Add Text Behind Video in After Effects

1. Introduction: welcome to this skill share class where you will be learning how to put text behind objects . In a video, you will learn how to use two different techniques, one using Lewicki and the other by rotoscoping. With these two techniques, you'll be able to put text behind any video that you want. Let's go ahead and get started. 2. Luma Keying: for our first example. We are going to be using Lewicki, and you can look at this video and see that there's a lemon being dropped into some water. And the biggest thing is that you could see it's separated from the background. There's a very high contrast separating the lemon from the background, so the background is black and the lemon is brightened yellow, so it'll be easy way to separate it. Using Lewicki, the same technique could be used the opposite direction. If you have a white background and a dark object, you could also separated with looming keep. So let's take our example video. Bring it into a new composition. Gonna make this fit to screen. And I'm just gonna scroll to his video where you have the lemon in the frame and I'm gonna make a new text object by clicking the type tool. And I'm going to write something like fresh. I'm gonna make the font bold and scale of the text and align it to the center. The next step is to take or to take or video and hit command D or control d duplicate the video, and we're gonna isolate it by clicking this this ah, solo circle here, and we're gonna click this transparency toggle so that you'll see the transparency once we apply the Lewicki, then go into your effects in presets. And if you can't find it, you can goto window and check effected presets and start typing in Louima and you'll get Lewicki. Go ahead and drop this on through the top clip, which is the lemon video, and you see it's a ski out darker, which is what we're going for, and you can destruct, raising the threshold, and you can see that you now have a lemon separated. This looks pretty good, and what we're going to do now is apply Matt choker, and if you throw it on, you can see it actually makes the edges thinner. Gets rid of some of that black, and you can also soft in it as well. There we go. So I softened, and by about 12 now, if he stopped the isolation, you can see that now the lemon is in front of the text as well as some of the bubbles and other elements, and that's how you do a looming key to separate the element and put some text behind. In the next part of the class, you will learn how to separate elements in a more complex scene. 3. Rotoscoping: Now, if you have a more complex scene where you can't use the loo Mickey to separate the elements a scene like this where there's many different colors and different amount of detail. And we could Rhoda scope the parts out where the text will go behind. Let's go ahead and grab our video and drag it into a new composition. Then let's duplicate but controlled the or command D to duplicate your flip. That's called the top one, and you can click, Enter to rename and we're gonna call this mask and the main one we're gonna called BG for Background. Now on the mask one, you're gonna go to Penn Tool and you're going to go to the part where your text is gonna be appearing. So for me, it's gonna be about two seconds and you're gonna go ahead and cut it out. And I usually do it different pieces. So he's moving arms and then also moving his head. I would do the arms separately, and then I would do the head separately. And as you can see, I'm clicking. But it's not making any curves, so you can click drag or ah, Better way is to do the road of busier and you can just click, and it will automatically make angles for you. And I prefer to do this because that's how mocha does it. And if you used other rotoscoping software, that's basically the best way to do it. So there you go, to cut out his arm, and I'm just gonna going go through and just cut out. You rest here. Perfect. Now, if you open up these menus, go ahead and click this stopwatch by mask path, and now you can key frame the mask. So I'm just gonna go through to about 3.5 seconds. And there wasn't that much movement, so I can just click it all, move it a little bit and then fix any of the slightly wrong angles and you can play it through and you get to hear he kind of moves up a little bit. So I'm just going to move all these key frames and once again fixed this part perfect once again. If you solo it, you can actually see the edge. So what you can do is mask, feather, whether it's slightly and if you click this toggle mask icon. They'll get rid of the mask points. That way you can actually see the edge slightly better. So I think about four pixel seems to be good. And I'm actually going to drag the mask expansion down a little bit so that it's closer to his body. So negative tube. So you can see that actually is a pretty clean mask. And now we can add or text. So I'm just gonna do tired of and I'm gonna make this slightly smaller. We go and align it to the to the right side and I'm gonna duplicate this text, bring it down work. I wish, Mark. So it says, tired of work, and I'm gonna go ahead and just apply it. Drop shadow. But so you could see the shadow was just on the work. So I'm going to copy it, based it on the tired off, and at about three seconds, there's gonna put these two key frames on. I'm gonna get P for position. Key frame. Go back at two seconds, bring it back. I'm going to select the back to key frames, right click Eazy e's and that basically soft ins so they don't just instantly stop, but it actually slows down. I'm gonna offset Tired. I'm gonna offset work so that it comes in a little bit later so that it's a little bit stacked. There we go. You're gonna add some motion blur, and I'm gonna bring the mask to the top. Now you can see that the mask is right above the text. Perfect. That looks great. And another way that I would actually make this fit a little bit better into the scene is by pre comping both of these so that we still have all the animations applied. So you gotta make sure that move all attributes of selected and let's call this text and we're gonna go into here, and I'm just gonna copy that background video just for reference, and we're gonna make it new adjustment layer. I'm gonna go toe levels and bring down the white just so you can make it darker. And I'm gonna take the pen tool and draw the shape off where the light would probably be coming from in this lamp. So something like that open up my mask. Do you subtract so that anything that he cut out is actually the bright park gonna feather it out pretty pretty hard and we're gonna hide the background. So now in our video, you can see that it looks like the lamp is affecting the text. And when the text is going behind the person, it's lit correctly. So this is a very simple way. You can put text behind different elements in the video and help make it blend in a little bit more. Let's check out the next part of this class for your assignment. 4. Assignment: Now that you learn how to put text behind different elements in the video, I want to see you try it. So find a stock video or shoot when yourself and try this effect out. I would love to see a result, so be sure to submit it into the class project. I can't wait to see what you can create.