Creating a text animation preset , part 1 - After Effects Tutorial

- In this movie, we're going to create an intro and outro text animation preset to use recurrently on a weekly webisode series. Let's hop right in and see what we're working with. So before joining in, hopefully you've been able to preview some of the presets that exist from the Animation Browse Preset menu inside of Adobe Bridge, or looked inside of the effects and presets and here we're going to actually dive into creating our own presets. So I've got some Seattle, Washington text and I want to have it animate onscreen in a cool way. So if you're going to animate your text from scratch, press the disclosure triangle next to the Seattle, Washington text layer. Everything about text animation is available from this animate menu, and what we want to do is to play it. Once we click on the play button, we have a series of parameters that we can add these and control their animation. Now, let's start off and simply add a little bit of a scale value. Now, once I add this scale, there's something to keep in mind. You might be tempted if you're used to keyframing to keyframing this scale parameter, but I want to encourage you against it. What you'd like to do is let's actually just use simple scale value of something like 120. You can see that the letters rise. And I want to keep in mind that you have this value called the range selector. The range selector is like a box when it first is applied as a text animation and it's encompassing your letters. You can animate that box, as in there are two values. A start and an end. If you open up the range selector one, let's actually add a keyframe to the start value, and this represents the start of the box. Just to double-check this, I want to actually move the 0% and scrub forward. You'll start to see as I scrub forward, that box becomes smaller, meaning that the actual start value is getting closer to the end value, which is all the way on the right, close to the end. I want to move this back and let's decide to make a one-second animation. I'll move my playhead to the one second mark. I'm going to take that start value and move it to 100%. If I move my playhead back, we'll see that those letters that are larger eventually become smaller over time. Now the best part about this is that we can add to this existing range selector. So let's add one more value. I'm going to press the play button. We're going to add a property, and right now we're going to add a position value and have it fall down from the sky. So I want to take this position of Y value, which represents up and down, and scrub it to the left. I'll move my playhead to an area where I can see this a little bit better. I don't want it to go too far. In fact, I want it to be on screen 'cause we're going to eventually add an opacity value as well. And I think that looks pretty good. I'll press the spacebar to play back and we can see that not only as those letters scale down, they actually move in position in terms of their Y scale landing into their final resting position. I want to add one more value to this existing range selector. The best part about this that I want you to remember is that once you have an existing range selector animation, you can add just more and more properties to add to the value of your animation. I want to click the add button, go to the property menu, and add an opacity value. I'll just take that and, in this case, make the value instead of 100, 0%. I'll move my playhead so where I can see it. You can see there that as I press the spacebar, nothing is visible. The characters fall, in terms of their value, as well as they shrink down in size from the values that we set there inside of the range selector. So once you have a range selector set up, it becomes very easy to animate properties. In the next movie, we're going to get familiar with what we can do by naming our animator, as well as just a couple more properties before we save that as a preset to our After Effects library for later use.