Animating a Text Reveal: Adobe After Effects for Beginners

1. Welcome!: How's it going, everyone? My name is Spencer Martin. I'm a graphic designer and YouTube content creator and go find my pixel in bracket. I've created a ton of tutorials over there. And in this class we are going to be looking at after effects and how to do a little minimal texts reveal animation. It's a cool animation you could use on your lower thirds or anywhere in your project where you might want to reveal some texts like this. We're going to learn about adding text and adding objects, trimming paths. We're going to look at keyframing, which is one of the main core components of After Effects when you're doing animation, we're also going to be looking at how to mask, how to parent objects and especially how to polish up your animation at the end with easing and make it look a little bit more realistic. Now if a lot of that sounds unfamiliar to you, that's totally fine because we're going to be covering everything for beginners. You're going to be able to follow along no matter what level you're at. I've also included two bonus lessons at the end that are sort of related, unrelated. One of them is animating texts spacing, which is a really cool, neat technique. You see entitles and I also showed you in that lesson how to use dynamic linking to take your After Effects project and place it into Premiere Pro. And the other one is a really nifty concept called master expression controllers. That sounds really complicated, but it's a really, really neat thing that you can utilize in your projects, especially when you have a lot of assets and a lot of elements going on. And you want to be able to change things over time. Now with that being said, the project in this class is going to be to create your own little animation and post it in the project area. It can be a little Jeff. Yes, I said Jeff, It's not gift or it could be a video that you want to link from YouTube or Vimeo just showing that you completed your own texts reveal and maybe you added something to it. Thanks for watching you guys and I can't wait to see you in the class. Let's get this thing started. 2. Dissecting the Animation: And I'm gonna show you guys how to create this animation effect right here. So it's just a minimal sort of text reveal type of animation. You've got a bar that sort of appears on the left, swipes across, reveals some kind of text, and then swipes back and disappears. So the way this thing is built, if I just sort of dropped down all of my keyframes on this guy with the shortcut key, you, that Uber key. It's actually pretty simple. You guys can see here I have a start and an end to the bar growing. That's the first two rows of key frames. And then the position is key friend on this bottom portion here. And so it basically opens up, it moves across that holds, moves crossed and closes up. That's all it is. That's all we're going to be building. And then as far as how this thing is actually revealed, I have a text layer underneath the obviously has Joe Smith written and then I have a shape mask over the top of that. And you can actually, you can actually, you actually see that shape mask. If I pause the animation here, this square shape here, that's all that the mask is. It's just a shape, a white shape. But because we're using the alpha mask feature or alpha track Matt feature from the text up to the shape mask, it's basically saying, OK, anywhere that, that shape is, reveal the text. Anywhere it is not, do not reveal the text. So as that shape moves across the text, it reveals it. And same thing happens when it moves back across the text, it just disappears. And we have that shape parented to the bar. So anywhere that the bar goes, the shape goes. That's why it sticks right there with it. So that's pretty much it. If you're an advanced user, you can probably figure this thing out just based on that, but let's start from scratch and just build this thing again. 3. Adding Text: So I'm gonna make a new composition. This is my little project panel over here. Oh, and by the way, I'm using the default workspace in After Effects. So you can go to Window Workspace and then down to default. I don't know all the intricacies yet, so we're just going to work our way through this. I'm gonna create a new composition, just create new comp right here. Or if you don't have any composition selected o or I do here, let's exit out of this one here. You can create a new composition with this new composition button, which is available in CC 2018 now, or hit the little new composition button at the bottom of the project pain. Okay, let's just do it. Let's create one composition settings. Let's name this guy tidal or no, we'll call it text reveal. And then I just preset whatever 1920 by 1080. That's what I want. Square pixels is what I want. Frame rate 29.97. Sure, that's fine. Resolution. I'll stick with full and then let's make this thing only ten seconds long. So the way this works is the first set of numbers is frames. There's about 30 frames per second, and then the next set is seconds. So we're going to put a tin and there we're going to have ten seconds long background color. Let's just do black. That's fine. I'll hit OK. So now that's gonna pop that back up since we actually have a composition at ready basically. And we have our 1920 by 1080 comma with nothing in it. First thing I wanna do is create a new text layer. And with that, I'm going to come up here and grab my text tool or Horizontal Type Tool, that's Command Z or Control T to grab that. And now I'm just going to click on my canvas or space here. And we're going to type in, how about we'll type in this time text reveal. Alright, and more than likely your texts is not going to be this large or position the same way as mind. So over here you can find the Character panel, which you can change the font I used entails and 14 narrow, that is a Typekit font. If you want to sync it, we'll just stick with irregular. You can set the text size over here, so we'll do 200 on that. You can set the spacing as far as the tracking between the characters that changes how much space is between. I like to give that a little bit of space. And then what else do we have? We can actually go down to paragraph. We can center it or align it one way or