Your First Text Animation with Adobe After Effects

1. Intro: You don't need to buy a text animation preset pack for tons of money, even if you have never touched After Effects or any other animation program before and just about 1 h, you will be able to create all of these animations and suddenly make your very own preset pack. Hi, I'm Marcus, and I started creating videos for YouTube more than ten years ago in 2012, when I was still going to school, which in the end led to me studying media and computer science. And here I am ten years later creating a course about texts animation. When my very first YouTube intro back in 2012 looked like this. Yeah, it was downloaded from some random preset page and it looked absolutely awful. In this course, we will cover the very basics of After Effects. And I absolutely mean it when I say, you will be able to follow this course, even if you have never touched After Effects before, it would be beneficial if you knew your weight around Premier Pro at least a little bit. But that is also more of a nice-to-have and not a definitive requirement for this course, we will cover every single step from the basics of after effects, the basics of texts animation up until the creation of your very own texts animation preset pack, which in the end you will be able to use directly in Premier Pro to enhance your videos with modern text animations. I am really excited to share all my knowledge with you because I would have loved to know all of this already when I started back in 2012, because if I did, my intro probably wouldn't have looked half as bad as it actually did. So let's get started. I hope to see all of you over in the course. 2. Class Orientation: Hi, welcome to the course. Our class project will be to create our very own texts animation preset pack. So the only thing you need to follow this class is, well, Adobe After Effects. But since you click on a course that's specifically mentioned After Effects in the title, I guess you probably figured that out already. That's it. You don't need anything else. And even if you have never touched After Effects before, you will be able to follow this course. I would highly suggest though, that you don't just watch this course for the sake of watching it, but that you actually open After Effects and play around with it between the lessons to actually try out the things I'm about to teach you. In the first two lessons, we are going to cover the very basics of after effects and the very basics of animation. So what is the composition? How to create one? What does a keyframe do? And so on, that we're actually going to start with texts animation, again, cover the basics first and then create some beautiful animations together. And towards the end, I will show you how to export these animations to create your very own texts animation preset pack that you can use directly in Premier Pro. So if you follow the course until the end, you will end up with a text animation preset that you can then extend further to include all of your favorite animations. Now, I would say, let's not waste any more time and actually get going with our very first lesson. 3. Getting started with After Effects: Alright, before we actually get into the nitty-gritty of text animation, there are some basics we need to cover because as promised, we'll be able to follow this course even if you have never touched After Effects or even any other animation program before. So if you already have some experience and you already know what all of these words mean, then you are allowed to skip this lesson and already proceed to the next one. You're still here. All right, Then let's get started. When you first open up After Effects, this is what you are going to be greeted with. In fact, that is the light. The very first thing you're going to see is this. I've already gone ahead and click on New Project because I feel like that's step is kinda self-explanatory. Alright, what do we have here? As you can see, our window is divided basically into four main areas. On the left here, we have the project window. This is where we will gather all of our assets. So we could, for example, import some video footage if we wanted to animate that, or we could import some graphics. This is also where we'll find our compositions, but I'll get to all of that in a bit. Basically, the project, we know it works like any other file browser you most likely already know from your operating systems, such as the Explorer on Windows or the Pinder on MacOS. So you can create folders, sub-folders, rename things, move stuff around, and overall just structure your assets. And I know this is a very boring thing to do, but I highly suggest to keep your projects structured because otherwise you'll end up searching that one graphic that you are sure you import it, but you just forgot the file name. Trust me, I've been there. It's not fun. Right next to the project window, we have our composition window. This is where we will actually see what we're currently doing. And it works basically like any other media player. So if I were to import, I don't know, for example, Star Wars, then you could watch Star Wars. And here, down here we have our timeline. And this one is actually a bit more complex than your standard timeline. You might know from your media player, especially since we're working with a layered approach in After Effects. So down here, we will be able to stack our different layers onto each other. You can think of in the same way as if you were stacking some papers. If, for example, I worked as a green paper on top of a red paper, then it would cover up some parts of the red one. And over here, our last of the four windows has a bunch of different segments that contain a bunch of different