Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Motion Graphics take a lot of time to make, and every time you want to reuse them, you find yourself needing to adjust your animations. Or you want to make a template to sell on a marketplace to earn an extra buck as a creative. Well, if that's the case, you want to make sure that your template is as user-friendly as possible and at the same time also that they can't make any mistakes. That is exactly what I'd love to help you with. Hi, my name is Jordy. I'm a filmmaker, video editor, motion graphics artist, little bit of everything and I do that together with my team here at Cinecom. We mostly make YouTube videos about video editing and film making to an audience of over 2 million subscribers on YouTube. Now I have created an entire library of templates that we use on a daily basis in our videos. These range from lower thirds to social media cards or an outro animation in which we can add comments from our audience. The only thing that we need to do is drag and drop the custom templates into Premiere Pro and change a few settings. This saves us an enormous amount of time. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to create such motion graphics templates yourself within Adobe After Effects, which can be exported to make use of within Adobe Premiere Pro. We're going to work with variations so that the end-user has multiple options. This is often created with expressions, which is going to be a big part of this class. Aside from that, you will also learn how to properly build out your templates with the end-user in mind, things like automations and objects linking to give more flexibility in your templates. Well, that sounds very complicated you might think, well, absolutely not. These advanced things like expressions and all, they are actually very easy. You just need to push in the right direction and you're good to go. Now it is however advisable that you do know the basics of Adobe After Effects. Though I have an entire beginner's class here in Skillshare as well, which I'll leave a link to in the class description if you're interested. Now, I really hope that you will enroll this class because I am super excited to start making motion graphic templates inside Adobe After Effects together with you. Let's get started and I'll see you back in the next lesson. Thanks for watching.
2. Creating a Template: Hello there, I didn't even see you. How amazing that you've joined the class. I am super excited to get started. I'm like a templates guy. Everything in my life are templates, and that way I can save time. For instance, this t-shirt, this is my Monday T-shirt. Also my Tuesday t-shirt, and my Wednesday and the rest of the week. It saves me time. You know what? Let's get started, guys, because we're here to save time. Right here, I'm inside Adobe Premiere Pro, and the first thing that I want to show you is how these templates actually work. I'm going to go fast over this because I'm going to assume that you guys do know the basics of both Premiere and After Effects. We can go in the top here, select ''Window'', and from there choose ''Essential Graphics''. From the Browse tab on top, we can choose a template. Now you are probably going to see some more templates in here because with the installation of Premiere, you get a bunch of templates. I don't like those, so I just deleted them, but here's one that I have created myself, and I can just drag that into my timeline to start using. Basically this template here is a lower thirds. I can actually, from the Edit tab here on top, then from the Essential Graphics, I can choose which player that I want. Jordy is the red team and Yannick, my colleague, is the blue team. We can choose whether that has to be displayed on the left side or right side. We can change the number here of the amount of wins, for example, one win, you can see that change over here, and we have some more options. All of this here has been created inside Adobe After Effects. We can use any kind of functionality, any kind of effect, and bring that into Premier through these motion graphics templates. You know what, let me just delete this example and let's hop into After Effects and show you guys how this exactly works. Let's create something very simple. I'm going to go to my Text Tool and just type in username, may perhaps make that a little bit smaller, like so and place that here on the bottom. If you're making lowered third skies, make sure to enable Title and Action Safe areas, so that you can position your texts to any of these guidelines. It just feels or looks better than if you would stick one of your texts against the border here of your Canvas. Next to that, I want to have an image which I have here at my Assets folder, Jordy, which is me, and I'm just going to place that here next to the username. We have an image, an icon of the person, and there we can type in the username, that is the idea. Now let's create some effects or animations as well. I'm just going to disable the Title/Action Safe areas for now. For instance, my Jordy image, let's just make something very quickly here with this scale. I'm just going to let that scale up from 0-24 like that, and you know what? For the text, I'm going to reveal every single character. Now to do that, we actually have some animation options. If we expand layer, we can see here on the right side Animate, these are all properties that we can estimate. For example, the Opacity. Every of these properties also come a Range Selector, and with that, we can animate the Opacity per character. Let's set the opacity to zero because that is what we want to accomplish. Now we can animate the Start, and you can see here that it will reveal each character separately. Let's do that from the start here, Jordy keyframe go a little bit forward in time, and let's bring that to 100. What we have right now is this. Very simple animation. But let's do one more thing, guys. Let's add a glitch effect to the entire design. Now instead of adding that glitch effect to the two layers, I'm going to create a new adjustment layer from the menu here on top. Now with that adjustment layer, we can actually very easily add the glitch effect to that one. I'm going to take the VR Digital Glitch and apply it to the adjustment layer, and that way it will be applied to everything underneath. Let's also animate that effect. For the beginning, I'm going to animate the Random Seed, which is going to make sure that the glitch is moving around, and I'm also going to animate the Master Amplitude, which is basically a toggle to put the effect on and off. The more the amplitude, the more glitch we have, if it's zero, we don't see the glitch. These are two great properties to animate. With having both of these animations here selected from the effects controls, I can now press the ''U'' key on my keyboard to reveal those that I have enabled. Let's go a little bit forward in time, somewhere right here perhaps, and I'm going to bring the Random Seed on a note to something like 50, and the Master Amplitude to zero. What we have right now is we've got this glitch right here as the animation also comes in from the picture and the username. Let's turn this right here now into a template so that we can use that insight Premier Pro. Now in order to do that, we have to bring up a new window. We're going to go to the Window menu on top and locate the Essential Graphics. That's the same panel as insight Premier, only here it looks a little bit different. The first thing you want to do is select a composition that you want to make a template off. In this case it's going to be username. We only have one composition. You can also give that a name if you like. I'm just going to leave that to your username templates. Now we can actually start dragging in properties into this window, properties that we want the end user to change. If you don't know which properties are supported, you can actually click here on this button, which says Solo Supported Properties, and that will reveal all of those properties that we can use. That is a little bit too much, I'm just going to collapse that again. We can also search for those properties ourselves of course. One of the great tips that I can give you guys is when working with adjustment layers, a very easy way to toggle that effect on enough is just simply adding the opacity property of that adjustment layer. Let's do that. I'm going to go to my Adjustment Layer, drag the Opacity property, and drag that into the Essential Graphics panel. This will simply put the opacity of that layer from 0-100 and everything in between, which is go to alter the effect that we've got applied to that. You can see that right here. I'm going to drag that to 0, the glitch effect is gone. Let's call this Glitch Effect. That way the end user knows that we can control the end effect of that. Now of course guys, this isn't that user-friendly, later in this class we're going to see how we can work with checkboxes, which is going to be a lot more convenient for the end-user, but that is going to require some more advanced steps. By the way guys, anything that you set in this window right here is going to be the default value. If you want the Glitch Effect to be on by default, then just increase that to 100. I'm going to also drag the picture into this window. You can just entirely drag that layer into the Essential Graphics panel, and that allows me to change the picture