- [Voiceover] This hidden gem is a very simple one, but if you're not aware of it, you won't believe how much time it's going to save you. Let's say you have some text, some 3D text, you type set it, you have it in position, and now you want to animate it. You want to take advantage of the many, many 3D text presets that come free with After Effects. Well you can go to the Effects and Presets panel, troll open Animation Presets, and troll open Text, and troll open 3D text, and you have this list of names that are kind of cropped off and you open it up in your window and you go, "I still don't really know what each of these do." You could try one by double-clicking and applying it, and saying, "Well, that's not what I had in mind." Go back to the start of the layers least it starts there, you can double click another one, and keep doing this trial and error which just takes forever.
But what you'd prefer to do is take advantage of this little feature in the Effects and Presets panel, in it's options known as Browse Presets. This opens up all of those presets folders that you had, Adobe After Effects CC 2015 Presets, it allows you to see little previews of what they do. In our case we wanted those text presets. There they are, I'll double click that. Open up the 3D text folder, click on one, and I get a small but useful animated thumbnail of what that preset's going to do.
I can keep clicking through the different thumbnails to preview them. See which has the look that I like. I'd prefer something that's going to fly in, on the front, not behind, I want something leaving the screen. Let's try this one. Once you've selected one that you like, assuming that you have selected your text layer back in After Effects, and put the current time indicator where you want that first keyframe to be, you double-click the preset in Bridge, and you might get an error, I've actually encountered this in recent versions of After Effects, where you get this obscure error, which might make you think things are broken, but just ignore it, hopefully you won't even see it at all.
And there's your preset applied to your layer inside After Effects. It is a far more efficient way to take advantage of all those presets that are installed with After Effects. It's much easier to see what's happening with a previewed thumbnail, than trying to figure them out just by their name. And by the way, there's even more presets available from Adobe, go to the URL, bit.ly/ShapeTextPresets. This will take you to the Adobe Addons page where you can download a set of additional presets both for shape layers and for 3D text.
Add those to what you have in After Effects, and have even more to choose from just to get the juices flowing, or finish a job that much faster.
Updated
6/7/2016Released
4/15/2015- Setting the vertex point
- Creating swarms of object
- Replacing layers without losing effects and animation
- Simplifying projects
- Hiding layers
- And more…
Skill Level Intermediate
Duration
Views
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Introduction
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Welcome2m 1s
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Gems from June 2016
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Preserve transparency3m 56s
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Gems from May 2016
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Illustrator artboards7m 57s
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Retiming Sequences9m 13s
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Collapsed adjustment layers8m 18s
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Gems from April 2016
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Converting footage to comps2m 13s
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Gems from March 2016
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Divide mode4m 38s
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Difference mode4m 14s
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Adding comments to projects3m 46s
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Edit this; look at that4m 3s
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Tricks with keyframes3m 49s
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Gems from February 2016
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Smoother6m 7s
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Linear expression6m 58s
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Expression controls4m 50s
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3D camera shake5m 56s
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Gems from January 2016
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Puppet overlaps3m 7s
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Puppets and multiple shapes3m 39s
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Slip editing3m 50s
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Adobe Typekit3m 15s
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Gems from December 2015
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Hold keyframes7m 6s
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Color palettes5m 18s
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Comp proxies6m 23s
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Gems from November 2015
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Automatic fades4m 12s
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Wiggle behaviors6m 36s
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Layer styles6m 56s
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Roving keyframes7m 38s
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Gems from October 2015
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Pixel Motion Blur7m 46s
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Fading multiple layers5m 10s
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Basic behaviors6m 48s
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Gems from September 2015
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Wiggle Paths5m 36s
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Preserve Frame Rate6m 50s
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Stereo Mixer7m 38s
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Gems from August 2015
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Stopping previews3m 58s
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Swarming shapes6m 6s
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Revealing curved shapes9m 53s
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Write-on8m 44s
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Dashed lines4m 45s
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Gems from July 2015
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Cleaning up projects5m 49s
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Illuminating dark layers3m 58s
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Adjustment lights5m 53s
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Gems from June 2015
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Conform frame rate4m 16s
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Working color space5m 31s
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Grow Bounds3m 18s
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Replace source4m 39s
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Sequence layers7m 52s
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Gems from May 2015
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Temporary tools3m 34s
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Guide Layers2m 49s
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Set first vertex7m 34s
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Cropping on output5m 28s
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Gems from April 2015
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Alpha Add mode2m 29s
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Effects instancing3m 53s
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Video: Browsing presets in Bridge