How can I make text bend and wave smoothly?

[Steve Bentley]

Any number of the deform plugins will do that – ripple, wave etc. But you can also do it with the mesh warp, bezier warp or use the reshape effect. You may have to precomp the text and if so you may have to use the “continuously rasterize” button to keep the edges clean.
Precomping the text will allow you to drag it (in the subcomp) through the deforming “field” area without having to worry about also shifting the warp. That way the warp can move and change independently of the texts motion.

Heck, you could even do this with the displacement effect and use a linear gradient as the map (black to white and back to black again)

[Richard Garabedain]

its not wave …or it could be but the text is actually moving up and then a displacement map is added.or maybe just a non animated wave