible tutorials on his site. Particularly interesting for sports motion graphics is his ‘Expressions & External Documents’ tutorial. In which he explains how to use the values from a text document to automatically populate your text layers in After Effects.

I explained how to do this using variable sets in Photoshop last year at the Idea Conference. In the After Effects/Photoshop Tips and Tricks seminar. (Here are my notes from the beginner class). But I haven’t found a great solution for implementing data into After Effects.

I’m curious how far one could take this. Changing RGB values of solids based on the teams color, or grabbing the teams logo from a database and ‘alt-dragging’ it over your animation. Conceivably, repurposing your player introduction for every player on every team in MLB, based purely on a giant excel document.

Harry  is the man! thanks for all the hard work.

http://www.graymachine.com/v3/19-expressions-and-external-documents.html#

Revised: http://www.graymachine.com/2009/04/expressions-and-external-documents-revisited/