Motion graphics 101: Everything you need to get started with animation

Motion Graphics is about bringing movement to your designs. It can be a great way to capture your audience’s attention and stand out from the crowd.

In this course will cover how to get started with motion graphics, how to create basic shapes and animate them, how to create animated titles, captions and effects.

Let’s get moving.

Hi guys, Jordan here from MottionArray.com. And today we’re going to be helping you to level up your motion graphics design skills and get you creating some awesome sequences for yourself. This class is designed for beginners, so if you’re really new to this topic, then don’t worry, you’re in the right place. Some of the things we’re going to be talking about are more conceptual, helping you to understand more of the overall design process, whereas others are going to be more technical, helping you to actually produce a result for yourself. Today we’re going to be going over the process of storyboarding for motion design, drawing out our concepts by breaking it down into individual shots, building out the composition, thinking through the shapes, movements, transitions, etc. And because every single project is different, we’re going to be going through one together as an example to learn from. So let’s dive right into it.

So when we look at storyboarding out our motion graphics project, it’s not unlike storyboarding for a feature film or commercial production. You’re not drawing out 24 frames for every second to create some sort of flipbook of your production, No. Instead, you’re just plotting out the base concepts that you’re gonna be animating on a computer later on. This is really important because getting a really good foundation at the beginning is going to save you so much time later on. If you draw out your idea for a storyboard and look at it and realize it’s absolute garbage, then you’ve wasted 10 minutes instead of a week straight of tedious animation work just to end up with something that you don’t even like. Start by focusing on getting a sense for what are the important beats in your sequence. Then that storyboard is going to act as a map that guides the rest of the process of creating your story.

At this point, it doesn’t matter if you’re planning to show these to anybody like a paying client later on, or even if they’re just for your own eyes in your own practice. Don’t worry about how good they look. Just worry about the process of going from nothing to something that you really like the idea of. So let’s get to the actual how of storyboarding.

A lot of people might like to use software or their computer or to draw on a tablet or something, but for me personally, I really like using a good old-fashioned pencil and paper. And the reason is actually because I’m terrible at drawing. No, that’s not a joke. Because I can’t draw to save my life, it actually boxes me in and forces me to focus on only the most essential pieces of the storyboard: what, when, and how. What shapes and images are actually visible in the shot? When do things progress and move forward? And how do things actually transition from one scene or shot to the next? These will act as the bedrock for the story that you’re telling because even if you’re creating just a 5-second looping animation for fun, your goal should still be to tell some sort of a story through that. That’s what’s going to captivate and hold your audience’s attention. So let’s get right down to it and actually start storyboarding.

And for us, we’re actually going to be creating a storyboard for that title sequence you saw at the very beginning, a ball starting on screen, beginning to bounce up as it morphs and rotates into a triangle. Triangle bounces and morphs up into a square. The square hits the ground and flattens out into a line that ends up being a progress bar, which separates and morphs into the title of our class.

Before I created this, I knew that what I wanted to do was play around with the idea of increasing complexity. The whole idea of this class even is to start with the very basics of motion design and then slowly start to progress into more and more complex ideas as we go along. And we can really play with that idea visually, so starting with a simple shape, a circle, and having that morph into more complex shapes like a triangle or a square will allow us to get across that idea that complexity is increasing over time. Hopefully, like your skills will be increasing over time. Then the final squashing of that square into a line that animates into the final piece of text shows visually the process of going something extremely basic, like a circle into something that imparts meaning, almost like a metaphor for the entire creative process itself.

So now let’s actually take our paper and draw a bunch of rectangles that are going to represent the frame for what we can actually see, or you could just do what I did and download a template from the internet. If you just Google Image Search Storyboard template, you’re going to find a lot of examples.

And begin to draw out the progression of your shots. Don’t be afraid to mess up. Mistakes are a part of the process. Just focus on getting your ideas down and we can refine them later on. My goal here is really just to show in as simple a form as possible what I intend to happen. You can draw arrows and lines to show intended movement, and it’s absolutely not cheating to literally write out what you want to happen. In fact, it’s absolutely necessary in most cases. It’s not uncommon to have voiceovers in a lot of motion design work. That’s something that you can’t draw. You literally have to write that out.