or the avatar. Guys, if this doesn't work for you, make sure to simply update your After Effects and Premiere, because this is one of the latest features of the Adobe programs. Finally, I want to make sure that we can change the source Text of this layer here, the username. Let's drag that into this panel as well. Give it a name, for example, Username, this is the label, and you can also give that a default name. Again, let's call that Jordy, because that's me. One interesting option here is with texts and that is Edit Properties. If you click on that, you can give some more options to the end user. If you want them to be able to change the font, the font size and everything, you can enable that right here. If you don't want that then don't enable that, of course. For now, let's enable that so you can see how that looks. There we go. These are the extra options that you're giving with the end-user as well. This is pretty much it guys. Now let's bring this templates into Premier Pro. Hit ''Exports Motion Graphics Templates''. Yes. You want to save the project. You always have to do that before an export. Now we've got a couple of options. We can actually save that to our libraries, which is an option within the Creative Clouds. I usually just like to save it to my local drive, that is up to you. Let's do it this way. You can click ''Browse'', to save that to a different location, but let's just keep that into the Lessons folder, which is also the folder guys that you can download from the class projects here on Skillshare, I think, that way you also have access to all the projects files I'm creating right here in After Effects as well as the templates that I'm each time of exporting. That's it. Hit ''OK'', and now it's probably going to give you guys a warning. That is because of the font that I'm using. I'm using the Arial Black font, and it's saying, "Hey, this is not an Adobe font." Which means if you are going to make a template and you're going to, let's say sell that on a marketplace, that means that a lot of people are making use of that templates. But if you're making use of Adobe fonts, it will automatically synchronize that. Because assuming if you have Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects, you've got Creative Cloud as well, and that comes with a library of fonts. You can check it out here in your Creative Cloud desktop app. Here are all of my apps I've got installed. But here on top, you can click on ''Fonts'' or here on ''Browse Fonts'' to look for more and synchronize them or install them onto your computer. I'm using something outside of Adobe, but I don't see that as a big problem, because I'm using Arial Black, which is a default font that everyone should have installed on the computers. Just something to keep in mind, guys, don't just start downloading any kind of fonts from the Internet, always think about your end user. Let's just hit ''OK'' for now, and that's it. It's saved so we can now hop back into Adobe Premiere Pro. We're going to go to the Browse tab, because in here we went to install that template, which we can do from the button down below, Install Motion Graphics Template. Then you simply locate that template file that we have just exported, which is right here. Hit ''Open'' and it will be added to your library. Now guys, very interesting is that this template will always be there inside Premiere Pro. This is not fixed to your project, so if you're opening up a new project in the future, that template will still be in there. That makes it very convenient to work with. Now we can just drag that into the timeline, and I've got this stock clip of this man here who is revealing himself. Maybe a great way to work with his lower thirds to show the username of this guy. But anyway, if we select that template file and go to the Edit tab from the essential graphics, we can now see all of those properties that we have given with the motion graphics template inside After Effects. We can enable and disable the Glitch Effect here, as you can see, as well as change the avatar by just simply clicking here on the menu and top and say Replace from Explorer, and I actually have here in my Assets folder a photo of Yannick, my colleague as well. Let's just select that one. You can see here that it will simply replace the photo with that. Super convenience. Of course we can change the username to Yannick, and if you want so also change the fonts and the size and everything if you want so. But that is basically it, guys. For this lesson, I just wanted to give you that workflow, the overview of what a template actually is and how it works. As of the next lessons, we're going to dive into more advanced techniques and start working with expressions, which is basically programming inside After Effects, which allows us to create more user-friendly templates like checkboxes, dropdown menus and everything, which is going to be really cool. I'm super excited guys. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
3. 'If Else' Expression: We're going to hacky, guys. We're going to write programming codes right inside Adobe After Effects, which doesn't sound as illegal as it is. Now, these codes are called expressions, and they can automate certain things for us. To give you an idea, guys, what I have right here is a big title text that is animated on the scale property. Now, I want this text to also bounce. Now, I can go ahead and create that manual with things like the keyframes and all, but I can also use a very simple expression. Now, if you go to our website, we've got an article about expressions. I'll leave a link to it in the class notes, but you'll see if you scroll down on that page that you can actually find some of these code snippets. You don't need to know anything about these codes. You can just simply go ahead and just copy that codes for the bounce expression. You see, that's what I want to achieve. Just hit "Control C," and let's hop back into After Effects. Now, code is written on specific properties, in this case, the scale property. To write codes inside that scale property, what you have to do is simply hold down the Alt key and then click on the Stopwatch, and a new text box appears where we can write those expression codes in. Just delete everything in there and paste that expression that I got from our websites, and that's it. When I now go to playback this expression, you'll see that the big text is wiggling or bouncing on the very ends. That is what expressions do. Now, expressions can also help us to make certain templates more user-friendly. Like we've seen in the previous lesson, we used a slider to control an effects. Well, this time, we're going to create a checkbox. Let's very simply add that same glitch effect again to the text like that, and let's animate the Random Seed from zero till the very ends to 100, so that way we have this glitch going on the entire time over the big title. We want users to be able to turn that on and off. Now, to do that, we need a checkbox which can also be found within the effects library. Under Expression Controls, we can find a bunch of effects which don't do anything. They're just dumb controls; that's it. But with some expressions, we can make them do magic things. Under there, we can find that Checkbox Control. Now, we can just go ahead and drag that to the big title layer, but I would always suggest to work with a controller layer. Just way better in your workflow. I would just make a habit of that because once you're going to work with multiple layers and everything, that controller layer is going to just give you a better overview of what you're doing. Let's go into the menu on top, select Layer, New. I'm just going to take the Null Objects, which is also just a dumb nothing object. It doesn't do anything. I'm going to rename that to Controller. This is going to be the layer that I'm going to apply all of these expression control effects to like the checkbox. Let's drag that onto the Controller, and that's it. Just the checkbox. Just check that or D check that. That's it. Now, we can also give that effect a different name by hitting the Return key. Now let's call this Glitch effects. There we go. Now, let's go back to the big title, and I'm going to expand and look for the Glitch effect, which is right here. We know that we've got this Master amplitude which we can use to enable or disable that effects. We're going to write an expression on the Master amplitude, and that is going to be the If Else expression which you saw from the title of this lesson. Now, the If Else expression is probably the one that you're going to work with the most, and that is why I also want you guys to actually know how to write that code. If Else, how does that work? Well, if we check the checkbox, then the Master amplitudes can be 100 or the effects can be present. If we don't select the checkbox, then we don't want to see the glitch effects, then the Master Amplitude is going to be zero. It's that simple. If this, then that. If that, then this or this, then that and this. I'm just making it complicated right now. Let's just get started. In order to start writing expressions, we're going to have to Alt click, but first guys, I'm also going to bring up the checkbox effects here in my controller because I'm going to need that to write the expression. Let's go back to the Master amplitude. Hit "Alt", and click on the Stopwatch. I can delete the code, whatever it's in there because