From the course: After Effects Guru: Animating Typography

Working with existing presets (and visually browsing) - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Guru: Animating Typography

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Working with existing presets (and visually browsing)

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A lot of people get started learning AfterEffects by animating text. And one of the great things about AfterEffects is the fact that there are a ton of pre-built text animations already set up within the application. And actually they're not quite within the application. You need to make sure you download Bridge so you can browse through all those presets. Yes, they're already in AfterEffects and you can check em out, but if you download Bridge you can browse through. So let's get started. In our working with Presets Comp, I want you to go ahead and select layer one, our surf layer. With that layer selected, then you can go up under Animation and choose Browse Presets. Now if you don't have Bridge already installed on your computer, you may not be able to actually browse these presets. So I really recommend you use Bridge or download Bridge if you haven't done so already. Now, I may have some extra folders in here because I do have some extra presets for other plugins that I bought, but the folder you want to look for is this Text folder. So let's double-click on the Text folder. And in here, this should look the same on your system, we have a whole host of different kinds of animations. I want to create an animation in, so let's go ahead and double-click on the Animate In option. And in here, you can see all the different options we have for animating text into a scene. Now since we just have one individual word, we don't necessarily have to worry about how each word is animated through the scene. We could just look specifically at characters. So let's go ahead and just click on Fade Up Characters. Now it may take a second to load, but once it actually loads you'll see a preview on the right-hand side of your screen. Now if you click through a couple of these different presets you'll get a pretty good idea as to what they look like once the preset has been applied. I want you to go down and choose slowfadeon.ffx. To apply all we have to do is just double-click. Don't panic when you jump back into AfterEffects. It looks like the word surf is gone, but if you actually scrub through, you can see we get this cool animation that's happened. And we also see these lines. These lines are selectors, letting us know which letters are selected at any given time, thus creating the animation. With layer one selected, if you go ahead and press the U key, it'll open up the key frames that were used to create the animation. So if you want that fade to take a little bit longer, all you have to do is click and drag on the second key frame. Let's move that down to around three seconds. Now I'm going to ahead and load up a preview so we can see what that preset actually looks like. I think that looks pretty neat. Let's go ahead and stop playback. So as you can see with our project, when it comes time to actually create animation all you have to do is select the layer that you'd like to apply the animation to. Then you can go ahead and browse all the presets in Bridge whenever you decide whatever it is you want to apply, just go ahead and double-click on that preset in Bridge. That will apply the key frames to your layer back in AfterEffects and then you can just move the key frames around the timeline to change the timing of that animation.

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