• Adobe After Effects

  Title Plugins

  Posted by Danny Jenkins on January 12, 2009 at 2:58 am

  I’m looking for the best way to create supers in after effects.
  I edit television commercials, a lot of which don’t have huge budgets and the clients just want big, fat, high impact titles taking up the screen.

  I was pretty familiar with Boris Graffiti 2.0 on an old version of Media100 I had, and found it pretty useful. As far as I can tell, there is no easy way to get titles like this using the standard after effects title tool. I know you can fill, stroke & shadow in AE, but mixing these up with bevels, gradients etc can be a bit cumbersome.

  I’m looking for something that can quickly put gradients, strokes, shadows, basic 3D bevels & extrusions etc but I want to still easily edit the text and animate it in the native AE environment/timeline.

  Are there any other plugins apart from Boris out there?

  I know that graffiti is a stand alone application, but I’ve heard of the Boris title toolkit too. Could the title toolkit be what I’m after and is it as powerful as graffiti?

  Ken Latman replied 17 years, 3 months ago 6 Members · 6 Replies
• 6 Replies

• 

  Brendan Coots

  January 12, 2009 at 3:38 am

  All of the options you mentioned are available within AE Natively, provided you know where to look and are willing to build up your effects. Strokes are easily set in the text parameters window. You can get animatable pseudo-bevels, gradients etc. using the Effect>Generate>Light Sweep effect. You can get shadows using Effect>Perspective>Drop Shadow.

  If these options combined aren’t giving you what you need, you could try Zaxworks 3D Invigorator.

  Brendan Coots
  Splitvision Digital
  http://www.splitvisiondigital.com
• 

  Danny Jenkins

  January 12, 2009 at 5:38 am

  Hi Brendan, thanks for your quick reply. I’ve pretty much been doing it in AE the way you have mentioned, but certain things just seem like they should be easier. For example using the light sweep or generate ramp fx… is it me or can you not just put a simple stroke on top of these fx? Also, the values of these fx are pinned to the x,y coordinates of the frame, and aren’t actually attached in relation to the text if you change it’s position.

  The stroke effect only works with paths,and you can cheat by using the glow effect but it doesn’t react well to motion blur.

  To me nesting text layers in comps to build up basic FX seems a bit overkill, and I want to be able to have my hands on any parameter of the text at any time. Sometimes I’ve created more complex styles in illustrator, but it’s a real pain if something needs to be changed.

  I hope there are easier ways to do these things but I’ve just never been shown how!
• 

  Elad Menashe

  January 12, 2009 at 11:55 am

  What about layer styles?
  Since AE CS3 each layer can have layer styles, look for it from the layer menu.

  Regards
  Elad
• 

  David Bogie

  January 12, 2009 at 3:54 pm

  Boris may be an economical plugin for you if you cannot justify the time and effort required to use the builtin AE tools.

  There are several text plugs for AE. I have none of them. Check Red Giant and Toolfarm.

  bogiesan
• 

  Antony Buonomo

  January 12, 2009 at 8:19 pm

  I think AE may be overkill for what you need, or for the time you have to learn. AE can be one big title generator if you want but you will find better/cheaper (time and money)/easier solutions for your needs. Well cheaper and easier anyway!

  A

  Vertigo Productions
  https://www.vertigo.co.uk
• 

  Ken Latman

  January 16, 2009 at 8:01 pm

  You can perform some cool 3D text effects with Zaxwerks ProAnimator or Invigorator too. I thinking huge letters for “Largest” sale ever type car ads I see.

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