the other. I'm going to center it up. And now that I have it centered, I've got it the size I want it to be. I'm gonna go back to align. And by the way, all these panels, if you're not seeing them once again, first off, default workspace, but also just got a window and then find the panel, whether it's paragraph, character or a line. And so I'm going to open up a line and we're going to align it to the composition and just center it completely, both vertical and horizontal. Alright, so once we have our text in the center, we're good to go. 4. Adding the Line: Let's create our little bar shape. So I'm gonna do that by going back to the selection tool. The shortcut key for that is v. I'm going to click in the gray space here off of any of my layers, so I don't have anything selected at all. And then I'm going to go up to the pin tool that grabbed that pin tool. I'm just going to create a point here. I'm going to hold shift and create a point down here. So this is our bar. But currently, and you'll notice that created a Shape layer down here in our Layers panel. Let's go ahead and rename that I can believe just sort of click on that. No. If I click on it and hit Enter, I'm going to be able to rename it, or I can right-click Rename. And let's name this guy bar, which is going to hit Enter to commit that. And then let's drop down and check out some of his properties. We actually have transformed properties which, and this is how aftereffects works. There's a bunch of stuff you can twirl down, but the transform properties will get back to with position. And let's go to the contents first and you'll notice that shape one isn't there. That shape is basically the bar that we drew. And if I drop that down, I see I have more options. I even have strokes and fills currently there's a Phil. I don't want a fill, so I'm gonna go ahead and go up here to fill, click on the word fill. And I'm going to turn that off with a little slash none and hit OK. And I do want a stroke. So it actually, you can also hide Phil by just clicking the eyeball over here, which I just learned. So that's how this is gonna go. So now I can show the stroke here. I can do the same thing by clicking this and showing it. And then I can also drop this down and adjust how large of a stroke. This is how many pixels. And that's also up here as well. So there's different spots. You can affect these. I can also adjust the cap and I'm going to do that. I'm gonna do a round cap on this guy. And the miter join doesn't matter because we don't have any, we don't have any corners in this bar. So that's it. That's just literally drawing my my little bar. 5. Animating the Line: So we got the bar drawn. Now I'm going to minimize this. Another thing we need to do in order for it to actually sort of exist and grow out of nothing, we need to add trim paths. So you'll see as you have this dropdown in this content section, there's an Add button and I can click on the little arrow and it's going to pop up a little panel. And let's go ahead and bring this. I'm going to bring this panel. If I click between these panels, I can slide this panel up a little bit so we can see are layers a little bit better down here, cuz we're gonna get pretty crazy on the layers as far dropdowns. So if I just drop this down and look, I can find trim paths. And if I click on that, it's going to add it to my contents. And I could drag this trim paths directly into the shape one if I wanted to, technically, you can have multiple shapes on the side of this thing. So if you wanna trim pads on separate shapes, you can do it by dragging it onto those shapes. So now that I have trim paths, I can drop this down, drop this down, and I have a start and an end. And if you see what these do, if I just grab this percentage of the start and drag it. Notice how it basically trims that path o fancy and wonder why it's called trimmed paths. And then the same thing happens. Let's say this is at 50%. If I take end from 100 back to 50, it's basically taking the endpoint and bringing it back. Same thing with the starts, taking the start point and bringing it towards the end. So you haven't start and an end to the path, right? 0% to a 100%. So we're just moving the start and end points. I'm going to take them both to 50. And from here, let's go ahead and add our first keyframe. And our keyframes we're going to add to both the start and the end. So I'm gonna click the little stopwatch on both start and end. We just attitude keyframes out here. Now let's go ahead and scrub out here with our time indicator a little bit. And we'll go out maybe frames. So you can see we went out ten frames and you can actually go to that timestamp. If you want to go to exactly ten frames, I'm gonna hit OK. We'll add another key frame here. I can do that by clicking on the little diamond button over here. It's going to pop in another keyframe and another keyframe. So the first, first set here, and by the way, J and K will jump you between keyframes. Also, these arrows will jump you to the next and previous keyframes. But basically we started sort of invisible, but both are end points are in the center. So if I jumped to this next one, I would want both the end points to go back to where they were to reveal the bar. So we're gonna take start back to 0 and we're gonna take end back to a 100. And because we key framed this, now if we look at this and I click off so you can see it as we play it. R bar builds, very easy. Bar builds. So let's go ahead and close it back up. Let's go out here to something like 1 second. I'm just gonna type in 100. It's gonna take us to that 1 second mark. If I click on this little timer here or this time over here. I don't know what everything's called, so I'm sorry if I'm calling these things wrong. But anyway, from here, obviously we're going to swipe across and we're still going to be revealed over here. