This video is both a competition and a tutorial!
Sponsored by the Adobe Community Experts Program, I was given the chance to celebrate gaining 5000 subscribers (thank you!!!) by offering a year's worth of the complete Adobe Creative Cloud suite to one lucky winner. In order to select that individual, I used a Google Form, its exported CSV (comma separated values) spreadsheet and After Effects.
This giveaway seemed like the perfect opportunity to demonstrate just how versatile After Effects is with importing data. You can link to text layers to display the contents and use expressions to cycle through the rows of the spreadsheet.
I take you through the process of importing a CSV, linking it to a text layer, using Javascript in the Expressions area to randomise selecting a name. I then go further and demonstrate two different ways to freeze the selected name after cycling through. Along the way I also demonstrate how to use CSVs for weather videos and movie credits. There's a project linked in the description you can download to see how I've done those.
