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Best learning tools for text animation in After Effects?
Hi all — I’m a newbie to both AE and Creative Cow. I’m chiefly interested in text on screen, and after watching some of the Adobe tutorials I’ve got a handle on the basics — laying out in Illustrator, importing layers, and animating layers on the timeline to set positions and have text slide on/off screen or use different effects for text.
What I’m struggling with is managing longer projects where the principal style is text on screen; picture a song video where each line is its own set of words moving on/off screen, then “wiping” to set up a fresh set of words/animation for the next line, but with 50-60 lines of text per video, so dozens of “set-ups”, ultimately. I’m looking for help/tutorials on how to do what I’d describe as “clearing” the screen to move on to a fresh set of words/animations, group and minimize large sets of timeline items to get them out of the way while I move on to a fresh set of words, etc.
Even knowing what kinds of search terms to look for would be helpful — After Effects is vast, and I’m only looking to master a small set of the skills in the tool, but trying to find what I need without knowing the language is daunting. Any tips on broad areas I should be looking for tutorials on would be very helpful!
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2 Replies
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You can make some pretty complex text animations fairly easily using Text Animators and you should find a lot of tutorials on those. They can give you control over properties for individual lines, words and characters. Once set up, they can then be saved as Animation Presets to easily apply when needed.
I’m not sure how you are getting the text into After Effects (or Illustrator/Photoshop), but Illustrator and Photoshop have some built-in ways to ‘import’ text into layers that you might find useful, try searching ‘data merge’ and either Illustrator or Photoshop to see if it might improve your workflow — it’s a lot like ‘mail merge’ in Word, and there is a bit of setup involved, so it may or may not be worth the effort. Then that .ai or .psd can be easily imported into AE.
After Effects doesn’t have a built in method to bring text from external files, but you’ll find methods/tutorials that use expressions or scripts to do something similar if you search for ‘after effects text from file’. Again, there is some setup involved, so you’d have to see if that time spent can save you time in the long run.
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Thanks, Kevin! Very helpful.
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