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a keyframe for both the start and the end. Because between these two points as we move, I want them to stay stay visible. I don't want them to do anything, however, will do the same animation here, sort of in reverse. So I could grab these two keyframes, copy it with command C or control C on a PC. Let's move ahead ten frames. So I'll just click on my little timer thing here and I'll change this to ten frames to move ahead ten frames. And here we're just going to paste. So we pasted those original keyframes in. So now we basically go from 0 to 100, stay at 100, and go back to 0. So our animation now is essentially a bar growing and then disappearing. So we've got that part of it done. Awesome. Let's go ahead and move the bar across our texts so we want him to end up sort of over here for a second and then go back. So let's say we want him to grow first, right? We want them to grow. So we'll start at these keyframes here. And instead of this, we can go ahead and minimize this trim paths. We can minimize the shape and we can go, we can even minimize the contents, but we're still on the bar layer. The bar object here, we can go drop-down transform. And we're going to turn on the stopwatch here so we can add a keyframe for position. So I want the position to start right there where it's at. And then let's say we want him to slide across and ten frames. So we're currently at that ten frame marker. You can see it here or here. If we take this and we delete that and we say, how about we go to the 20th frame? And I'll go ten friends out there. And from here we can actually change our x value. So we can literally click and drag this out and you'll see the bar moves across. And then we can just drag it to where we want that bar to stop for a moment. Like oh, so now what we have is the bar growing and then sliding across super-quick. So we'll just the timing on that. But, but that's the keyframe that we want. We want it to go across and then we wanted to hold there, right? So let's go ahead and add another keyframe. I'm just going to jump ahead ten more frames. So delete this will add 30 and it'll take us to the right spot, which is basically that 1 second mark. And here I'm just going to add another key frame. And then once again will just click copy with command C or control C, that first keyframe. Move out here another ten frames. So we'll move out to the 1-10 mark. And we will just paste in that keyframe with Command V or control V. So now, and let's go ahead and go back to, let's minimize everything. So that key earlier that I use the yuki, they call it the Uber key. If I hit you, it's gonna show me all my properties that have keyframes. So now we've added, with this start end, we've added the reveal, the build of it, and then what the position we've added, the movement of it. But we need to tweak sort of where all these things happen because it's moving back and it's disappearing at the same time. So let's go ahead and just simply grab, click and drag and grab these two points. These right here are the start and end. That's our sort of reveal. We need this to not happen until our little bar gets back. Alright, so we're gonna drag that out. And then let's say that it does do this, it does build and then immediately go across. Okay, that's fine. However, I want it to hold over here for three seconds. So currently I'm at the 20th frame. If I click on this and simply add a three here, that's going to be three seconds and 20 frames. So we're adding three seconds and I'm just hit Enter and it's going to bump my cursor out. So I know that this is three seconds from here. So I'm gonna grab these two points here and drag them out until we hit that mark. So now it just holds over on the right side for three seconds. So we build. We slide across, we hold for three seconds, and then we slide back. And then we can bring these keyframes back a little bit, because once we slide back, we want him to disappear. So we slide back and we disappear. Easy enough. So if I click off of everything, I can watch that. Build slide, hold, slide and disappear. Cool. 6. Masking the Text: Now that we've got our movement and keyframes all set here for this guy. And I'm going to grab the position here and just move it out a little bit so that it doesn't just build and then immediately shoot across. We're going to tweak the timing of this later, but for now, we're going to create our mask. So let's minimize this and then click in the gray space, a click off of all your layers. We don't want any layers selected. We're going to zoom out up here. So I'm gonna click into the composition area, hit Command or control minus to zoom out just a little bit. And next we're going to create a shape. So I'm gonna go up here to my rectangle tool shortcut key is q. The grabbed that rectangle. I'm gonna go ahead and add a fill of white. Let's find to have and then no stroke on that. And then I'm gonna create a rectangle that is long enough to cover up all of my text. So we can start out here and just create a rectangle towards r bar if we want to, until we cover up right on the edge of that bar. And we can zoom in here and see with Command Plus now where we hit on that bar and we can edit where that sort of falls. And if you just kind of move it, so it's halfway over the bar, that'll be a good spot for revealing the text. Let's zoom out again. So now we have basically this big ol Shape layer, and then we have our bar, then we have this text. So we need to tweak a couple of things over here. First off, let's go ahead and bring that shape layer below the bar. So it's in-between the text and the bar. And we can rename it to shape mask if we want to, so we can keep track of it. What I wanna do with this guy is go ahead and select on text, reveal my track Matt. Now if you're not seeing this come down here to toggle switches and Modes, your view might be like this. If you toggle that back, you'll see track Matt. I'm going to set the track Matt to alpha map on the shape mask, I think, or it could be alpha inverted. We'll find out alpha matte. Ok, good. So both the shape mask disappears and the texture reveal disappears because currently, like I explained earlier, our shape is not over the top of our text, so they're not revealing it basically anywhere the shape is, the text will be revealed. Currently, the shape is not over the text, so the text is not revealed. Now, we want the shape to move with the bar, because right now that shape doesn't move at all, the bar just moves. So all we need to do is on this shape mask layer in the parent column. Instead of none, we're going to select bar. Now, the shape is looking at the bar for basically its position. And