Create motion graphic templates - After Effects Tutorial

- [Narrator] If you use Premiere Pro, Adobe has created tighter integration in Version CC 2017 between After Effects and Premiere through the essential graphics panel. This work flow greatly improves functionality to allow Premiere users the ability to alter not only text from After Effects compositions, but also various graphics properties as well. With this, we can create a motion graphics template in After Effects for shared used inside of Premiere. Here inside of After Effects I have a lower third with the person's name, title, and graphics animating on and off, and it's these elements that I want to bring inside of Premiere and repurpose according to who's speaking on screen at the time. As part of this template, I don't want to include this background video, so let's go ahead and turn this off by turning off the visibility here. Alternately, we can have After Effects do this automatically for us by use of a guide layer, so let's go ahead and right click on layer two and enable guide layer. You can see that we have a new icon here, and essentially this tells After Effects to show us the contents of layer two inside of our composition window, however, when we go to export out or render, turn the visibility off, so this allows us to work with our lower third with a bit of context in the background here, but when we go to export out our template or render, we will have basically this instead. We'll have that transparency. If we turn this off and turn on our transparency grid, we'll have this imported into Premiere. So I'll reenable all this so we can have a little bit of context as we work. So now, let's expose layer one, this precomp layer, and you'll see that we have some effects in here. We have a dropshadow and a CC light sweep. Depending on what background is going on here, we might want to increase the opacity of our dropshadow. We might want to decrease it. We might want to alter the softness, so it all just depends. It would be really handy to have these parameters exposed in Premiere, so we can do that by way of the template. So to make these changes, let's go ahead and move up to window essential graphics. With this essential graphics panel, I'm going to click and drag and dock it on top of that project window to make a little bit more screen real estate. So what does this essential graphics panel actually do? Well, we can take different properties from our compositions and promote them up into Premiere so that we can make the changes there instead. To first do this, we need to select a master composition here, so we'll select lower third from our dropdown here, or alternately we can select our composition down here and come up to composition open in essential graphics. Let's go ahead and rename our template to something a little bit more meaningful. We'll call this lower third radnus. Here we go, and let's start dragging in some of these properties here. So dropshadow opacity, we talked about distance and softness, and we also talked about the CC light sweep. Maybe we need to decrease or increase the width, make it narrower. We want to increase or decrease the intensity, depending on what's going on in the background. So let's go ahead and grab that as well. Now you'll notice that I can change out these parameters here inside the essential graphics panel, which is super handy because now this provides a consolidated place where we can take all the parameters that might be scattered about through our composition. It might be somewhere nested several precomps deep or in a layer that we need to twirl down to. So by consolidating it all here, we gain easy access to some of the important parameters. You'll notice that we're starting to get a little cluttered with regards to our properties here. So let's add in comments to help separate out what is what, so we'll add in a comment and let's type in the word dropshadow. This will help us to keep mental notes for ourselves or to other editors if we're sharing this out as to what these sliders and parameters do, so this one is for light sweep. We can actually click and drag and reorder this comment on top, and we'll add this light sweep. I can drag this and reorder that over there. So now we're starting to compartmentalize what these properties do. Obviously, the most important one that we're missing is the person's name and the title. So let's scroll all the way up and the person's name and title is inside this precomp. Let's go ahead and double click here. Now it's important to note that there are some parameters that are not accessible inside of our essential graphics panel. So take Kelli's name for instance, if we twirl this down and go to transform, we can alter out the position here, however, if we try to export this position property inside of our essential graphics panel, After Effects gives us a warning saying this is not yet supported. So we can filter all the supported properties by selecting this button here. Solo-supported properties will show us just what is importable into our essential graphics panel. The one we're looking for is called source text, and this is what will ultimately change out what we see on screen. Because this is fairly important, let's drag this to the top and we'll rename source text to person's name. We'll do the same thing for the title. This is a person's title. With that all done, I think we're fairly close to exporting. Let's go ahead and set these default parameters here for our lower third. We have our dropshadow which looks to be, let's leave that at about 50%. We'll decrease this distance and increase the softness somewhere in there, and our light sweep, that's lookin' pretty good. So if this is our default state, let's go ahead and export out this motion graphics template. We'll click there and After Effects asks us to save, and our second dialogue box will be where do you want to save this to? This is the default, essential graphics library that is local to your system. You can select any other drive on your local computer, or if you have the creative cloud libraries, you can save it to there instead. I'll go ahead and leave it as essential graphics and say okay. With that saved, let's step over into Premiere. I'll open up my exercise files folder and pull up the After Effects for Editors Premiere Pro Project. Inside this project, we've got a sequence here called 0303 creating motion graphics templates, and we have two ladies here who desperately need some lower third, so let's go ahead and add in what we just exported out. We'll come up over here to window essential graphics, and I'll take this panel and just dock it. Now inside the browse mode, you can see that we're browsing through the essential graphics templates that are local to our system. You can target the local drive here if you saved it off to your hard drive. Basically, we're going to scroll down and look for what we titled lower third radnus. Here it is, so I'm going to click and drag this and add it to my timeline. You'll notice that Premiere Pro adds in this new folder here called motion graphics template media. There's our template, so when we play through, we can see all the work that we did in After Effects gets brought over into Premiere. Perfect, although this person's name is not Kelli. This is actually Felicia, so let's go ahead and select our clip. Inside the essential graphics panel, you'll see that we're now in edit mode, and here's all the properties that we had exported out from After Effects. So let's go ahead and change out this person's name. Her name is Felicia. She is the general manager, and this lower third could probably use a little bit more punch. Let's go ahead and up the opacity. Let's decrease the softness, and decrease the distance about a tad. It looks like that light sweep is okay. I'm happy with that. Let's go ahead and instance out another version with this person. This is Suzi. Let's go ahead and select our clip again. Type out her name, and she is actually a glass blower, so glass blower. She probably doesn't need that much in terms of light sweep, so let's decrease that intensity, maybe make it a tad bit wider. It looks like that is all good. So we have one template that is instanced out for Felicia, and we have another one for Suzi. So here we saw how the essential graphics panel allows us to create motion graphics templates. It's a great way to package up an After Effects composition so that we can then repurpose them in our edit or share them out with other editors.