we're going to start and write something new. We're going to actually write if, so we just go ahead and write that if. Now, let's open up the two parenthesis and between these two, we're going to write the statement, so what if. What has to be if? Well, if that checkbox, so we're going to use this little pick whip tool so that we don't have to actually write it. It's going to automatically write it for us. If we're going to use that pick whip tool here from the expression controller to the checkbox, you see here, it's going to write this code for us, which simply means, "Hey, that checkbox." We've got the checkbox, so if that is checked, now in order to drive that, we're going to write double equals. Now, the reason why we write double equals is because we're just going to check what the value is. Is it checked or is it not checked? That's what we're doing right now. If we would only use one equal, then we're going to save variables in that. That's for later in this class, so don't worry too much about that yet. Double equals one. One means it's checked. Zero means it's not checked. It's that simple. You could also write true or false. That's also a possibility, but I like to work with one and zero. That also works just fine. We've got the statements between two parentheses. Now, we're going to write what has to happen. In order to do that, we're going to work with the semicolon, which is this little figure right here, and that also has to stop somewhere. We can already go ahead, put some spaces in there and write the second semicolon to close that. You always want to open something and close it back. Between these two, we're going to write what has to happen, or just in other words, the value that has to be inside the Master amplitudes. We can just go ahead and write 100 in here. It's going to use 100 and put it in there. It's that simple. Now, what has to happen if that is not the case? What if the checkbox isn't checked? Well then, it has to be zero, of course. We're going to write just after that semicolon there, else, what else? Then the same thing again, open up the semicolon. We're going to write zero now, and again, close semicolon. There we go. If the checkbox is one or enabled, then the value in the Master amplitude has to be 100. If that's not the case, else, then the value has to be zero in Master amplitudes. That is how we can write an If Else expression. This is the basis, and we're going to see later in this class as well, how are we going to utilize this code to do a lot more things because instead of 100, we could also give a whole different action to this expression, but this is it for now. Let's just click away from this, select our Controller. You'll see now if we've got the Checkbox D checked, we don't have the glitch effects. If we check it, we do have the glitch effects. Look at that. Let's bring up the Essential graphics panel, which is right here. I'm going to select the If Else composition. I'm just going to drag that checkbox property now into this Window right here. You can give that a name, for example, glitch effects. The end-user will now have a very easy toggle button to toggle that on and off. It's that simple, guys. We can go ahead and export this again into Premier Pro and use it over there, but this is the If Else expression. Hopefully, this was a little bit clear. Definitely make sure to practice that a little bit on yourself before we go to dive into the next lessons because we are going to work a lot more with these expressions. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
4. Designing a Lower Third: Hi, my name is, and my profession is. You see I'm saving time here, I didn't even have to say my own name anymore. I'm just using a template for that, something that I created way back in the days and now I'm just reusing it. I think this template thing is starting to get clear. Let's create a lower third, guys, just like the thing that you've just saw. I'm inside Adobe After Effects right here. The first thing that I'm going to do, which has already been enabled that I see here is my title, safe area, which you can do from here. Let's create something fun. Let's create a background first. I'm just going to take the rectangle tool here on top, and I'm going to draw a rectangle like this. This is going to be the background for my name text. So make sure to also be organized and just rename your text layers. For example, this is the name background red. Nice, let's create an animation for that for the position property so right here somewhere, where the animation end. So make a keyframe for that, go back in time, now let's push it to the left. There we go. Now that rectangle comes in from this side, looks great. Now make sure to always work with smooth keyframes guy. Make sure that the end keyframe here, right-click on it, and head over to your keyframe assistant and choose easy ease in, the animation is coming in so that way now we've got a smooth animation going on. Very basic things. Let's duplicate that layer to add an extra effect to it. There we go, and I'm going to rename that top here to backgrounds white because I'm going to change the color of that rectangle to white. There we go. Now here's something interesting when we're going to offset the top layer here by a couple of frames, you will see that we've got this animation now going on, where we have this red rectangle here on the bottom revealing itself, so little extra tint to that. Looks good. Now we're going to also create a new background field for the profession or the subtexts. Like before just duplicate one of these layers, you can do that by the way by hitting "Control D" or "Command D" on your keyboard if you're working on a Mac. I'm going to drag this layer here to the bottom, hit the "U" key on your keyboard to reveal the keyframes and if you stand on any of these and select all of the rest, what you can do now is actually take that layer and drag it to a different position, but also make sure that the keyframes come with it. Now if you hold down the shift key as you move it around, it will be locked to a certain axis, in this case, the y-axis so you just pull that a little bit down, like so. This is going to be, I'm going to rename that to the subtexts background red. Again, duplicate that layer, and this is going to be the white one, so we're going to rename that to background white. Change the color of that to white, and you know what? Just to have some difference here, I'm going to bring this layer down like so and this time offset the red layer instead of the white one. There we go. We now have this animation going on here, and to make it look even better, we're first going to reveal the name and then the subtexts. So take these two layers here and move them a little bit more to the right, like so. First the name comes in, and then the profession, looking gorgeous. But to be even more organized inside your lower third design, what I would also do is give different colors to my labels. The ones here on top, they have blue colors here these labels, and you know what? For a subtext, we can actually give that a different color, for example, orange, [inaudible] know way we can clearly see these are the layers for the subtext and these are for the main texts. The reason why I find it so important to be organized is because you're making a template and perhaps in a couple of months you want to make adjustments to that template, so you want to go back to the project and understand what you've been creating those couple of months back. Let's now grab the text tool and start typing the text, the place holder. For the top one, that's going to be name, there we go. I'm going to change the color of that to red perhaps, there we go. Make that a little bit smaller, and I'm going to align that right here next to this guideline. Now here's something super important, guys, when you are designing templates, you have to keep in mind that the text fields are going to change. That means if I'm going to type here instead of name Yannick, which is my colleague, you'll see that won't be aligned to the left guideline anymore. That is because my alignment is set wrong. Maybe that wouldn't matter at all if you're just working with one fixed text, if you're creating templates, it's something to keep in mind at all time. So under the paragraph paneled here, make sure to align it to the left side because we also have a lower third on the left side. Now we can drag that text layer here to the left guideline, and if I'm going to change that text back to name, you will see that it will start from that left guideline. For right now to subtexts, let's create a new text layer and call this subtext, make this one your whites, there we go, and perhaps, maybe change the font a little bit instead of Arial Black make this bold so that it's not too bold like the black. Let's D scale that so that it fits in the subtext. But something to also keep in mind guys is what your background layers. If for example, you have someone with a very long profession name, keep that in mind as well because if we're going to start typing in this layer here, and it goes beyond that background, it doesn't look as good anymore. Think of the longest word that you're ever going to use or your end-user might be using and make sure that you have some room with your background layers. Now before you're going to pop me the question, can I also make my background layer scale with the text? Well, yes. But