so as the bar moves, the shape is going to move. So we just created our animation. We can even play it from the beginning with spacebar. So builds comes across and it'll swipe back and it's gone. Now that's all very kind of static feeling. And I'm going to drag this sort of well-known, we're going to edit the time on this guy, right? So very static feeling very quick across. So we want to add a little bit of realism to this. And that's where easing comes in. 7. Polishing Your Animation: So we've actually set everything up. Now all we need to do is tweak some of those values on the easing of the keyframes and we'll be good to go. So on that bar I'm going to hit the UK key and it's gonna drop down every property that has a keyframe. And from here we need to start setting up some easing. So I'm gonna grab these two points. And I want to ease into this animation. So I wanted to sort of build fast and then slow down as it gets to the end of that build. So we're going to right-click on that keyframe assistant and we're gonna easy ease in. It's kind of like a train station you're coming into the train station at. So you're easing into this point and then easing out would be leaving that point. How much influence that point has on sort of leaving the translation right? So I like this, That eases into here. But the velocity of this probably isn't very much. So it's probably hard to notice how much of an 0s there is on that build. So I'm gonna go ahead and right-click on one of these points and go to keyframe velocity. This is how I like to think about it right now, the incoming velocity, so the 0s N is only 33% influence. I'm gonna change that to like 90% influence. I'm gonna hit, okay, I'm gonna do the same thing for this bottom keyframe. We're gonna go to keyframe velocity, right-click that, and we're going to change this incoming velocity to 90% influence. Now what does that do? Basically, if I click on my graph editor here, you can see as I sort of, Let's bring this out a little bit more, that these are my two key frames. And basically this is the speed. So it's like kinda slow and then it goes really fast right away in this sort of 0s is down into this point, then influence is this handle. So the more we sort of click and drag out this handle, the more or less influence this point has on the speed. And so as a sort of flattens out, it gets slower. That is the visual of what we just did to that keyframe. So right now it's ten frames of animation. Let's see if that's sort of enough. Yeah, I think that's a good sort of pop and then ease into that point. And then we're gonna move across. And of course the move across need some easing too. And I think that we're going to double up the time that it takes to move this. And let's, at this point we've sort of measured everything, but now it's time for the feel, the real feel of it. So we're just going to drag this keyframe out. And what we're doing here is we've grown and then this is the position down here, right? So this is the slide across. So I want to ease in to this point over here. So I'm going to grab this keyframe that is the position over here. We're gonna do keyframe assistant, easy ease in, and then we're gonna do the same thing. Velocity. Let's do like 90%. That's just a very a, you can go up to a 100%. And just kind of, it's just kind of a feel thing, right? So let's see what happens. Sort of builds, slides across. Now it's still choppy through there. So let's give it some more keyframes. You'll see as we drag this across further away from the original position, it's just going to take longer to go across there. You see that? And you can see how it goes kind of quick. And then it slowly eases into the final position. I think I want this to ease out of this point actually. And so I'm going to right-click, go to keyframe assistant, easy, ease out this time. And then I'll do the same thing. I'll right-click that keyframe velocity. And we'll do, instead of this incoming, we want outgoing and my change to influence to 90% on that and hit OK. And let's see what that looks like. So it kind of has a little bit of slow going. And it's got a pop in the middle. And it eases into that last point. But I do think that this takes a little too long to texture view. So let's go to this 20 frame mark and just bring this back here. And it's all about feel. So let's watch it, let's see it build. Slide across. Good. I like that feel actually. So let's see, we're at, we want that to be exactly the same coming back. So we can see that we're at the 15th frame and we go to 1-20. Alright, so that's like 1 second 5 frames. So if this one is at four, 1 second 5 frames back would be probably to 25 or so. So we're going to change this to 225 to move our cursor 1 second 5 frames back. And so this is where I want to drag this point here. And so the animation coming back is going to be the sort of the same as the one going across. So same thing here. We're going to ease out of this point as we leave it and come back. And then we're gonna change the keyframe velocity to 90%. Hit OK. And then this guy over here, we gotta click on them and then right-click, ease into his point. And we're going to change his two also. Keyframe velocity, 90% easing in that incoming velocity. So we're easing out of this point as it comes back and we're easing in to the final resting place of R bar. So you'll watch sort of 0s is out and he uses in, and then r bar will just disappear. So let's finalize this. Let's ease into that last little disappeared point. We're just gonna write. We can actually click and drag on both of these. And right-click. Keyframe assistant, easy, ease n that turns them both to sort of easing and right-click velocity. Just do 90%. This is sort of, God do this a bunch of times. I'm sure there's quicker ways of doing this, but keyframe velocity 90%. And this is sort of a basic, basic tutorial. And so now our whole animation, it builds and ys's in, and then it eases out, pops across eases n holds for a little bit. Ease out, pops across, eases into that final point. And then we sort of ease into the disappearing of R bar. So if I click off of everything, nothing selected, come back to the middle here. And then because we only go to about, I don't know, 4 second, almost five seconds. I'm going to bring if we