If you use Blender for video editing, you might be interested in this.
I am experimenting with ways to use the text-strips in the Video Sequence Editor (VSE) to control the the generation of text overlays, with fonts other than the one provided by the text-strip itself.
I’m very happy with the use of text-objects to create titles for my video editing.
Recently, I’ve latched on the idea of using drivers from the properties of a text-strip (in, say, scene[“scene”]) to control the properties of a text-object in a different scene (like, scene[“Text-Overlay”]). By doing this, I can add the driven text-object’s results (with whatever font that I choose) back into the VSE of scene[“scene”].
What I have found, though, is that text-objects (unlike text-strips) do not have a way to dynamically change their text content.
I have seen example scripts on-line that reference the bpy.object.data.body register of a text-object. With my limited scripting skills, and ‘ape-ing’ the examples, I have not yet been able to get these scripting examples to transfer the text from my text-strip to the text-object of my choosing.
So, my question is: is there any technical reason why the properties of the text-object class cannot also have a text-input property, like that of the text-strip in the VSE?
I have to admit that I am at a loss to know what parts of the source code I should be looking at to make a comparison of these two text-related things.
I’ve also done a little reading on drivers, and don’t think, as they operate now, that I can link a driver between the ‘sequence_editor.sequences_all[“text-strip”].text’ register and the ‘bpy.context.scene[“scene”].objects[text-object"].data.body’ register.
Is there a ‘security’ issue, if python string-manipulating expressions are used in drivers? Is it the blender python interpreter that is preventing the driver from using string registers? Probably it is just my poor understanding of python scripting and drivers.
I am fairly sure that I have mangled the register names, so please correct me, where you can.
I would appreciate any thoughts you all might have on this.