it's a little bit complex and involves some more complex expressions, and that is why I've got a separate lesson for that later in this class. For now, we're just going to design this with a fixed background, size in mind. Let's name this back to subtext, there we go. Now let's also create a text animation, and what I have in mind is that when this block here comes in and it's covering up the reds of the same color of the text, we can then reveal it. I'm going to do that with a mask, perhaps disable now the title safe action area because we no longer need it. Let's start by creating a mask on its endpoint. Just simply click here under "Rectangle Tool", but makes sure to have your name layer selected. Let's drag a mask around it and make sure that it's long enough so that it won't cut off anything for long names. Keep that in mind, guys, always do. Now let's go back to where the animation is ending somewhere right here, and I'm going to align my mask next to that line. Something like this. Now let's take the mask path because that's what we're going to animate, and let's just go with those couple of frames back to here and move the mask all the way back as well. Now, because we've got that smooth keyframe, the easy ease in going on with the backgrounds. We also want to do that probably right here, because otherwise, you can see here that the animation of the mask and the rectangle do not line up. Right-click here the last keyframe assistant and choose easy ease in and now they do match up. It doesn't have to be perfect because we've got this red rectangle block, we're just covering it up. This is looking good, it's revealing itself now from behind. Let's do the same thing for the subtexts, create a mask rectangle over it like so. Make sure to align that. Create a keyframe for the mask path. Go back in time, where that rectangle is out of the framing like so, and move this all the way to the left. There we go. Right-click and choose "Easy Ease In", and this subtext now also is being revealed. Now one last thing to do and that is enable motion blur for all of these layers. To look at that, we've got ourselves a very modern and tight looking lower third animation. I love this one. Now, as I said before, when you're making templates, always keep in mind every option that the user might want to change. When I'm thinking of lower thirds, I'm also thinking about the position of that lower thirds, so in this case it's sitting on the left side. But what if you have your subjects also sitting on the left side and you might want to have your lower third on the right sides? Let's give that option to the end-user. Let's create a drop-down menu where they can choose whether it has to stick on the left or the right side. Now, in order to do that, we are going to have to create our lower third as well on the right size. Yes, we can go ahead and select all the layers in here and say 'Control C, Control V' to make a direct duplication of that. Unfortunately, there's no switch control to make it automatically switch. We're going to have manually steer that to sit on the right sides. While I'm now changing all of those keyframes manually to make it coming from the right side. It's something to keep in mind as well, is that your text also needs a new alignments. That means we're going to go to the paragraph right now and change the alignment to the right sides, like so, and just bring this back to the rights. The same thing for the name to the right sides and bring that back to the rights. The last thing that I got to do is just change the animation of the mask paths. There we go. If we now play this back, we can see that we've got a lower third on both sides, which we can use as a template. Now, how are we going to give the option to the end user to toggle between these two? The first thing that I'm going to do is just group these two lower thirds together, which is going to be a pre-comp. Select everything from the right side, right-click and choose pre-compose. We're going to call that the rights animation. Hit "Okay", and enter the same thing for the other one, right-click, pre-compose and call this one left animation. We've got two layers right now. If we're not going to go to the opacity property, we could create an expression to bring the opacity from 0-100 to enable or disable each one of those layers. Like we've seen previously, we're going to create a new null object and we're going to call that controller. On that controller, I'm going to apply something called drop down menu, which is also an expression control effects. There we go, head over to the effects controls and we're going to go to edit here from the effect properties. Let's just delete one of these items with the minus on top and let's change the other names. The first one is going to be left and the other one is going to be right. Then hit, ''Okay,'' so we've got two items in my drop down menu, left and right. With that, I want to toggle between these two. Let's call this here the position property. There we go. The position of the lower thirds. Like before, just open that up, effects position menu right there. That has what we're going to link to. Let's start with the first one. The right animation hits the ''T button,'' on your keyboard to bring up the opacity property and Alt click on the stopwatch, delete the text in there and let's start writing something new. Like we've seen before, if, open up the parentheses, we're going to link to the menu. There we go. Then double equals because we're going to see what's inside of the dropdown menu and I think it's going to be position 2, I'm correct? Yes. Because left is the first item in the drop-down menu and right is the second item in the drop-down menu. That's why we also have to write in the second number here. If that equals 2, then, open semicolon, it can be 100 opacity. If it's not the case, we're going to write else right now, then it has to be zero. We don't want to show that layer and close the parentheses. There we go. If everything went well, when I'm going to change that drop-down menu to left, it will hide that layer and show when I'm going to set it to rights. We can now write the exact same code for the left lower thirds, but just change one little parameter. To make it ourselves easier, I'm going to just copy this entire code here, Control C, Alt click on the opacity of the left animation and just paste that in there. But I'm going to change the position of the menu to one in this example. Now we can just go ahead and switch between left and right. As you can see, the only thing that it's doing is just changing the opacity, showing one layer or the other. Now let's bring up our essential graphics. I'm going to select the composition lower thirds, and I'm going to bring in that menu property right in there. This is going to be the position property left or right. That is something super user-friendly for the end-user. Everyone just loves drop-down menus. All right, so there's one last thing that we have to do and that is the actual text. Now, there is a problem because which text property are we going to add to the essential graphics to the templates? We've got the left and we've got right. Does that mean that we have to create two naming fields for left and rights? No, of course not. This is how it works. Let's open up the two compositions. There we go. I have them right here. Maybe to make it ourselves a little bit easier, I'm just going to drag the right here to the right side of my screen and have the left one here on the left. Here are the two compositions. What I want do is just make one of these text fields, the master and the other one is going to follow. This is how that works. I'm going to start with the name fields, and I'll just open up the text property for text source. Here as well, name, open up the text source. This is also an expression, but luckily we don't have to write much, we just have to link them together, so name 2 is going to follow what its source text here. Take the pick whip 2 for the source texts, is going to follow its master, which is the source text of the left animation, the other name field. There we go. It's that simple. You will see now that let me just enlarge this composition for a moment. Inside the source text automatically, some expression code has been written, which is just pointing towards the source text of the other layer. All right, so let's do the same thing now for to subtexts. Just collapse these other two here, source texts, subtext, there we go and link that or parent it to the other layer. That means now that we don't have to worry about the right animation anymore, we can just go ahead now and take the source text for subtexts for the left animation, which is the master into the essential graphics, and the same thing goes for name as well. Let's put that on top and call this name and the other one subtext. There we go. It's that simple. You will see now, you can go to change name to Jordy, very time saving guy. Now as you can see, it has changed the text source of the left lower thirds but also the one of the right lower thirds, because it is just pointing to the other text fields. That is how you can create your own lower third template with a lot of different options, but still make it very user-friendly for the end-user, that is something that you always need to keep in mind, make it user-friendly. That was it again. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson.