zoom out here with our little I don't know what this is called, this little toggle down here, we can zoom out all the way and I can see the end of my composition now because remember we set it up for ten seconds. I can actually bring this end back to the 5 second mark. And now as we play this, it's gonna loop back to the beginning. And so we'll just go ahead and start here and we'll play it and see what we got. We got a text reveal, hangs comes back and disappears. We did it. You guys I know I probably fumbled through that process, but we did it. And so if you want this guy to hold longer, all you have to do is grab this set of key frames. You can kind of see this in two halves. This is the build and slide across. And then this is the slide back. And what's the opposite of build? I don't know, disappear. And so if I want this to sort of stop longer and reveal the text for longer, all I have to do is grab all of these keyframes here and drag them out. And now, while this sort of as playing between its just hanging out there, just waiting for it to go back and then it pops back. Oh, of course it didn't because I have this dragon, so let's drag this out a little bit. Okay, so it's just hanging out, hanging out, hanging out. And then it'll pop back. So that's how you can change the time in between. And then you can tweak all of these different key frames. You know, if you wanted it to take longer to build that you can drag these two out and that'll take longer to build and different things like that. So, so you can really create whatever kind of animation you want. We created one here, you know, that sort of builds and then hangs and then goes back. But use these, uses, these techniques, these tools, these Keyframing and all this kinda stuff. These are basic things in After Effects. Create your own sort of animation, would love to see what you guys make. Catch me on Twitter or wherever instagram tag me and I want to see your texture reveal animations that you've made. I hope you guys got something out of this. Make sure to subscribe for more tips and tutorials and I'll see you next time. 8. BONUS: Animate Text Spacing: All right guys, today we're gonna be looking at text tracking if you come from a design world or just letter spacing, character spacing and animating that in After Effects, and then probably bringing it over into premier. I'll show you how to do that really easily if you want this effect in your video. Ok, so we have aftereffects opened here, and I also have Premier opened and the background. And I will flip over to this when I show you how to bring it into Premier really easily. It actually kinda dynamic Lincoln and it reminds me of sort of like using a smart object. It's pretty sweet and editable. You know me, I like editable. Alright, new composition. There's button here. You can just right click over here to new composition. There's like 15 ways you can do this, but open up a new comp. And I'm gonna do 1920 by 1080. This preset is 29, 97. I don't really want that. I'm gonna do. Well, basically you're going to want to do whatever the frame rate is of your project. So I know that my sequence and Premier is 24 frames per second. So I'm going to use that. It looks like it changed my preset to HDTV 108024. That's 108024. All this is pretty good. I'll go ahead and keep it at thirty-seconds. Nowhere is there. Pretty much everything's fine on my head. Okay, so we got this composition in here. I'm actually going to rename this composition. I shouldn't named it in the first place and it's going to be called, I'm just going to call it Legacy actually because we're going to use the words legacy like you guys saw in that video. So all I need to do here, I want this sort of transparent background so I can bring it over into Premier and place it on top of any video I have in Premier. So we're really just going to add some text to our document. And there's a little type tool up here. It's Command or Control T as the shortcut. And I can just click on my, I guess canvas here. I'm going to be bad with the names and aftereffects. It don't use it too much, but I'll consider this my canvas. And I'm going to type, I'm going to type legacy. I'm just using all caps for that. Looks like it's the font is white. It's hard to see. I need to bring it up a little bit. The font that I utilized in that video, if you're wondering, is called Butler. I think it's out there and free somewhere. Okay, so we brought that up. The other thing I wanna do in my character and paragraph panels, if you don't see them, you can go up to window dropped down and find probably text or character or paragraph. There's character, there's paragraph. Okay. I want to center this because I want that text tracking to go from the center out. And then I'm gonna go to my alignment panel and actually center it completely on my composition as well. So we're right in the center of the composition. It's hard to see. I think I can change that by toggling off this transparency grid. Now it's going to show on black. But since there's nothing underneath my text layer, it is transparent underneath. So no worries there that just shows you are, that's just how to toggle on and off the transparency grid. Okay, let's change this font to one that I'm using for pixel in bracket a lot, that's good. Headline pro will do good headline probe, black, maybe medium, sorry, just getting picky. Okay, mediums, Good. I actually want to track it out a little bit already. So whenever you're looking at the Character panel, there's this horizontal Snow, not horizontal scale. There is. Where's my text tracking is an paragraph, notes right here, I'm sorry, set the tracking for the selected characters. Right now it's at 0. You can use this and kinda scroll left and right. And you can see that that's, that's the effect we're actually trying to do, right? We're trying to basically animate this text tracking. So I'm going to track it out to my sort of minimum that I want it and we'll set that to 75. You can just type in there if you want. Then we're gonna go down to my layer. I got legacy down here, it's my type layer. I can toggle this down and you're gonna see over to the right this little animate toggle. If I click on that, I have a bunch of things that I can animate and tracking just happens to be one