From the course: Your First After Effects Project

Animating text with presets

From the course: Your First After Effects Project

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Animating text with presets

- [Instructor] Now we want to animate those two words, Hawaii and established 1959. And I'll do it using some built-in animation presets. So I'll pause the playback, go back to the beginning, then I'm going to select layer number three, hold down Shift and select layer number four, and then right click on both of them. And under the Create option, I'll choose Convert to Editable Text. And this is going to create to live text here inside After Effects. Now the advantage of working with live text is not only we can change it to something else, but we can also use the very sophisticated text engine, which is built into the application. Now, I won't be able to cover everything in this course, but I will show you a good starting point, which is using the built-in presets, the chips with the application. So I'm going to make sure that only one layer is selected. And if you want to deselect something in After Effects, you can either press F2 or go to the Edit menu and choose Deselect All. Another keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A. This means that now I can reselect layer number three, this is the first line of text, and then make sure that the Effects and Presets is available on screen. I want to show you that under the Animation Presets, you have this Text folder, which has tons of built-in animations. Now, most of them have a descriptive name. But if you want to see some visual indication of what each and every one of them is doing, you can go to the Animation menu, then you can choose Browse Presets. This is going to launch Adobe Bridge, which in these days, it's a separate application. So you need to install it separately from the Creative Cloud application. But notice that it took us to the same folder, meaning that right now, we are inside the After Effects folder, inside the animations and presets. So we can double click on the Text folder, and then we can open up let's say, Animate In and click on one of those presets, then you will get a preview over here at the right hand side. So you can get a sense of what each and every preset is doing for you. And if you want to take one for a spin, for example the Typewriter, assuming that you have a text selected in After Effects, then you can just double click directly from Bridge, and this is going to apply it to the selected layer. Now in most cases, you should be brought back to After Effects, but if it didn't happen, like we are seeing over here, you can click on the boomerang icon, which is going to return you to After Effects, and then you can activate the timeline, press spacebar and take a look at the result. In my case, I made a mistake, I actually wanted to apply the typewriter effect to the bottom layer. So I'm going to undo by pressing Command + Z, then select the established layer, layer number four over here, return to Bridge, and then I'm going to double click on the Typewriter effect. And now we can get a sense of how this works for this layer. Now it is a little bit too slow to my taste. So what I can do is select the layer, go to the Animation menu and choose Reveal Properties with Keyframes. Because what we did now is used one of the presets which is using two keyframes to animate it. So if I want to control the timing, I can take the first keyframe and I can drag it, let's say under the one second marker, more or less, and then I can take the second one, which is the end animation and drag it under the two second mark. And now if I'm going to play it from the beginning, I will have a quicker typewriter effect, which I fancy. Alright, so I'll free up this layer. I'll select the Hawaii layer, and this time, I'm going to go to the beginning. And I'm actually going to apply a preset directly from the Effects and Presets because I know what I'm after. I'm just going to start to type the word foggy. And you can see that under text, under blurs, we have a foggy preset, which I think will work nicely for the Hawaii title. So since it is selected in the timeline, I can just double click on this preset, then activate the Preview panel and press spacebar or play to preview everything in concert. So now we have the animation that we've created earlier, which is nicely synced with the foggy animation that we've created for the Hawaii text. Notice that each one of the characters playing one after the other. So this is a pair character animation. And at the same time, we have these very useful typewriter effect. So let's just fit our viewer up to 100%. This way we can see everything playing at the same time.

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