Introduce type in motion - After Effects Tutorial

- [Tutor] If you've ever designed type animation using what's generally referred to as presentation software, that would be things like PowerPoint or Google Slides, you know that it doesn't really match the kind of type choreography you typically see in the movies and television. On the other hand, a huge portion of that work is in fact created in After Effects. And by that work, I mean what you see in movies and television. In this course, our purpose is to help you take your first steps on the path toward those more sophisticated type treatments, starting right here. So the way that I tend to work with type often is just to look at the type design and see what it suggests to me that I should do with it. And there's a specific reason that I wanted native After Effects text here, because if I just wanted to animate these words as objects then I wouldn't really need that. The type that I would import via say Illustrator would be fine. But what I want to do is actually animate the tracking and to do this, I'm going to start with a preset. So I have the text selected and I'll even solo it just to get us really focused here. I might as well as zoom in. That's a little too much zooming in, okay. And under effects and presets, animation presets, I'm going to go down to text and there's a whole tracking category here. And all I want to do is increase tracking. So I'm just going to double click that one. And it looks like we have a couple of key frames. If I press the U key, I see the key frames themselves. They look a little different than the key frames you're used to but let's see what they do. Well, that's it they don't do a whole lot but they do track out the text and believe it or not, there's a whole process for animating features of type in After Effects and it can be a bit complicated to set up. To give you an idea, look at the number of controls that are here under text that have to do with animation and they just multiply as you add more of them. So starting with a preset and just taking a look at the key frames is a great place to actually start. But what I'm going to do is go back to where the tracking is zero, delete these key frames and create my own. And I'm going to say that I want the text to resolve to zero at three seconds. So I'll click the stopwatch to create a key frame there. And then I'll just go back to the beginning and reduce the tracking. So let's bring it right in like that. I'll set a shorter work area. So that'll be the area that previews in RAM and press spacebar. The great thing about using a preset like training wheels on a bicycle is that if you try something that doesn't work, you always have a starting point to go back to where you know you won't be in trouble. In this case, there's one ingredient from that preset we do need to add back that would be eases to the motion timing, and that'll be next.