Now for us, we don’t have any voiceover, but we’re still going to write out exactly what happens as if we were describing it to somebody. Don’t worry about getting too technical at this point, just give enough information to help somebody get a baseline for what’s going on. And we can go over my example here, together: A ball starts resting in frame. The scene is very basic, a single line to indicate the ground and the circle, which is our point of focus. It squashes down in preparation to bounce and then jumps up into the air. It then morphs into a triangle, which then hits the ground. Hitting the ground causes the scene to rapidly change style, radiating out from the center. Triangle continues to squish and pop back up, morphing into a square. The square hits the ground and squashes, which stretches it out into a wide bar. This bar animates in color from left to right, in the same way that After Effects renders this bar then duplicates by splitting in a liquidy, gooey fashion, and then morphs into the final title. Huh, okay, so I think you can understand what I’m going for here, and I’m hoping that you can see exactly how okay it is for your drawings to suck and for everything to be a little bit messy. And again, if this is just you and you know exactly what you’re going for, you don’t have to feel like you have to write out an essay for everything. It’s just helpful in case somebody else is going to be looking over your work or in case you’re planning to put this in a drawer for two months and you can’t quite, exactly remember what it was that you’re going for when you pick it up again.

Now inevitably, the question will be asked, ‘Hey, I’ve written this all down on a piece of paper. What happens if I want to change the order of things? Do I have to scrap it all and start from the beginning?’ Well, maybe. But you probably don’t have to. I know it would suck to just have to erase everything and then do it all again. But another option would be literally just to take a pair of scissors and to cut out each individual frame and then position things out manually on your desk. I know that’s not the most optimal solution, but there is another way if you know that you’re going to be going down that route anyways, you don’t have to write things down on a white piece of paper. You can grab some sticky notes and then use your desk, your wall, or anything as a surface to plan out your story.

The thing that’s really important to remember with this is that you are not serving your storyboard, your storyboard is supposed to serve you and help you in your creative process. If you find that something just isn’t working for you personally, don’t be afraid to break away from what everybody says is the correct way of doing things. Storyboarding is an essential part of the process, but no one said that it has to have a certain number of boxes or even look a particular way. Make it your own. You can even do things like take your phone and take individual pictures of each frame and then send it over to your computer and organize it there. Sort of like the way that I was showing you my storyboards.

Once you’ve got the general structure down and you’re happy with the progression of your story, it’s time to start thinking about refining your storyboards. What kind of a style do you want your sequence to have? There’s an endless number of different styles that you can end up with, and they each create a different impact for your story. But like I mentioned before, I can’t draw to save my life, so this is where somebody like me would jump onto the computer and open up a program like After Effects to really start building up that look. And just as a little time-saving tip, all of those example styles that I showed you before were either templates or video motion graphics or something from MotionArray.com. You can actually feel free to just browse around and see if there’s a style that resonates with you and you can sign up for a free subscription or even a paid subscription and download some of these for yourself and start to play around with them. And I’ll try to leave you a link to some of my personal favorites to get you some quick inspiration if you’d like. It’s actually really helpful to visualize the progression of your story beats in the style that you’re going to be ending up with.

Now, there’s no particular declarative end to the storyboarding process, it’s going to be different based on your production. If you’ve got a large commercial production, and you’ve got a lot of money behind it, then you’re gonna need to produce some really detailed storyboards. This is in part to help people really have an understanding for each different department and what’s gonna be needed from them, but also so that your end client doesn’t come back to you and say, ‘hey, this is different from what I was envisioning in my head.’ And on the flip side, if you’re just doing this for yourself for your own personal enjoyment, then you really don’t need to feel like you have to go beyond scribbles on a piece of paper. If you’re the only person that you’re answering to, then feel free to leave them as rough as you’d like. Like I mentioned before, you are not serving your storyboards, your storyboards are serving you.