settings, such as, for example, this one called effects in presets, which contains well Effects and Presets. We will be using some of those windows, not all, but I'm going to explain them as soon as we actually need them. Alright, I've already talked about compositions twice. First, when I said that those compositions will be saved in the project window. And then again, when I call this window the composition window. But what the **** is a composition? You can think of a composition as a container for your final video. So each composition consists of a timeline where we can actually compose our different elements to create our final video. So our very first step is that we're going to need to create a new composition by clicking on this button down here. By doing so, this new window pops up where we can adjust some settings for our new composition, we will leave most of this is the only thing. You might want to change out the composition size where we can define the pixel dimensions, the height and the width of our final video. And down here, arc length, we will go with the pixel size of 384164 now, which is exactly four K and the length of 20 s. If you're working on a somewhat weaker machine, you could of course reduce this, for example, to full HD since working with work a footage, of course always a bit much to handle for your computer. And before we actually click Okay to finally create our composition, we first want to give it a name because to put it in the words of the very awesome After Effects YouTuber Ben Mario, we always label our layers. With that being said, we click on Okay, and we have our very first composition. So to summarize, we have four main areas in After Effects. The project window, the composition window, the timeline, and an area with a bunch of other settings. And the most important object in your After Effects project or your compositions which are essentially a wrapper for your individual animations 4. Fundamentals of Animation in After Effects: Hi, Welcome back. Now, in the last lesson, we created our very first composition together, but it's still very empty. So let's populate it with our very first object. To do so, we'll select our shape tool up here and just drag and hold on are still blank canvas to create our very first rectangle. And as you can see, this not only created a rectangle appear in our composition window, but it also created our very first layer down here in the timeline. This new layer has a bunch of different properties. The most basic ones being those that you can find here under transform. So as you might've guessed, if we, for example, change our rotation property, then our rectangle will be rotated to whatever well, we've inserted, okay, but how do we actually animate those properties now, to do that, we need a so-called keyframe. A keyframe is basically the main building block for any animation. And it describes three properties. What, when, and the Bellevue sounds a bit complicated. I'll give you an example. Let's say we want to animate the position of our rectangle that already answers the what question. Because what we want to animate is the position of a rectangle for the win. We'll just choose the 1 s mark for now. And the value in this case is where we want to have it, since we are animating the position tonight, actually add our very first keyframe, we just click on this small stopwatch icon left to the property we want to animate. And as you can see over here in the timeline, this small diamond shape appeared, which is exactly what I was talking about the whole time. It's our very first keyframe. Now, with a single keyframe, there is no animation yet. We need at least a second one. So we move our timeline to, I don't know, let's say 5 s. And then we move our rectangle to our desired position at 5 s. Congratulations, you've just created your very first animation. Because if we hit Play now to that, a rectangle is actually moving left to right. Because by telling After Effects that we want to have the rectangle on the left at 1 s and to the right at 5 s. After Effects is now automatically calculating everything between the one and the five second mark to move our rectangle from the first to our second keyframe. And that's basically animation. Thanks for attending my course. I'm just kidding. We're not done yet. If you have another look at the simple animation we just created, you might realize that it is a bit choppy. It very suddenly starts moving and it also very suddenly stops moving again. That is due to the fact that what we created is in fact a linear animation. There is even a way to visualize that because if we click on this icon up here, we can open the so-called Graph Editor. If we now again select our position property, precisely see what After Effects calculated for our animation for the y property, there is actually no change at all, since we're only moving from left to right. But for the x property, we can see that it suddenly starts moving and then it also suddenly stops moving again. To make that a bit smoother, we can just select both our keyframes and press F9 on our keyboard. This will automatically apply something called easing the keyframes, which as you can see, it just means that our animation is not as abrupt anymore, but we'll slowly start moving them gets a little faster just to then slow again before fully stopping at the five second mark. Using the graph editor, we could actually adjust the easing exactly to our liking and exactly control the speed of our animation to how every we want to have it. But in most cases, just automatically applying the auto easing by pressing F9, we'll create a decent results, okay? Okay, Okay, I hear you're complaining. This is a course about texts animation. We are to