5. Advanced Animations: Now you have been doing an amazing job so far. See what you've been doing so far. You've been writing expressions, creating templates. You've learned a ton already, so keep that up. I'm still super excited, so let's continue now in this lesson. We are going to create a slight up text animation, and we're going to work with things like Object Linking. I'm going to also teach you how to work with animation curves, and finally, some formatting techniques to create a template. Let's get started. I'm going to go to my text tool on top, like [inaudible]. We're going to create this word stay, and then we have these sliding texts coming up like stay creative, stay safe, stay cool, or whatever you want. Let's do that. We're going to start with just writing Stay, and I'm going to place that right here. I'm going to set the alignment to the right. It's already set correctly because if we are going to give the end-user the possibility to also change that text, that person might write something longer. So let's keep that with Stay now, and I'm going to align it somewhere right here. You can also use the alignment tools here on top if you want to position it exactly in the middle here with that button. There we go. This is going to be the main text, so we're going to rename that layer to MAIN TEXT. Next up I'm just going to duplicate the main text, and that way I'm sure that we have the exact same size and everything of that text layer. This one I'm going to align to the left side, and bring that closer more to the middle like that. But you know what? Let's call this one Creative. This is going to be my Subtext 1. Let's just continue doing this. I'm going to duplicate that layer Subtext number 2, and I'm going to move that one down like so. We're going to call this one, let's say Safe. Let's duplicate that again, bring that down. Call that one Cool. Perhaps, maybe one more Subtext number 4. Stay, I don't know. Warm. you want to stay cool when it's hot outside, and you want to stay warm when it's cold outside. Makes sense. I want you to create animation now where are these texts go upwards. We're only going to animate one of these texts layers. That's going to be the most efficient way, and we're just going to link all of the other texts layers to the master. The other ones are going to be the followers. Just like we've seen in the previous lesson where we are going to link to source texts to the master, this time we're just going to link the entire layer to it. That's going to be done with the parent tool, which we can find right here. These pick whips here. If you can't see that by the way just right-click here in your columns, and from there you can choose your columns, the Parent & Link options. We're going to link everything to Subtext number 1, so just select all of the other subtext layers. Just take the pick whip tool, and link it to Subtext number 1. We can just go ahead and only animate the top one. You know what? This is the last position here, so I'm going to go a little bit forward in time, create a key frame, then go back in time and push this text down. You can see here everything else follows with that. To be sure that we're always staying on the exact same line, we can actually bring up the rulers here in the composition. If you press "Control R" you can see this here popping up, and you can actually drag out a ruler from that. I'm going to align that with the Stay text, and that way I'm sure that I'm staying on the exact same heights. Let's play this back and this looks okay, but I wanted to go a lot smoother. One thing that we can do is just right-click on that end key frame, just go over to Key frame Assistant and choosing "Easy Ease In". Now it already goes a little bit smoother, but I wanted to go even more smooth. Here's where those animation curves come in. To bring up those animation curves what we just have to do here is click on this icon, the Graph Editor. This right here, what we see now is this speech curve. If you can't see that, what you want to do then is go to this little menu right here and choose a graph type. You want to make sure that the Edit Speed Graph is selected. I think by default the Value Graph is selected, so there you can change that. If we would now push here or pull on that lever, we can make the texts go faster in the beginning and slowly decelerate till it's ending position. The higher that speed graph line is, the faster your animation goes. The lower that is, the slower it goes. Let's play this back. As you can see here it comes in fast, but it also stops a lot smoother. You can also pull this a little bit more to the right sides making good animation just longer and timed. It comes in fast and it's slowly stops. Looking great. If you like you can also add that expression in there like we've seen before here on our website. The Bounce Expression, something that I use very often. Alt/click on that stopwatch. Do also based in an expression here. There we go. Now we can have that very gentle bounce in there. The reason why we don't see that bounce as much anymore is because we have this animation curve going on. The more you smoothen out that animation curve, the less bounce you see. But something noteworthy, if we go into the expression code right here; let me just make a little bit more room for that, there are some things that we might understand. For example, here on the bottom we can find amplitudes; the amp value, the frequency, and the decay. For example, the amplitude. The higher the amplitudes maybe the more it will bounce, so let's try and change that. Perhaps set that to five or something. Let's see what that does. Already you could see now that it balances extra on the very end. It's not looking that great, so maybe decrease that back a little bit. This is how you can play around with these expressions as well. That to two, and I think this looks pretty okay. We have a very gentle balance in there, which makes it more dynamic. You can also play around with the frequency and the decay to just see what that does for your animation. That is the first one looking good. Let's go over to the next text. Stay Creative, we're going to create a new key frame. Go forward in time, and bring this up to Stay Safe. Like before we're going to create animation curves, so well let's go back into the Graph Editor. If you don't see any graphs in here by the way, that means that you haven't selected your property. Make sure to just select that, and that would bring up the curves. Let's do that again. I'm going to select the first key frame, bring this down and pull it to the right side. Bring the other one down as well, and bring it to the left side. We're going to accelerate to a very fast speed, and then go back to the stop position. Look at that, looking awesome. Let's continue doing this key frame, go forward in time and bring it up. Again, in to the Graph Editor, pull this key frame down to the left, pull this key frame down to the right. There we go. Let's have look at the final animation. I think this looks pretty cool. We could now go ahead and remove that guideline by just dragging it up again and perhaps also de-check Title Safe area, and there we go. The next thing that I want to do is highlight all of the other texts. So only show the one that sits next to Stay. In order to do that, I'm going to group everything together. Just select all of your subtexts, right-click, and choose "Pre-compose". We're going to call this the Subtexts. Hit "Okay". Now it's just a very simple matter of dragging a rectangle mask over that composition, something like this. That is now how we can reveal these other texts underneath the mask. This looks pretty cool, although I have to say it myself. Let's bring this into a template, and I'm want to show you guys some more formatting options. We're going to go back to the Essential Graphics. I'm going to select my primary composition, which is the Rolling Text. Let's call this also Rolling Text, and we're going to drag the properties in here that we find important to change. That is going to be the main text here, the source text of that. Let's give that a label, Main Text. Then the subtext, we are going to have to jump into the pre-comp for that, and just drag any of these into here. There we go. Subtext 1, Subtext 2, Subtext 3, and finally, Subtext 4. We can give that a name, Subtext 1, Subtext 2 so that people see what they are changing. This is now something that we could export as a template for the end-user, but we could make this a little bit more user-friendly by adding formattings. Here on the bottom, we can find a formatting drop-down menu. There are two things that we can do, we can add a comment and we can add a group. Let's start with adding a group. Basically this group is like a bin. We can, for example, call one Main, and we're going to drag the Main Text in there. We could also make a group inside of a group, it's going to be the subtexts but I'm going to drag that group outside of that group. It's just like making folders guys, you can also make subfolders obviously. I'm just going to bring all of these subtexts into here. There we go. Now we've got two groups. We can also collapse them, expand them again. This is really useful if you have a lot of properties to give to the end-users, so that they have a better overview of what is for what. Finally, we also have an option here called Add Comments, which is basically just the label. You can give some information to the end-user. For instance, give the label here Info, and we're going to say Change the text of the subtexts and perhaps place that here on the top. Now people will know that these options are for changing the subtexts. This is a non-editable field by the way. It just acts as label, as an information to share. Something you can also do definitely if you are going to share your template on a marketplace or something is give some information about the archer. Created by Jordy Vandeput. Give some copyright information perhaps with that. Usually such a label is placed on the bottom, or all the way on the top of your templates like so. The last thing that I want to show you guys is the Set Poster Time. For that, I'm going to go back into my main composition here, and choose for a frame here in my composition that I feel that should act as a thumbnail for the templates. For example, maybe somewhere here in between two, so that way you're also showing this has an animation. They are definitely if we're going to enable the Motion Blur, just look at that. We can actually say, use this frame as the thumbnail by just clicking now here on Set Poster Time and you'll also see that it updates it right here. That is what people will see inside Premiere Pro when they load in your templates. Let's just let sit on Export Motion Graphics Template. Yes, save that. This one is going to be called the Rolling Text. It has already the right name. Let's just hit "Okay". Yes, I know that we're not using an Adobe Font. I'm okay with that, and let's now hop into Premiere Pro. From the Essential Graphics panel, I'm going to click here on the bottom to install a new Motion Graphics Templates and choose my Rolling Text and there we go. We can also see here the thumbnail that we've chosen. We can drag that into the timeline, and their we go. Minute is selected, we can then change everything that we've set before. Here you can see those labels created by Jordy Vandeput. Subtext with some more information about what to do with that. You can also collapse those now because we've created groups or expand them again, and we can change the text right in there. This is how we can add some more formattings toward a template, as well as creating a more advanced animation using Object Linking and those animation curves. With that, I hope that you've learned something new. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you back in the next lesson.
