[Chaz Chester]

Not totally sure I understand what you’re going for, but would something like this help? https://gumroad.com/l/acdtg

[Chaz Chester]

There’s no substitute for proper lighting, but you might be able to salvage this shot by adjusting the colors with the effects Selective Color and Change to Color. Make everything you want to key out as green as possible and everything you want to keep as magenta as possible. It’ll make your footage look crazy, but that’s okay because you’ll set Keylight to Screen Matte and just use this version as a luma matte for the an unaltered copy of the footage. If the edges are jagged, you can pre-comp it and slap Matte Choker on the pre-comp. I had some success with this still you’ve posted, but it’s gonna take a lot of tweaking and probably some roto to get the footage to look clean. Good luck!

[Chaz Chester]

Interesting… I didn’t even know Bridge had these previews. You’re right, though, they don’t really look like the default settings for the presets.
I’m not really sure how they’re getting separate parts of the characters to fade in with just a text animator, but you could achieve something similar by setting your stroke width to 0 in the character panel and animating the offset to go from 100 to -100, with all of the other settings set to the preset’s defaults. The effect Simple Choker will help get rid of any remaining pixels.

Another way of achieving this effect, which is how I would typically do it, is to just put a solid with Turbulent Noise on top of the text layer to use as a luma matte and animate it going from totally black to totally white.

[Chaz Chester]

With the layer selected, pressing the U key should reveal all of the keyframed properties.

For Emerge, it should show the “Offset” property in a custom named Range Selector called “Selector – Offset”. Emerge is only meant for text and won’t do anything to other types of layers.

Fluctuate doesn’t have any keyframes because it’s using a Wiggle Selector, which means it’s moving between values based on the selector’s controls, which can be found by clicking the Text twirler. If your layer isn’t text with a stroke (the stroke found in the character panel), you won’t see anything happen.

It’s also worth noting that Command + ` (I’m guessing Ctrl + ` on a PC) will reveal all of the properties on a selected layer, whether they have keyframes or not.

[Chaz Chester]

With the layer selected, pressing the U key should reveal all of the keyframed properties.

For Emerge, it should show the “Offset” property in a custom named Range Selector called “Selector – Offset”. Emerge is only meant for text and won’t do anything to other types of layers.

Fluctuate doesn’t have any keyframes because it’s using a Wiggle Selector, which means it’s moving between values based on the selector’s controls, which can be found where all text animators appear, under the Text twirler. If your layer isn’t text with a stroke (the stroke found in the character panel), you won’t see anything happen.

[Chaz Chester]

If you’re trying to wrap a 2D layer around the front of a cylindrical object, the simplest option would probably be to use CC Cylinder. From there, you’ll be able to keyframe the rotation to match that of the mug. As far as I know, After Effects doesn’t have a good way of tracking the rotation using only one tracking point.

[Chaz Chester]

Adding the expression to Color property of your fill effect should do the trick:

target = thisComp.layer(“Target”); //The layer you want to check (probably use a precomp for this)
colorpicker = thisComp.layer(“Text”); //The anchor point of this layer determines where it checks
[1,1,1,1]-(target.sampleImage(target.fromWorld(colorpicker.position), [0.5,0.5], true, time)) //[1,1,1,1] is the RGBA value for white; by subtracting the result, we get the inverse.

[Chaz Chester]

This might be a dumb way of doing it, but maybe as a workaround, you could store the text before that letter, the letter itself, and the text following that letter, and then remove the text layer and generate three new text layers in its place, each with a piece of the original text in the font you need.

[Chaz Chester]

I would create a rectangular shape with a gradient fill (looks like black, other color, black), then animate the start and end points of the gradient to mimic the example. Holding alt and clicking on the stopwatch will let you add an expression to the start and end points.
This expression: loopOut()
will make the animation repeat over and over again. The effect “Posterize” should help you achieve the banding/stepping that’s in the example, if you’re going for that retro look. Once you’re happy with the animation, copy the layer as needed to fill the screen and offset each of the layers by a frame (or a few) to create the illusion of the color moving upward.

[Chaz Chester]

Wait… that’s not what you’re asking. I’m not sure if there’s a way to change the view layout with your keyboard -_-