lessons and we have not even created a single texts so far. Don't worry, we'll get to that in the next lesson. Let's quickly recap though. We learned what a keyframe is. It describes what, when, and it felt you. We also briefly learned about the graph editor, but mainly you what easing is and how to apply automatic easing to our keyframes. So give it a go and play around with some keyframes before we dive into text animation in the next lesson 5. Introduction to Text Animation: All right folks, welcome to the next lesson. In this lesson, we're finally getting to the good stuff, which is of course next animation. Don't worry if you're a bit nervous because there's always risk starting from the very beginning. I've already gone ahead and deleted our sample rectangle. So the very first thing we're gonna do now is adding some texts. To do that, we'll select the Text tool from the toolbar and just click on our composition window to create a new text layer. You can then type in whatever text you want and format it however you like using the options in the character panel, I would assume that you know how that voice from your favorite Office program. Okay, so now we have some texts, but how do we actually animate it? Well, let's create our very first simple but elegant, faint in animation, which will look like this once we're finished, because this animation is actually very, very simple, We will only be animating the position and the opacity of our texts. So just as we learned in the last lesson, we could open the transform properties of our texts layer down here. But let's advance even that a little bit because we can immediately opened the position property by selecting our text layer and then pressing the letter P. Now we do basically the same thing we did in the last lesson. We create a first keyframe for which we moved the text down a little. We go a couple of frames forward, which we can do by clicking on the next frame button up here. By the way, we create our second keyframe for which we move the texts back up. Then we press on the letter T, which will close the position property and open the opacity property. Instead, we create a keyframe again at 100 per cent, go back to the start of our composition and create a second keyframe at zero per cent. Now, yet another shortcut, we press on the letter U. This will actually open all properties on a layer that has keyframes on them. So it's a very handy shortcut to find all of our keyframes at once. And once again, just as we learned in the last lesson, we select all of our keyframes and press F9 to apply the auto easing to our keyframes. And there we go. We have our very first pretty text animation. I hope this makes up for me not talking about texts at all and covering only some basics and the first few lessons. Because with all those basics, this was actually very easy and a very quick process, right? But what if we want to go from this animation to this animation? I mean, it is basically the same. The only difference is that for the second version, we target specific words of our texts layer instead of the whole texts layer at once. To achieve this, we need a so-called text animator. So let's remove our initial keyframes we created. And let's add a text animator to our later by clicking on the animator button here, the properties we want to animate are actually exactly the same. Let's add an animator pull the position and another one for the opacity. Now, without creating a keyframe, let's set these two values to our initial state by moving the text layer down by, let's say roughly 200 pixels. And let's set the opacity to zero again. But Marcus, didn't you tell us that we always need keyframes to animate things? Indeed we do, but the keyframes need to be in a different position this time because by setting the values on the animator we just created, we are essentially telling After Effects from that offset I just gave you, I want you to move back to your original state and we can animate that moving back to its original state up here in the range selector. If we expand this, you'll see another property called Start here, which is currently set to zero. And if we start playing around with this, well, you'll see exactly what I mean. Because at zero per cent or layer has the full offset we put in at 100%, it fully converted back to its original state. And as you can see as well, our animator is actually targeting each character individually. So if you want to replicate the animation I showed you earlier, we need to tell the animator that we don't want it to target individual characters, but individual words instead, we can do that by opening the Advanced section of our range selector. And here we have this drop-down that we can adjust from based on characters to based on words instead. And as you can see, the range selector suddenly does. We want it to do tonight? Actually create the animation. We still need to create our keyframes by clicking on the stopwatch icon, moving a couple of frames forward and then setting our start value to 100 per cent. And once again, you know what is coming now, we select our key frames and press F9 to apply our other easing. And there we have it pretty cool texts animation already, right? So what did we learn in this lesson? We learned how to animate some basic properties, but we also learned about the text animators and about range selectors. And we even apply that knowledge to create these basic texts animation. So go ahead and play around with it a little. Because with that basic knowledge, you can actually create some pretty advanced animations already 6. Creating Simple Text Animations: Alright, since you now know about and understand the basics around Keyframes, easing and text animators. I want to use this