For me personally, I really love going into a program like After Effects and designing out individual frames and styling them to really make sure that I like what I’m gonna be ending up with. But that requires me to really dive in and start creating shapes and layers and that’s actually something that we’re gonna be tackling in a different video. I hope this has given you a little bit more insight into how to achieve an effective storyboard. Thanks so much for joining me in this video and I can’t wait to see you in the next one.

Thanks so much for joining us in this video all about the basics of design for motion graphics. Today we’re gonna be diving in After Effects together to create the basics for what would eventually become a fully animated motion graphics sequence. Some of the things we’re going to be going over today include how to create basic shape layers, the tools used to create basic solids and shapes, we’re going to be looking at the pen tool and how to use it to create masks, and then finally text. So let’s get into it.

Just for your reference, I’ve actually already storyboarded out the entire intro sequence that you just saw, and I’m going to be using it as a launching off point to start creating some of the base elements inside of After Effects. So, let’s open up After Effects together and start by selecting the parameters for our project. You’re watching this in a 16X9 aspect ratio, so the default 1920 by 1080 works for me. But if you wanted to create something that’s vertical, say, for example, you wanted to post on TikTok or Instagram reels, then that’s something that’s gonna be really helpful to do at the start before any of your work is done. Additionally, you may be happy with a frame rate like 24, 25, 30, 60, but I wanted mine to have a little bit more of a stop motion feel to it to help distinguish it from the live-action segments like you’re watching right now.

A lower frame rate can also help to just solidify that feeling of something being animated in the minds of your audience. Totally a stylistic choice, but I’m going to be sticking with 15 frames per second. To be clear, this is something that you can change after the fact, but in the event that you’re creating compositions inside of other compositions and things get technical, then you’re going to have to change the frame rate inside of every different section of your project. The bottom line is that if you know you’re going down a particular path, it’s always best to start out that way from the beginning. So hit okay and we’re inside of a project and ready to get creating. But if you’re still new to After Effects, here’s a little bit of a refresher.

This is your timeline. Your timeline shows elements of your project across time, and each individual element is gonna be placed onto its own layer. You can’t have two items occupying the same layer, it’s not allowed inside of After Effects. But it’s easier to show you rather than tell you, so let’s create our first layer together. Our first onscreen image is a circle, so let’s start just by creating that. Now, there’s a bunch of different ways that you can go about creating shapes, but the easiest way by far is to use an existing shape tool. Yep, those exist. Go up here to the marquee tool and by clicking and holding it down, you can show more options. And then we’re going to go down here to select the Ellipse tool. From here, you can click and drag out a shape of a circle in this section known as your Composition Window.

But here you should notice that it’s not quite perfect unless when you click and drag, you do it at a flawless 45-degree angle. So a simple solution to create a perfect circle is just to hold down the shift key while dragging, and your circle remains perfect, uniform, flawless. Now all you have to do is drag in any direction to change its size, and once you let go, you have a shape layer that’s visible here in your composition window, but also on your timeline. And now that you know how to create a simple circle, let’s change it up a bit by adding shapes with sides to them, by creating our triangle and our square.

Back up at the ellipse tool here, is another tool that has loads of possibilities. It’s called the Polygon tool. Select it, and now we can create simple shapes with any number of sides. If you click and drag it out, you’ll start off with a base shape, and you can see here that my shape is a triangle, but yours might be different, so if you wanted to change the shape, all you have to do is while you’ve click and drag, continue holding down the mouse button, but then use your up and down arrow keys to change the number of sides that the polygon has. By hitting up, we can see that we changed to a square, then to a pentagon, then to a hexagon. And by clicking down we can decrease the number of sides that our shape has.