of them. I didn't put that in the title of this video because tracking means something different in the after-effects world for most people. But character spacing is kind of probably what you were looking for. Okay, so this just gave me a little animator down here and a range selector and tracking type and tracking amount. I'm going to toggle down the range selector and we have start and we have end. Make sure this is 0% and the offset is at 0. We also have an advanced option. So you can really get nitty-gritty with this. But honestly you don't have to do a whole lot because we have tracking amount here. We know it's 75 because that's what we started with. But this animator down here is just assuming that wherever your trackings at is the zero-point. So I like 75 as the zero-point. I'm going to toggle on the stopwatch to create a keyframe out here. And then if we go, let's say 65 seconds out here, something like that. I'm going to change this to maybe 30. There you go. And if we swing back to the beginning and hit spacebar to play, our text is tracking. The animated tracking. We got it. Just like that. So you can change how long this is right? You can change the placement of your key frames and the character spacing grows, and then you can adjust. You can go back and forth between keyframes with these arrows right here, and you can adjust just how much tracking there is. So we could really take that up to like a 100. And that's gonna track really quickly across that, that span of time to a 100. So I'm just going to leave it like this because you guys can see it for sure. This is eight seconds. So what we could do is go back to our composition up here in our project panel. Right-click and go to composition settings. And I'm going to set this, instead of 30 seconds. I'm gonna set it to something like nine seconds. Give me a little buffer at the end so I don't lose my keyframes are my little, yeah, my keyframes. But I still have the animation in a pretty condensed little composition. So what we need to do now is save this guy. I'm going to go up to File Save As and want to find a spot on my desktop, you have to have a little recorded folder setup. We're going to call this character spacing perhaps. And so this is my aftereffects project. I just save that. I'm just going to exit out of aftereffects. Don't even need to mess with it now and go back to Premier. So we're in Premier Pro now down here in the project panel of Premiere Pro, I can import and aftereffects project. I can just double-click in this space. It's going to open up my little Finder window. I'm going to go to recorded where I saved that, open up that character spacing After Effects Project and hit Import. Now with the dynamic linking, I probably shouldn't have closed out of the project. We'll open it up here in a sec with the dynamic linking a. Once we import these, we can actually select which composition from that project we want to import into our file. Okay, I sped that up there, it took forever, but here's my composition. In that aftereffects file I see legacy. I can import that comp, hit OK, and it's going to come into my project files here. F a that this is basically like a video clip. We can actually click and drag this onto our timeline. And if I bring it out over here, we can play and preview our effect. So this is kind of like its own little video. This aftereffects composition that got brought in. Now, like I said a second ago, I prize should a kept aftereffects open because what you can do if I right-click on this kind of might even be able to do it from here. If there's an edit button, it doesn't look like there is. There might be, you might be able to find it, but I can go back to After Effects and open up that composition and edit it. And that's the coolest part about the dynamic linking between aftereffects and Premier Pro is that we can open up that character spacing project. Here it is, we could just completely change this to pixels, for instance, and save it Command or Control S. Go back to premiere. And this little guy has already updated to say something different. So you could go back, adjust your tracking, adjust the length of your composition, adjust what it says if you want to, and create whatever you want and bring it over here to Premier Pro to place on top of your videos. That's it for this tutorial. I know there were some skimpy little parts there. I might computer was not loading for some reason that was trying really hard. The fans kicked on, it was freakin out is shouldn't do that for you, especially for something as simple as spacing out your text should be fine. Really cool stuff though. Just animate tracking with the text animator in After Effects, and then save that down. Import that composition to Premier Pro, place it on top of your video, whatever your video is. For mine, it was just a black background for you. It might be a nice ocean scene or something super atmospheric, something like that. I could see this being used in those ways. But that's how you animate text tracking, text spacing, character spacing, letter spacing, whatever you want to call it. Thanks for watching this video. See you guys next time. 9. BONUS: Master Expressions: I'm gonna show you how to create master expression controllers in Adobe After Effects and why they are so awesome. So I've got an After Effects project open here, and this is actually something I'm working on at work. We're working on sort of like a minimalistic line art style winter themed background. And this is in the very early stages still. But I've done a lot of setting up to my document that I wanted to show you first an example of why master expression controllers are so freaking cool. And basically I've got a lot of elements in my project in this composition. You can see them all down here in the layers panel. There's actually quite a few different pre comps, whether there are all these little trees, some of the trees are, have fills on them. So notice how this tree here actually is in front of the horizon line. And then some of these other trees are see-through. They don't have a fill and these Phil's need to be the same color as the background. And all of these stroke widths should be the same, and also all the stroke colors should be the same. I even have a text element on here