lesson to actually create some different text animations. Actually, these three Textanimations to be precise, the process of creating these will cover some more basics on how to work with After Effects, such as, for example, masks. But we'll get to those as soon as we actually need them. Okay, let's start with our very first animation. And the very first thing we're gonna do is create a composition. We once again set it to four K, which is 3.41, 60. We set it to 10 s, and we call this composition track. Because once again, I have to cite Ben Mary you, we always label our layers and click on Okay, to create a composition than we grabbed the Text tool once again, our sample text into our composition. Now, the main property we want to animate here is the so-called tracking, which describes the distance between our letters. Since there is no such property on our basic transform options, we Once again need to utilize a text animator. So we click on animate and then on tracking, which we'll add our tracking animator. If we now slightly increase the tracking amount, you can see this just moves our characters further apart, which is exactly what we want since in this case we don't want to target one specific characters or one specific words. We're not going to touch the range selector in this case, but we'll animate our tracking amount directly. So, you know the drill, we create a keyframe at, I don't know, let's say 30, move a couple of frames forward and set it back to zero. Now, we want to animate our texts. We don't want it to suddenly appear. So once again, also animate the opacity will let it start at zero per cent, move it back to 100%. I think you know how that works by now. Now, there is one more thing we want to do to add a little more visual interests, which is scaling down our text layer a little after we press S on our keyboard to open the scale property, create a keyframe just at the position where our tracking animation ended. Once again, move a couple of frames for what and decrease the scale to, let's say 90%. Then we press the shortcut again to see all Keyframes we have on this layer, select all of them and press F9 to apply our auto easing Once again, there we go. Animation number one is done. That was pretty easy right? Now, let's continue with this box reveal. The first step is once again to create a new composition, same settings as before. And we're going to call this one box reveal that will create a box with the rectangle tool, add another sample texts with the Text tool. This time it should be black line everything just the box size to perfectly fit our text. What we'll be animating now is actually just the width of our rectangle. To do that, we opened our rectangle properties and specifically the rectangle pack. Here we have the size property which we can use to adjust the size of our rectangle. The only problem is if we change either of the two values for width and height, it will automatically also adjust the other one. But we can easily fix that by clicking on this small chain here, which will separate the two bulbs. And what we're gonna do now, I'm pretty sure you guessed it will create some Keyframes. Let's move a couple of frames forward, set a keyframe for the size, moved back to the style, and set our width to zero. Then Once again, we select our Keyframes and press F9 to apply some auto easing. Now, this might look like we already have what we want, but there still is one issue which you'll be able to see if we overlay the animation over some actual footage, because the black text grows out of the box, which we obviously can't see on a black background. But luckily, there is once again, a quick fix for this. Unfortunately, that quick fix currently is still hidden from us because there are two views for our timeline, which we can toggle by clicking on the Toggle Switches, Modes button down here. After clicking that, we suddenly have a new checkbox right here with a small TI. If you hover over it, you can see it describes this feature as preserve, underlying transparency. You can think of this somehow as a reverse cookie cutter probably because it just means if we enable this for a layer, this layer will only be displayed if there is something to display it on top of. So as if we took the bottom layers as a cookie and cut them back through to the top. Okay, yeah, that's a pretty bad analogy, but I think you hopefully get what I mean. So if we enable this for our text layer than our texts will only be shown if there is the box below which exactly what we want. Let's get to Animation number three. You know the drill, new composition, same settings. And we call this one stroke box. And then we Once again create a new text layer with some sample text. Now, you might think that we're going to utilize a regular rectangle for this again, but actually we won't, because what we're going to use to realize this animation is an effect called stroke. And the stroke effect needs a mask, or more specifically, a path that it is applied on. Now, what is a mask? A mask is somewhat similar to the cookie cutter we use in the last animation. That it won't choose which part of a layer to show based on what's below, but based on whatever shape you want to cut out. So actually this one is probably more of a cookie cutter than the other one. Now, to create such a mask, we need to select our text layer and then choose our rectangle tool again and draw a rectangle while our text is selected. Now, this will not create a new rectangle, but a mosque in the shape of a rectangle. And as you can see, this mask will only reveal everything that is within a rectangle and cut everything else off. But how do we get that stroke now, we just go into our Effects and Presets window and search for the stroke