6. Color Controllers: Colors. Don't we just love them? Oh, look, red, it's my favorite color. What is your favorite color? Let's get started, guys. What I have right here, where is my mouse pads? I lost my mouse mats. Is it mouse pads or mouse mats in English? I don't know. Anyways, let's continue. This is a very simple animation of two rectangles. We got a bottom line and upper line. Basically, what's going on is just they animate themselves going in and out and a text will reveal. I don't care too much about the text right now, I'm more interested in these two rectangles which I want to change its color from. We all know that, for example, if we bring up the opacity from the upper line, and we are going to Alt click on the stopwatch to write an expression, that we can write a value in here. For example, 50. It will output that as the opacity, 50 percent. The opacity property is just going to take a look at what the value is inside the expression. If we are writing an if/else expression, now we're also just going to write what the value has to be. It's exact the same thing. When we are going to go to the color of this rectangle, let's find it here. Contents, Rectangle, Fill, right here, the color. When we're going to Alt click on that, then what should we write in there for the color red, for instance? Let's try a red, but I don't think that's going to work. No, it can't read red. For colors, we also want to read a numeric value, but what is the number of red? Well, there is a very simple tool for that. If you would search on Google for color picker, you can actually find this tool right here where you can just drag this thing around to pick the color that you would like, and you know what? Let's grab something that looks like red. There we go. Here on the bottom, you can then find a bunch of numbers. We get the HEX value of this color, we also get the RGB value, the CMYK, etc. All of these output a different numeric value, and that is something that we are interested in. In more particular, the RGB value. These three numbers, they stand for red, green, blue, just like the name RGB. The maximum, if I'm just going to drag this all the way up here in the corner, pure red, you will see that red now sits at 255, which is the maximum. This can be seen as 100 percent pure red. There's nothing more when that value sits at zero percent or also zero and its numeric value, we don't have any red. Let's bring it all the way down here to black, it's now zero as well as for all the other colors. Red, green, and blue are all zero, black. But if we would bring that all the way up to white, everything is 255. If all the colors are the same, they add up to each other and we get white. But if we get something in-between, let's go for something like that, we get a very different value. If we would add up all of these, 153, 125 and 41, we would get this very ugly yellow. That is something very interesting to know. We can just go ahead and copy and paste the value from here into After Effects. Let's do pick out a more beautiful color though, something like green. There we go. I'm just going to copy this and hit "Control C" to copy that value, then go back into After Effects. That is something that we can now just paste into the expression. But before we do that, we're first going to have to write bracket open because we're going to have to define four points. Every time that we're going to talk about its points or multiple values, you're always have to open up a bracket. If we are going to work with the position, for example, we get two values; the y and the x-axis. Then we would also write the brackets open. In this case, they're going to be four values. I know that we've just copied three, but we'll get into the fourth one in a moment. So bracket open and going to paste in, the values right in there. We can just leave the commas because every time that we add a comma into our expression, that means that we're going to start with the next points. We get red, green, blue, and there's going to be a fourth one, comma, and that is the alpha channel. Alpha just basically means opacity. What is going to be the opacity of the color? If I would set this to zero, then my color would be transparent. We don't see anything. If I would set this to 255, which is maximum, then we have opacity 100 percent. In this case, let's go for that. Just type in 255, the maximum opacity and close bracket. Let's see what happens. If I'm going to click away, you'll actually see that the color of that upper line doesn't really change. It's still white, and that's because After Effects does work in the RGB values, but it doesn't take a look at these 0-255. That's because After Effects looks at its colors from 0-1 and everything in between, that could be 0.7, 0.4, etc. The reason for that has to do with the color bit depth. But as motion graphics artist, we don't care that much about it. I'm not going to bother you with that long explanation. We're just going to do a very simple math equation into expression. That's right. We can also use this as a calculator. If 255 has to be one, that means that we can very simply just divide this by 255. It's that simple. Once you've written that down, we get the exact same color that we've picked out from the Google color picker, that beautiful green. This is how we can define and write colors, and that is how we can input a color into an expression. Why is that important to you might ask? Because yes, we could also just go to our Essential Graphics tutor and very simply just dragging the color property into there and the users will just have the ability to change the color from there. Well, that's because sometimes you just want to give out a predefined color, a color that the end-user is not allowed to change. For instance, let me just go back to my Effects Controls and I'm going to go over to Layer, New, Null Object. This is going to be my controller. Let's just rename that to controller. I'm going to drag a drop-down menu to it. Dropdown Menu Controller right there. Let's go over to Edit, and I'm going to create three values. For instance, we have created this lower third right here, but every person has its own predefined color. For example, Jordy has its own color, maybe red, then Yannick has also his color, for example, blue, and for the last one we got Lorenzo, which has a no green as its color. Let's hit "Okay." Now we're going to go back into the color control right here, and we're going to write again that if/else expression. If we are going to choose Jordy from that drop-down menu or just me, then you're going to have to display that specific color. If it's someone else, then we're going to have to display another color. Let's do that. This is going to be a more complicated if/else expression so that's going to be really interesting. Let me just make that here a little bit bigger. Like before, I'm going to start off with writing if, so if open up parentheses, and we can pick with that to the menu here on top so the drop-down menu, if that is the first value which is Jordy, then open semicolon, it can be this specific color. Let's go back to that Google color picker, and let's take the red color, copy RGB value, go back into After Effects. I'm going to overwrite that with these three numbers, the last one is the opacity. Just leave that to 255, and we are going to say close semicolon. There we go. You'll see that this here is red. If we are going to change that to Yannick, for instance, it's going to give an error because we don't have that option yet in there. But you'll see that it will change the color so that is working great. Let's set that back to Jordy. As you can see here in my expression, what I'm doing actually is also I'm adding breaks into my expression. That way, I get a little better overview of what I'm writing here into quote, and perhaps, I can even offset this a little bit with a tap to everything that's sits a little bit further or sits within an if/else expression. But now comes the tricky part because we cannot type else in here. Because if we do that, we'll say, if Jordy, then that color, and if else, anything else than that color. But because we've got three values: Jordy, Yannick and Lorenzo, we can't do that. That is why I'm just going to end the if quote right here. If we've selected the first item in the menu, then change the color to this value. That's it. We can now go ahead and just copy this entire line right here, add a few breaks in there, and paste it back because we're just going to make a second if expression for menu number 2. Let's go back to the color picker of Google and lets go for something blue like that, copy the RGB value, go back into After Effects, and I'm going to change the value here to that blue. There we go. Again, copy everything, Control C, add a break, paste, and this time, menu number 3, which is going to be Lorenzo. Let's go to the Google color picker, select green, copy that RGB value. Let's go back into After Effects and change here these three first numbers. There we go. Let's try it out now. Jordy, red, Yannick, blue, and finally, Lorenzo, green. That is working perfectly and very interesting now is that we can go ahead and also change the texts right here. It now says mining. Let's copy just everything from that expression. We're going to take everything. I'm going to go now over to my text layer right here, head over to the Source Text because that's what we're going to change, that source of that text layer, Alt click on the stopwatch and just paste that entire expression in there. I'll just enlarge this in tiny bits so that you can see better. There we go. We don't have to give RGB values right now, we're going to give texts values. You might think that we can just go ahead and just write in here Jordy Vandeput, but unfortunately, that is going to give an error. If we are talking about text like pure texts like my name, for instance, then we always have to put that between quotes. Let's do that. One quote over there and one quote over here. There we go, Jordy Vandeput. Now it sees that as an actual text. Let's do that here as well. Yannick Theunissen, that's his last name. Finally, we get Lorenzo Menz, with a z. The if expression has already been written, you can now see from the controller that if we are going to change one of these values here in a drop-down menu that also the text will change. That is going to be very useful if you have, for instance, a live show where you always have the same people on the show, then don't give too much options for the end-user. If they can just flick one simple drop-down menu and they have set to the right color and to the right name, then that is even more user-friendly than giving them a color controller and a text box. That is looking great. The last thing that I want to show you guys is we still have that bottom line. They're very interesting is that we can give a tint color that is different from red but still red with a very simple equation. I'm going to expand the upper line and perhaps make my expression field a little bit smaller. There we go. I'm also going to do the same thing with the bottom line, just open that up. What I'm going to do here for the bottom line is just Alt click on the stopwatch. I'm going to remove the texts in there, and I'm going to link that to the color of the upper line. Right now, we're just taking over that same color, so nothing really happens. But if we are going to do a little math equation, so just for instance, divide everything by two, we get a darker shade of that blue, which is really interesting. We don't have to go ahead and write expressions and do all of these crazy things. We can just divide that by two and we get a different shade. For Yannick, that's going to be darker blue, and for Lorenzo, that's going to be a darker green. There we go with one simple drop-down menu, we can control a lower thirds with different colors and different texts, super user-friendly. That is how colors work inside Adobe After Effects. Thank you so much for watching, and I'm super excited to see you back in the next lesson.