So let’s go back down here all the way to a triangle and let go. Awesome. Let’s do that one more time. But creating a square, so click and drag out. And because my shape has three sides, click the up arrow to get four sides and that’s the square, Great. Now we’ve created our three basic shapes that are a part of our larger composition, but I really don’t like this default color here, It’s kind of gross. So if I click and I highlight this shape here, either by clicking on the shape itself or by clicking on the layer, I can then go up here to the Swatch and click on it and change the color for that layer that I have currently selected. Nice. And if I really like that color that I’ve selected here, I can make the other two exactly that same color either by going back to change the color and highlighting this hex code here to copy it, then highlighting the next shape, choosing the color and then pasting in the hex code here.

But a simpler solution actually might be to click on the color swatch here for the shape layer that you want to change and then click on this Eyedropper Tool here. Now you can just go to the shape here in our window and click on it and it’ll steal that exact color and put it on to our new shape. Awesome, now all of our shapes are the same color that I want.

But we still have a slight problem. around all of the shapes is a small white border. If you like the look of it, then cool, but I want to get rid of it, and the way to do that is to go up here to where it says stroke and click on the lettering. This gives you your stroke options and I’ll click on the line through it to remove the stroke, and then I can do the same for all three of the shape layers.

But right now they’re just kind of on-screen and not actually doing anything. If we scrub through our timeline here, nothing is actually happening as we go forwards and backwards in time. So let’s make some very basic changes with our shape layers here. The first thing is just to rename them. When you create a new layer, you might have something really basic here, like shape 1, shape 2, which really doesn’t tell you anything. And it can get confusing to know which shape you’re actually working with. So instead, what’s really helpful is to rename them yourself.

So go to the layer that you want to change, and if you’re not sure which layer it’s impacting, you should see that the layer highlighted in the window when you click on it will also highlight it in your composition up here. Right-click on this section here and you can select re-name. And just type out something that really helps you to identify exactly what it is. So for me, that’s just typing circle. You can also highlight a layer and just hit enter to start re-naming it.

So now we have all of our basic shapes and they’re labeled so that I can keep organized. Now we can start working with timing. Right now, our shapes are all just visible at the same time, but we know that we want them to appear in a sequence one after another. So let’s start by taking our first shape, circle, and dragging the end here so that it goes away after a couple of seconds. You can see that it disappears when our timeline play head passes over the end here. So whenever these layers are visible, our shape is visible, and we can do that for our other two shapes here as well. Just grab the ends here of the triangle and drag them to match the point where the circle ended. And if you hold down the shift key, you’ll actually notice that our layer here, when we’re dragging it, jumps and snaps to the exact point that our circle layer ended. Pretty nice feature that can help you to be very precise, very quickly. Finish up with the same thing for the square layer.

And now what we have is this, each of our shape layers are only visible one at a time and in the correct order that we’d like for them. I know, it might seem super basic, but we’re actually making really good progress. So now you might be thinking they’re all over the place, how do I get them to occupy the same space? Well, you could manually just click and drag them to where you want them to go, or toggle down these dropdowns and change their position parameters, but looking back in our storyboards, you can see that I wanted all of these to be centered in frame as much as possible, and there’s actually a tool that’s really good at doing that quickly. it’s called Align, and we can access it here by finding it on our side panel or by going up to window, Align. And now all we have to do is select the layer that we want to align and then click the vertical and then also the horizontal align features. And now we can see that our shape layer is perfectly centered in frame. Super helpful.

And we can do that with our other two shape layers here so now when we scrub through in our timeline, we actually get progression from one shape turning into the next It’s not flashy, like at all. But that’s okay, we’re just laying the foundation so that later on you can more easily animate these shapes to morph and change and transition from one to the other. But before we get there, we have to explore a few other tools that will help you on your journey. The first one is just a brief overview of the anchor tool. If for some reason you started to align all of your shapes and one of them seems to be way different from the others, it might be because their anchor point is not centered in the middle of the shape. You can see the anchor point here because it’s a little dot with a circle around it. And if it’s not at the center of your shape, there’s a really quick way to fix this. Highlight the shape layer with the anchor point that’s not aligned properly in the center. Then go up to this icon here, the pan behind or anchor point tool. If you hold control or command and then double-click on this feature, it’ll center the anchor point for that particular layer that you’re dealing with. And now you can just go back to the align tools and quickly align it back in the center and you’re back in business.