effect. Drag that right onto our text layer. By doing so, you might've seen that here on the left, our Effects Controls popped up. These Effects Controls actually display the exact same properties. We can also access directly in the Layers window. So that's why I haven't covered that window so far. And that's also why we're going to ignore it for now and just use the Layer window instead. So let's hop into the Layers window and open our Effects properties and below our stroke properties. As you can see, there are a couple of properties, most of which I think are pretty self-explanatory. By adjusting the color, we can adjust the color of our strokes by adjusting the size, we can increase the width of our stroke and you can just adjust all of these exactly to your liking. The property we actually care about for now that we actually want to animate is the one being labeled. Because if we slightly decrease that, you can see our stroke actually gets a bit shorter. We can actually do the same thing with the start property as well. This would just shorten our path from the other side. Instead, we do with the same as always, we create a keyframe on the end property with zero per cent at the beginning, increasing to 100% at the end. And then we select both are Keyframes and we press F9 to apply the auto using our stroke is being animated the way we want it. But if you have a look at the animation we want to replicate, you'll see that the text is also moving into frame. The problem is, if we try to do this animations using the position property of our texts layer, actually move the whole layer and thus our mask and our stroke as well, which is not exactly what we want. So you might have guessed already, we're going to use a text animator for that again. So we click on animate at a text animator for the position opened that animator and animate our position value, starting somewhere out of the frame and moving back to our initial position. And we also apply our auto easing again. I guess you should know how that works by now. We go, we just created three beautiful Textanimations for it to be precise. Actually, five of them, since we already created these ones in the last session. But how can we now actually use these in our video content? Well, we'll cover that in the next lesson. 7. Integrating Text Animations: So in the last few sessions, we learned how to create, and we did create a couple of different text animations. But how can we use those animations with our actual footage to get those animations into our actual, for example, social media content. I'm going to show you two different ways how to do this. Both of which have their pros and cons. And the first one I'm going to call the After Effects, right? For this version, we're going to import our video content into After Effects and overlay or animations directly within After Effects. To do this, we can actually just drag and drop our footage into the project window. Now, my suggestion would be, if you choose this version, you'll either first cup your final video in Premier Pro, export that video and then import that video into After Effects to overlay your final animations as the very last step. Or you choose your clips that you want to have animations on directly within Premiere, then right-click on those clips and select the option to open that clip as an After Effects composition. Either way, you will end up having your footage that you want to put a text animation on directly in After Effects. Now, if you opened it from Premier, then after Effects will actually auto create your composition. If you import your final rendered footage, that we still have to create a new composition for it. But I'm pretty sure you know how that works by now. I am going to show you a little trick though, how we can speed that up when working with actual footage, because you can actually just drag and drop your imported video file on the composition Create button. And After Effects will automatically figure out the size and length of your footage. And it will create a composition that will fit that perfectly. Now, we could of course, just create our text animation we want to overlaid directly in this new composition we just created. But there's actually an easier way to do this because we can just reuse our compositions we created earlier and those into our footage composition. So I'm just going to drag and drop one of the animations we created earlier onto our timeline. And as you can see, this creates a new layer, which is in fact just our animation. We can treat this layer just as any other layer. So if for example, we're not happy with the position of our animation and we wanted to move it. We can just open the transformation properties and move the layer. And if we wanted to adjust something within our animation, we could just double-click on this layer, which takes us directly to the text animation composition. We can just adjust everything as we wish. And as soon as we have all the texts animations we want, we just rendered with this big composition by clicking on composition, add to Adobe Media Encoder queue and then render everything using the Media Encoder, which I assume you probably know from working with Premiere. Now, the advantage of doing it this way is we still have full control over our animation and we can still tweak and adjust things to make it look exactly the way we want. We could even leverage some other features of After Effects. And for example, track our animation to follow a specific movement on screen or to follow the camera movement to make it look as if our animation was floating in the air, the negative aspect of this version, it can be a bit tedious because we always have to open After Effects to actually use our animation. Because