Drop Shadows on Static Text

[Medimagery]

I have a running line of narration text on the bottom of a medical animation. The text contains superscripts. I've learned that only the "static text" option in Adobe animate allows superscripts.

The text in my video is white, with a fairly dark backdrop for the video itself. But my client wants the text to stand out more than it does now. I've made the text as large as possible. I cannot add a drop shadow to the text I have, because I cannot use the "dynamic text" option. And a 50%-alpha black box behind the text looks ugly, to me. I've also tried duplicating the text blocks so a darker text layer is behind; changing the behind-text color to grey, and then offsetting this text to the right and down so it adds a kind of drop shadow. But the visual effect is hard on the eyes and does not make the text easier to read.

Are there any workarounds?

Thanks,
Laura

[Colin Holgate]

If you copy the layer of subtitles into a movieclip, that when you do a test movie the movieclip plays along with the right timing, you can then give that movieclip a drop shadow filter.

Setting up the timing might be tricky, but you could change the movieclip on stage to be a Graphic, so that you can scrub your main timeline and see the text changing, then when you're happy change it back to movieclip, and add the drop shadow filter.

[ClayUUID · Accepted solution]

Is this an AS3 or Canvas document? Animate in AS3 mode is perfectly happy to apply filter effects to static text objects. In Canvas mode you can apply filters to static text objects by wrapping them in a movieclip, then applying the filter to the movieclip. However, you should be very careful about using static text in Canvas mode, because it works by breaking every single letter down into vector outlines. This massively inflates the file size, and renders much more slowly.

If this is AS3, I'd recommend using glow instead of drop shadow. With a low Blur (~3) and a very high Strength (~2000%), at Medium quality, you get something very close to an outline effect, which is ideal for subtitles. Unfortunately this doesn't work in Canvas mode because Strength is apparently clamped to 100% when you run it, even though it will look correct in the IDE.