Browsing presets in Bridge

- [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.