7. Handling Text Fields: I've said it many times before and I'll say it again, it is super important that you make a template that is user-friendly, but also that the end-user cannot make any mistakes, that you have a fail-over system. Let me show you guys what I mean by that. I'm going to create a simple text field, and let's just call this sample text, and I'm going to align it here on the bottom left. There you go. This is my template, and I'm going to drag the source text into my essential graphics. Now, what if the end-user is going to type in a very long sentence in here? For example, Jordy is super awesome, really cool. Now, see what happens here. My sentence is being cut-off somewhere right there, and as a template creator, we want to make sure that stuff like that doesn't happen. So instead of creating a text field, I'm just going to delete this here, we are going to create a text area. Now to do that, just again, take the text tool on top, but this time don't click but make sure to click and drag to create a text area. Let's type something in here, sample text. Again, let's take the source text property, drag that into the essential graphics, and now let's type in that really long sentence. Jordy is super awesome, amazing, coool. Got three Os there, but that's fine. There we go. We know can see that we have an automatic line break if the text is going to be too long. But there is a little mistake where the two lines are overlapping, but we can change that here with leading, set the leading so just it increase at a tiny bit, there we go. This is great. We've made sure to catch that fail. Let me just go ahead, and align this a little bit better. We've made sure that we can write two lines in here. I'm going to drag this down. There we go, so now it's aligned better. But now what will happen if I'm going to write in a shorter sentence in here? For example, just Jordy Vandeput, my name. Well, now my name sits a little bit too high. Now I want this to be here on the bottom. So I'm going to drag this down. But now the end-user is go to decide to write in a longer sentence again. Jordy Vandeput is awesome, really coool with three Os. Now, we see that our text is just sticking too much to the bottom. We want to create something where the text field is going to be aligned a little bit higher when we are making use of two lines, and a little bit lower when we're only making use of one line. Again, that is going to be fixed with an expression. Don't worry guys, this time I don't want you to actually know exactly how to write that expression, we're going to copy and paste something again, because after all that's what expressions comes down to a lot, just copying and pasting snippets from what you find on the web. Let me just go ahead, and this expression needs to be pasted into the anchor point property. Because with the anchor point, we can see that we can also change the position of the text layer so that is good. Let me just go ahead and Alt, click in the anchor points, and I'm going to paste in my expression. Now, this is also that you can find here from the downloads guys. If you download all of the project files, you'll find a little text file in there as well where you can just find that code, and it will also make sure that you can find that expression here within the class notes on the player itself. We can just go ahead and copy and paste that onto the anchor points property. Basically, what it's doing right here is making use of a function called sourceRectAtTime, and we're going to dive a little bit deeper into that in the next lesson. For now, don't worry too much about that. What it's basically going to do is just take a look at the width and the height of the text fields, and it's going to adjust the anchor point property according to the height, in this case, of my text fields. That's basically it, nothing else to worry about just click away, and it has done its job. Now, we can go ahead and just grab that text field, and just move that to a different position. We're changing the position property right now not the anchor point property. There we go, it sits in the right place. Let me just go ahead and change the text now to just Jordy, for instance. There we go, and now you'll see that automatically my text field is being adjusted to the bottom. I know it would've just been a lot easier if there were a vertical align option, but we don't have that within After Effects so we had to create that ourselves with an expression. There we go. Two very important things, the text fields to make sure that we can add a new line, but also the vertical align expression to make sure that we always start from the same height. In the next lesson, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the sourceRectAtTime expression because that is something very important, and it just allows us to make a lot more dynamic templates with a lot more functionalities. I'll see you guys in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching again.