with the title of the event that has the same color as all the strokes. And so if I needed to make an edit, the reason that master expression controllers are setting one up is so cool is if I, if, if, if somebody's like, Hey, I don't really like that blue, I'm gonna go with like a red. You can adjust that very quickly across your entire project in one spot, which actually have open here. But I'm gonna show you I have a master controller composition. Inside of this composition and all I have is a null object just to, just an object that is nothing basically. And inside of that null object actually have effects set to it. And those effects, if I go up to the effect panel down here, drop-down expression controls have different expression controls added specifically, i have a slider control and color control actually to color controls. And I can see that panel right here. And I've got them set up right here and I've renamed than one's called background color. You'll notice that's that background color, the stroke color, that gold, and then also the stroke width. And I'm going to resize this so you can see all three of those. If I go back to my full background, let's say somebody comes to me and says, hey, we don't wanna do that gold anymore, gonna make it white. All I have to do is click on this color here, one spot, Go, make it white, hit OK. And everything I'm a document turns white. Let's say they want the background not to be the dark blue, but they wanted to be a dark red or magenta tone. I can go up there, select a different sort of magenta color, hit OK, and everything changes. And that includes the Phil's on these trees and the background color because everything is linked to these master controllers. So it allows you to change so many different things in your document all at once. How do we do this? Let's get into that. I'm going to create an entirely new project, but I wanted you guys to see the power of it before we go into actually just creating the little bits and pieces. So let's go up to file and we're going to go to new and new project. And actually before we do that, I need to save this thing. Okay, we saved File New, New Project. And this is a completely new project, completely blank. We're going to close out some of these panels. Let's just bring everything back to the default workspace, window, workspace default. And we're going to reset default to saved layout. And it's gonna kinda reposition some things. Always opens up my libraries because Adobe loves those libraries. But anyway, we have, we have a completely blank document. So I'm gonna set up a new composition either by clicking this button here if you're in CC 2018 or this little new composition button in your project panel over here. So we're going create a new comp. That comp can be whatever it's just do, 1000 by 1030 frames per second. Right now it's set to be one minute long, doesn't really matter. Runge-kutta do any animate and I'm just going to show you how to create this stuff. So let's call this one shapes. That's going to be the composition aims shapes. Ok, so we've got a comp here called shapes. Why don't we add some shapes? So without anything selected, I'm just going to create a square rectangle. Boom, there it is. It's got a white fill. And, and that's it. Let's create another square rectangle, gonna click off of that shape layer so I can create a separate one. And this one, let's go with a stroke of red, hit OK. And the fill is going to be non-existent. We're just gonna click fill and turn that off. Hit OK. And now we're going to create a shape that has a stroke color. Okay, cool. Well, how do I set up expression controls? I'm going to create personally, I like to create a master controller composition. And so to do that, create a new composition. Literally none of this matters, but I will call it master. You can call it master expression controller if you want to, whatever you wanna call it, hit OK, cool, new comp, nothing in it. I'm going to right-click in the space, go to new and create a new null object. On this null object, I'm going to attach all the different expressions that I want, all the different controllers that I want. If I go back to this layer, I'm looking at, OK, I've got a fill color. I want to control the fill color on a control maybe the stroke color of different shapes. You know, even, even if I had, I could even lock these into the same color if I wanted to. So for, for this case, let's go with a fill color and this, and then we'll also do a stroke width that's kind of like similar to what I showed you in the beginning. So we're gonna go back to that master expression controller. And I'm going to add some effects to this null object. So I'm just going to drop down the effects panel and go to expression controls. And I'm gonna do slider controller first. And what slider controller does is it basically controls values of properties. So it doesn't just have to be the stroke width. The stroke width is just a number. So the slider controller sets things to a number. And so anything you have you can set to this controller. In this case, I'm going to rename this guy, hit Enter and just name him stroke width. So I remember recall later what it is. May hit enter on that. And here's one thing that's pretty darn important. In order to link things back to this master expression. Composition, actually need to lock in this affects panel. I don't want this affects panel to go away because as soon as I go, the shapes panel that affects panel goes away and I get effects panels for. Shapes that are in this composition, not the master expression controller. So anyway, I've done enough talking. Let's just click this little block button on this effect controls of this null object. And then I'm even going to move it. I'm going to click in this area and drag it. Now I can drag it around to anywhere. I'm going to put it at the bottom of my project pane right here. Now I've got the project window with all my assets and then I've got the effect controls for that null object. And I'm going to squeeze this down a little bit. And you'll notice that as I go back to the shapes composition, that effect controls stays there because we locked it into place. So now I've got this slider for stroke width. I can actually drop down. Let's see which shape