From the course: Video and Audio for Designers with Creative Cloud: Part 2

Making the banner - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: Video and Audio for Designers with Creative Cloud: Part 2

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Making the banner

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- [Tony] In this chapter, we're going to build a lower-third for our project using a couple of the skills we should already have and a couple from the previous chapter and, of course, some brand new ones. So here in After Effects let's start a new composition either by going to the composition menu or Command + N, Control + N, quickest way to get that up. I'm going to call mine L3 because that's what I call everything with lower-thirds. And Tools, just here. And 1920 by 1080, 30 frames per second and if I just highlight the duration field and type 600, that will give us the six seconds that we need. Hit OK and we're ready to go. So we'll start really easy with this particular one by creating a new solid, so Layer menu, New, and Solid. Okay, and we'll just call this one Banner, like so. Okay, and leave everyhing there as the comp size, which it should be already, and then just choose a nice, dark gray for that and hit OK. Hit OK again and our solid is created. So what we'll do first of all is just change the opacity of this solid first, so let's just tap T here to get the opacity. And then just drop that down to about 65% should be just fine. Excellent, that's working really, really well. You can tap T again to make that go away. Now we're going to make a mask across this solid, so let's get the Rectangle Tool and then just create a long rectangle from one side to the other, like so. Perfect, so that's exactly where we want the banner to be. And the size, as long as it would accommodate two lines of text, which that will, then we're great to go. And then we'll just animate this on and off of the screen area. So to do that, of course, we'll tap P and then we'll drag the playhead across to about 20 frames, just there, okay. So adjust the CTI to that point and then click the Time Vary stop watch. So, of course, that allows us to animate this, as you know already, and puts a keyframe at that point. Drag the CTI back to the start and then increase the y value to just move that off of the comp region, like so, perfect. So you can see that that will animate on nicely. What we can then do is copy that particular keyframe by clicking on it, okay. Take the CTI all the way to the end and paste, so we've now got that keyframe just there. Wind that back just a little bit here. Okay, so about half the distance of that one. I tend to think it's better if they disappear quicker. Target the next keyframe, so the one at 20 frames there and then paste, which of course will drop that just there. So now that will disappear quite quickly and you can see, there you go, perfect. That's working exactly the way we want to do it.

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