8. Object linking: Objects linking, the act of linking objects together, which is pretty obvious. What I have right here is a very typical logo reveal animation. This is something that you could create to sell on a marketplace. I make sure that it is user-friendly. Right now, one of the first issues that I'm running into is that the logo isn't really following the animation of the background rectangle. This is going to be my first way to link objects together. We're going to do that with the parent and link tools right here. You can see this here in your layer options. You just right-click in your columns, go to "Columns" and make sure that parent and link is enabled. We can then go ahead and simply link that layer with the parent tool to the hexagon backgrounds, it's that simple. What we're doing right now is just saying to take over all the animation properties, the position, the scale, everything over from the hexagon backgrounds. It's going to follow beautifully. Looking good. Let's drag that logo now into the essential graphics and give that as an option to change to the end user. The next thing that I want to do is also give the option to change the background color here of the hexagon. Let's open up the properties, and it's right here, color, underneath the fill. Let's drag that into the essential graphics as well. This is going to be the background's color. We also have a text rectangle background right here. We could also give that as an option to change the color from, but I don't want it to make it a little bit more user-friendly and only give one option to the end user, and with that option here to background color, both of these layers needs to be changed. This is going to be my second way of objects linking. I'm going to open up the properties here for my text backgrounds and locate the fill color, it's right there. Let me just make this a little bit bigger so that we can see better. What I'm going to do now is only link that property to the color of the hexagon backgrounds. I don't want to link everything like we've done before, only the color. In order to do that, we're going to have to Alt click the color property to write an expression. However, we can write it automatically by now using the pick whip tool of the expression controller, and we're going to link it to the color property. There we go. It's going to write the expression for us, just click away, and automatically when we're going to change the background color now to something else, let's take red you'll see that the both of these will change, the second way of object linking. Let's set that back to white. Now we're going to come to the third way of objects linking, and this is what the lesson is actually about. Before I forget, I'm also going to drag in the source texts of the company name year into my essential graphics. This is going to be the company name. Currently it says Company Incorporated, but let's change that to JORDY VANDERPUT IS COOL, it's best thing that I can come up with. When I click away, you'll now notice that the background will not scale together with the length of my text. That is something that we need to fix. We're going to have to link the background size to the size of the text, and that is unfortunately not easy to do. We're going to have to work with a specific expression to make that work, but I'm going to help you guys with that, it's going to be super easy. Let's locate the size of that backgrounds, that text backgrounds right here and, I'm going to collapse the film. We're not going to work with that anymore, but we are going to work with the size of your rectangle path. You'll see here, if I'm going to change the value for the width, that we can change that to make it fits with my text size. We're going to write an expression to make that happen automatically. Alt click on the size property. The first thing that I want you guys to understand is how are we going to give a value to the sides. Well, like before we seen with the RGB colors as well, this is two-point values, that is why we're going to have to write this in brackets. Open a bracket. The first value, which, maybe I'll just type something, 500, and then the second value is going to be color. Let's just take over the same value here as we already have, 172, and close brackets. Click away, and you'll see now that automatically, these values are being taken over. Knowing that, we can now take this a step further and say, I'm also going to write my code a little bit more user-friendly. Also for yourself, you're going to have to be user-friendly because maybe in the future, you're going to open up your project again to make changes to your templates. I'm going to right here on top, a. This can be anything by the way. You could also write in your name, Jordy, or whatever you want. We're going to create a variable. A variable is just a custom name. Just make sure that that always sits in the white color because if I'm going to type something different, like for example, value, which has a property that is being used as well to write functions and expressions, you will see how that turns yellow so that means I cannot use that as a variable so it has to be a unique name. Let's just go for eight. Then type equals. This time, only write one equal, not two, because we're going to compare and see what it is. Now, we're actually going to put a value inside of a, that is why we're only writing one equals now. A is going to be 500, and b is going to be 172. Now that we have these two values, a and b, it means that we can swap out here the width and the height value with a and b. I hope that that makes sense because this is a much better way to write codes because the next step is going to be a much longer sentence, and if we're going to fit that into the end value here within the brackets, that data is not going to be user-friendly anymore. Now, let's click away and see what happens. You'll see that we end up with an error. This project contains an expression error. Well, that is because After Effects doesn't recognize line breaks. It's actually written right here is this, a equals 500 and b equals 172. We're going to have to tell After Effects that we've actually added a line break right here. To do that, we're just going to have to type in dots, comma in the end of every sentence, it's that simple. Usually whenever you see an error, one of such things is probably going to be the problem. Now, let's click away and you'll see that it works out perfectly. We can now go ahead and change the 500 here to 900, and you'll see as well here the width changing of that rectangle. We don't want to type been a manual number in here, we want to automatically or dynamically let it change with the size of the text. In order to do that, I'm going to remove 900 and I'm going to start by taking the pick whip tool of the expression for the size, and I'm going to link that to the entire layer of the company name. There we go. We have now automatically written a piece of codes which is just targeting that layer, and now we can take that a step further and actually do something with that later. To do that, type in dots. We're going to go a step further with that layer. I'm going to type now source, record at a time, and After Effects is actually helping us here. This is the property that we would like to work with. The source record at time is going to take a look at any given time within a timeline and just grab any property from the targeted layer. That means we can dynamically change the size of the rectangle at any given time, even if you would animate the text coming in for instance, if you would animate the scale of the text layer, or make your characters come in, animate that property, it will always make sure to follow the sides of your text layer. Let's take that. We can just double-click on this property to make it right, and on that very anterior, we're going to now look at which property that we would like to take over. In this case, it's going to be the width. We could also take the position or anything else, and in this case, it's going to be the width. Just type in width and that's it, we've taken the width of the text layer and we've placed that into variable a, and that is going to be outputted here into the size of the rectangle. Now, let's click away, and you'll notice [inaudible] that the rectangle has the exact same size as the text layer. To prove it to you guys, I'm going to change my text out to BAZINGA. You'll see now that my rectangle size has changed together with the size of the text. This is no magic, guys. No, this is just you doing awesome stuff inside After Effects. One problem that I'm looking at here is that my rectangle is really sticking here to my text as you can see. I want to have it like a little bit of breeding area, a little bit of [inaudible]. What I can do is just here, in my expression, before the point dot, always make sure to do that because that is the end of the sentence. Type in plus 100. We can just do that because after all, the size are just numeric values so we can just type in 100 in here. If we do that, you'll see that the rectangle becomes 100 pixels wider. Cool. That is a third way of linking something to something else, you know what I mean. As for it the b value, guys, there's one last thing I want to show you because currently, I cannot change the height of that rectangle, as you can see because it is fixed. The expression we've said that it should be 172, it cannot change. However, if we're going to write something different here, I'm going to remove that, and we're going to say that b, and I'm going to take the pick whip to free expression, is going to be that value here. You can see I can just link it to its own property. Let's do that and it's going to automatically write the expression for us. It's always going to take a look at the input in this case. If I now just click away, you can see now that we do can change the height of that layer. Look at that, Bazinga. That is in an essence how to work with the source, record, and time function. I'm going to leave a link here in the class notes here again on the player itself to the Adobe websites where you can read more about this specific function. Because yes, there's a whole lot more that you can do, but that is going to need a whole different class as well because it's big. In this lesson, I just wanted you to know what it is and a very basic use of the source record a time function, this is how to work with that. This is also something that you're going to bump into a lot more when creating templates, a background that you'd follow the length of a text. This is a perfect example. Thank you so much for watching guys and I really hope that you find this coding not too boring. Once you get the hang of it, it can get really interesting and fun to make all of these automatic things and dynamic stuff in After Effects. I'll see you in the next lesson.
9. Conclusion: Well, well, well, look at that. You've just completed the entire class. Now all jokes aside, you can be really proud about yourself because this definitely wasn't an easy class. Writing expressions, I mean, that is not something for motion graphic artists, so yeah, you can definitely be very proud about yourself for all the cool new things that you've learned from this class. But right now it's time to practice those new things that you've learned. What I want you to do is create a template inside Adobe After Effects. I want you to keep in mind that it is user-friendly, but also that the end-user cannot make any mistakes such as having a text that is longer than the Canvas size. Go ahead, create your templates, and make use of advanced techniques like object linking, if-else expressions, checkboxes, drop-down menus, etc. Then upload your template here in Skillshare under the project app so that I can load it in into my Premiere Pro and try out your templates and I can then give feedback to you. I'm really curious to see what you guys will be making. Definitely do that. I'm really looking forward to your templates. That was it for this class. I really hope that you've enjoyed it and, of course, learned a ton of new things. Thank you so much for watching. Like we always say, stay creative.
Jordy Vandeput, Filmmaker and Youtuber
