Creating the composition – Animating Text

Dec 30, 2021

Creating the composition – Animating Text

First, you’ll import footage and create the composition.

1. Click the New Composition From Footage button in the Composition panel to create a new composition.

2. Navigate to the Lessons/Lesson03/Assets folder on your hard disk, select FishSwim.mov, and then click Import or Open.

After Effects can import several file formats, including Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files as well as QuickTime and AVI movies. This makes After Effects an incredibly powerful application for compositing and motion graphics work.

3. Choose File > Save.

You’re ready to add the title text to the composition.

About text layers

In After Effects, you can add text with flexibility and precision. The Tools, Character, and Paragraph panels contain a wide range of text controls; some of these are also available in the Properties panel. You can create and edit horizontal or vertical text directly on the screen in the Composition panel, and quickly change the font, style, size, and color of the text. You can apply changes to individual characters and set formatting options for entire paragraphs, including alignment, justification, and word-wrapping. In addition to all of these style features, After Effects provides tools for easily animating specific characters and properties, such as text opacity and hue.

After Effects uses two types of text: point text and paragraph text. Use point text to enter a single word or line of characters; use paragraph text to enter and format text as one or more paragraphs.

In many ways, text layers are just like any other layers in After Effects. You can apply effects and expressions to text layers, animate them, designate them as 3D layers, and edit the 3D text while viewing it from multiple angles. As with layers imported from Illustrator, text layers are continuously rasterized, so when you scale the layer or resize the text, it retains crisp, resolution-independent edges. The two main differences between text layers and other layers are that you cannot open a text layer in its own Layer panel and you can animate the text in a text layer using special text-animator properties and selectors.