has a stroke. Read one here. So I can drop this down until I get to that shape and its stroke can drop that down even further. Now you'll notice that the stroke width has a number associated with it, and I can reset that to whatever I want. However, if I have tons of these shapes across my entire composition and I want to change all the strokes at the same time, or maybe even just all the strokes of the squares at the same time, all the strokes of the triangles at a different time or with a different value. You can set up all these different controllers, right? You'll see the power of this. So if I hold Option or Alt and click on the stopwatch, it's gonna drop down my little expression stuff here. Now I don't really know anything about this area here where it writes the code in what's highlighted. But I do know this little squiggly thing, this little woody call that. I don't know. Anyway, it's pick whip is what it's called. And you can literally click and drag and link this number to this slider controller. Once I do that and let go. And then I click off to sort of refresh it. Oh no, it went away. You know why? Because we set the value to 0. This slider has a value of 0. So let's say I just slide that over to something like 15 or 14. Boom, it sets it up to be 14 points and I can just change that completely. And now if I have duplicated this object across, in multiple spots, across my little art board or canvas or composition wherever we want, call it. I can, I don't have to go into each one of these and change the stroke size. I can literally just changed this one slider and it changes all of those objects. Now this is super powerful because this technique scales to so many different things. So let's go ahead and set up something for the color, right? I can actually go back to this master expression controller. Click mental object, go up to effect, down to expression controls, and go to color control. Now I've got a scullery thing in here, and let's say that this is going to be the stroke color. Okay, cool. Let's go back to the shapes. And here's, here's the deal. Here's one thing. One little caveat. Tried to do this stuff in the beginning, because now that I have multiple shapes, I have four of these shapes. I get a drop down, each one of them. And get to that color. Let's drop this contents down. Boom, rectangle, stroke. Get to that color. Hold option or Alt, click on that panel and then pick whip it to this color. That's how I set to be that color. But that was only that one shapes. So if I change this to blue, only one of the shapes it's going to change to blue. So I've gotta set that on each one of these shapes. Drop it down, jot that down, drop it down. Stroke, color, option or Alt. Click that stopwatch, pick, whip it to this color and boom, it's set. So it's ideal to think about your project in the beginning, setup some of these master expression controllers on things that you know, are going to be like hard to adjust later if you needed to go back and adjust them. And so then when I create that one Shape layer, instead of having all these duplicates, I could just create this one shape later Shape layer that's pick whipped, whether it's the stroke width or the color. And then once I duplicate this guy, then I can move him about. If I click and drag on this shape. So I've got three of them now. And now if I change any of these stroke widths, it changes all of those shapes. And if the stroke color stuff changes all of those shapes. And I could even set up this last one. Let's say we wanted a fill on this guy and go back to that null object effect, especially controls. We'll do another color controller. Now this is where it's important maybe to think about naming them. And this one I'm gonna do a fill color. And for this guy, we're just going to leave him, he's just a color and go back to my shapes. I've got shape one here who's just a fill. And I'm going to bring him to the top so he's on top of everyone else. There he is. We can drop him down into his contents, go to that rectangle, go to fill instead of stroke. And we can do the same exact thing, option or Alt, click that stopwatch, pick, whip him to the fill color. And now he's going to be set to whatever I set this. And so if there's multiple instances of this object, even so, yeah, you can princomp a shape and then duplicate it and then go back and change just that one pre-commit. However, if you have multiple pre comps across your document and you need them to all be similar or all have the same stroke with there all have the same color or even just different properties because that's slider property. Remember that's just a value. I could set that to be opacity. So what if I pick whip this opacity as well to that slider value, even though it says stroke with it's just a value. So now this shape is actually its opacity is also linked to the slider value. So if I drop this down, not only is it going to change the stroke width of my other shapes, it's gonna change the opacity of my phil. See that you can't even see it anymore. So let's, let's bring it up to woo, woo, woo, let's go up to 100. It's setting the opacity to 100, the strokes to 100 C, C How you can just do different things with this, whether it's opacity values or any kind of value for any property, or stroke widths or stroke colors are shaped colors, different things. You can set up this little master controller to control multiple things across your project all at once. And it's so easy if you need to, if you need the same graphics or same animation, but you need it in like five different colors or like certain color palettes. It's so easy to set up all your elements to be using these master expression controllers. And then just create different versions of the different colors very, very quickly and easily with these values and these color controllers and all of these settings. I hope any of that made sense. I know that I probably way over explained that and I hope you can see the potential value in this. I'll open up my original document again. We won't save any of this stuff. And so, you know, the, the value in this guy is that we can lock this guy in. We can change things across our entire document all in one fell swoop, which is super, super awesome, super handy and super time savy and efficient.