there is actually a way to make our texts animation is usable by directly from within Premiere Pro using a so-called motion graphics template. And this brings us to version number two, which I call the premier route. Now to create such a motion graphics template, we first need to open the Essential Graphics window and after effects, which we can do by clicking on Window Essential Graphics. Now, the first thing we have to do in this new window is to select the composition. We want to turn into a motion graphics template. Now, let's select, for example, our trek in animation we created earlier. And let's also give our motion graphics template name. We'll just call it the same as our composition, which is track in. What we have to do now is drag all properties we want to be able to edit in Premiere into this window, the most important property for a text animation is probably the content of our texts layer. Since I assume you probably won't need a text animation saying sample text that off. So we can make sure we will be able to edit the text and Premiere Pro by opening the text properties of our layer and dragging our source texts property into the essential graphics window. Now, you might not only want to adjust the content of your texts, but probably also the font being used or the font size. And we can make sure this is possible by clicking on the Edit Properties button and setting the checkmarks for an able custom font selection, as well as enable font size adjustment. And now you could basically dragged and dropped nearly any property of any of your layers into this window to make it editable in Premiere. But for now we'll just keep it at the text itself. So to actually export this motion graphics template, we'll click on the Export button. After Effects will tell us that we need to save our project. That is completely fine. Let's save it. Now, in this window, we can select where to actually save our template. Because what this Export button actually does is it creates a MOG RTF file that contains our template. Mog RT is actually just short for motion graphics template. Now this MOG RTF file needs to be put in a specific folder. Premiere will then be able to read it and apply the animation. So by choosing the option local templates folder after Effects will actually put it automatically into the correct folder so that premiere on the same machine can read it, but you could of course also choose the option local drive to save the file anywhere else on your drive if, for example, you wanted to share it with your whole team. So all of you have access to the same animation. We will choose the local templates folder for now though, and click, Okay, alright, now let's switch over to Premier to see how we can actually use this animation. Now, the first thing we want to do in Premier is open the Essential Graphics window, which we can do again by clicking on Window Essential Graphics. Now, you can see there is already a ton of different templates here. Those templates are actually delivered with Premier, and you could also use some of those by dragging them onto your timeline. But most of them looks something like this beautiful animation, right? So let's switch back to our browse tab and search for our track in animation that we created. And let's drag that onto our timeline. And there we go. That's our animation directly in Premier. And we even have the editing options we defined to adjust our text. So what did we learn? We learned about two different ways to use your animations with actual footage. First by importing your footage into After Effects, and also the other way around by exporting your animations from After Effects into Premiere. So I would say, go ahead and create your most favorite animations and export them to create your very own texts animation preset pack 8. Conclusion: Congratulations everybody. You should now be able to create your very own texts, animation principles, including all of your favorite animations ready to use directly in Premier Pro, we covered the very basics of after effects, the very basics of animation including what a keyframe is and how we use them to create animations. How to ease our keyframes to smooth and our animations to create texts and how to animate the text using texts animators, we then apply that knowledge to create some actual text animations and we export them as motion graphics templates to be used in Premier Pro. In fact, you shouldn't only be able to create text animations now, you should actually be able to create all sorts of different animations with After Effects. It's the basics we covered in this course. Not only worked for text animation, but are actually the basics of After Effects for any kind of animation. With texts animation, we just dipped our toes into the big borders of motion graphics, actually using the key basics from this course and a bit of practice, you could create animations like this or this. So if there is one main thing to take away from this course, It's that all of these animations and come down to just a bunch of keyframes. I promised. In most cases, these animations look a lot more complicated than they actually are. And I really can't wait to see all the amazing animations you will create. Once you have them ready, remember to upload them to the projects and resources tab on the class page so I can actually see them. Thank you so, so much for watching because even though I've been on YouTube for more than ten years, this was actually the very first complete course I created. So I'm really looking forward to all of your feedback. Be it good feedback, which is awesome for pushing my ego, or even better, some negative feedback or some things I can improve to make the next course even better. See you then