Text on a path - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's go ahead and open the composition named 3.3 Text on a path. So expand the folder here, expand the Compositions folder and here it is. 3.3 Text on a path. Simply double click it. In After Effects, in order to have text on a path, we need to have a path, and that's logical but paths do not exist independently from a layer in After Effects, so you must select the layer. That means simply click on it. Then you have to draw a path. For this one, we're going to use the pen tool. In the Tools panel, click on the pen tool, which is this one. It looks like a little fountain pen. The shortcut for it is the letter G. And now, with the layer still selected, click here, then click here towards the bottom and drag to the right. This brings out the handles. And now let's click here. And now we have this nice curve that is a path that belongs to this layer. Now, in the timeline, let's go ahead and expand the text layer, the text property path options and from this dropdown menu, choose Mask 1. As soon as you do that, a couple of things happen. The text snaps to the path and we get five properties in the timeline that we did not see before. Let's go through them. The reverse path property is pretty easy. You can turn it on or off. When you click on the word Off, the text just goes on the other side of the path. Click on it again, and now you have right side up. So upside down, right side up or outside the path, inside of the path. The next one is perpendicular to path and in fact, we can make this a little bit wider so that you can read the entire text and right now, all of our characters are perpendicular to the path but they don't have to be. We can actually turn that off and now, the text is actually right side up and not at an angle. I prefer to have it on, so let's go ahead and leave it on. Force Alignment. It's going to make the characters take the entire length of the path or not. Shut that off for now. The first margin is a value that you can scrub and keyframe and it's pretty self-explanatory what it's doing. It's moving the text along the path. But the last margin here is not quite working. If you scroll a bit, you're going to see that it makes no effect on the text. The reason for that is because of the alignment of the text. Right now, and by default, After Effects is going to give us a left align text. Now, we could change it. If you select the layer and go to the Paragraph panel, you can have the text be left aligned, center aligned or right aligned. If you don't see the Paragraph panel, please go under Window, and choose Paragraph. If the text is centered aligned, then both the first margin and the last margin values here in the timeline will have an effect on the text. If the text, however, is right aligned, then the first margin will have no effect but the last margin will. Go back to a left-aligned text and now, let's turn the Force Alignment on. Then both the first and the last margin have an effect on the text. Let's go ahead and scrub these values so we can scrunch all of the characters right here in the middle. Now, we can keyframe this if we want. You can choose to keyframe at the beginning or at whatever point in time you want. And now, move the playhead to a different point in time and let's scrub these values again as to separate the text. If we play this, you see that sure enough, the text separates like if it were an accordion. Well, you can even select all of these keyframes and then go to Animation, Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease. Look at the shortcut, it is F9. And this, of course, will provide us with an acceleration and a deceleration of the interpolation. Now, let's do one more thing. With the layer selected, and that simply means click on the layer name, press the letter M, M for mask. And click on the words Mask 1 and let's go ahead and delete that. So now, obviously, we don't have text on a path because we just deleted the path. With the layer still selected, choose Ellipse tool. When a tool has a little lighter-colored wedge on the bottom right-hand side of the tool, that simply means that you can click and hold and other tools will appear. So if you're not showing the ellipse tool, go ahead and click and hold any tool in its place and you will see the ellipse tool. Press and hold the Shift key and now when we draw, it's going to be a circle. Release the mouse button and now let's collapse the layer in the timeline and expand it again. Expand Text, expand Path Options, choose Mask 1 from the dropdown menu. As soon as you do that, then the same thing that happened before, happens here, except now we are in a circle. Move the playhead all the way to the beginning and let's keyframe the first margin. Now let's move the playhead all the way to the end of the composition. And now let's scrub these values so that our text goes around the circle once. You can press and hold the Shift key as you scrub these values and this is going to multiply the scrubbing value by a factor of 10. Now, play this from the beginning. Animations in After Effects will loop. And this is pretty good. Let's go ahead and stop this and now, to the right of the word Text in the timeline, you're going to see the word Animate under the menu. Go ahead and click on the menu and then choose Enable Per Character 3D. Click on the same menu and now choose Rotation. In the timeline, you're going to see three rotations, the x, the y and the z. In the x rotation, type in the number 90, as in rotate 90 degrees. As soon as you do that, the text is going to disappear and that is going because we are looking at the top of the text now. Let's go ahead now and select the layer. Click on the layer name and press the letter R, R for rotation. This is going to be the rotation of the layer now and not of the individual characters. So we can scrub the x rotation until we can read the text again and now, if we play this, we are going to see that we have our text going on the path and the loop is almost seamless and that's pretty cool.