Next up, I really want to change up what’s going on in the background here. And the way to do that really quickly is to add a solid shape layer, just like the name suggests, it’s an entire color just completely filling the frame. And right now, our frame is just black. But you might not realize this, but our frame isn’t actually black, but a transparent frame that after effects is just coloring black for us to be able to see our shapes a little better. If we toggle this transparency grid here, we can see that we actually don’t have any background at all. So let’s create one.

Let’s go up to Layer, New, Solid. Or you could go down here to the left side of your layer section, right-click, and select New, Solid. Both ways do the same thing. And from here you can choose the color of our new solid. I’m gonna stick with some of our Motion Array brand colors here and go with a purple color. Nice. When we hit okay though, we can see that our entire frame becomes purple and the reason that’s the case is because our solid color layer is overtop of everything, it’s just blocking everything else. If we click this little eyeball here, we can hide our solid layer from view without changing anything and everything else becomes visible again. So let’s solve our problem here just by lowering our solid layer below everything else. And you can do that easily by clicking and holding our layer here, on the left-hand side of the timeline, and now you can drag it up and down in sequence. It’s pretty intuitive, stuff at the top is literally going to be over top of everything else. And by dragging it down to the bottom, you’re gonna make it the thing that’s furthest back in your scene. And now all of our layers are able to be visible at the same time.

Great, but this layer is really boring, It’s just one solid color. It’d be really nice if we can create some dimension with this by creating depth. And I’ve got just the thing for that. We’re gonna be making it so that only the corners of this frame are this color of purple, and so that it slowly fades into a black in the middle, like in this reference image that you’re seeing. To do this, we’re gonna be creating what’s known as a mask using the pen tool. A mask is essentially just a cut-out of a particular layer. This mask is just a shape that you create out of the layer, and once you’ve created it, you can choose to have what’s either inside or outside the mask as visible. It’s an incredibly versatile tool that you’re really gonna want to get to know if you want to further your motion graphics career. So let’s go up here to the pen tool and click on it and select our solid color layer.

From here we can simply click, and our first point is created using our pen tool. This doesn’t do anything until we make more of these points. Create more and more and more, and then finally connect the last point to the first by clicking on the original. And there we have created a really odd shape, but that is a mask. This is just an example to show you how this process works. But this isn’t the final result of what I’m going for. So let’s delete this by clicking this dropdown in our solid layer and you should see that there’s a section here for the mask. Click on that, and then delete it by hitting the backspace key. From here, we can create the shape that I was actually intending for, and what we’re gonna do is instead of just clicking and moving on to the next point, we’re actually gonna click and then hold down and then drag out for a little bit. What this does is create a curved edge instead of a rigid, jagged one. Let’s continue this process until we connect the first one to the last, and now we have a shape that’s closer to what I want.

You can see that we’re closer, but we’re missing that natural falloff, that gradient. And the really nice thing is that we’re only actually missing one thing in order to create that, and that’s what’s called a feather. Essentially by increasing masking, you’re increasing the total distance over which the mask transitions. Right now, there’s only one-pixel difference between this mask being visible and being transparent, showing what’s behind it. But if we toggle down our mask settings here, we can see that our feather section is set to zero, giving us a very sharp edge here. But if we raise this up, we can see instantly that we get a more natural gradient from our color to the empty background. We’re basically increasing the number of pixels that it takes for our mask to go from visible to invisible. This is way more of what I’m going for. Now all that’s left to do is to do the exact same thing but for the other corner of our frame. We can either create an entirely new mask or copy and paste this original mask that we have and then click and drag it over to this other corner, saving us a lot of work.

But if, for example, you realized a little bit too late that this is exactly the opposite of what you wanted, say, looking something like this, there’s no need to redo everything, you actually just need to go down to the mask section here and change the type from add to subtract or from subtract to add, depending on what yours is set to. By doing this, you can change whether or not the middle of the mask is present or if the middle of the mask is invisible. But for me and for this project, I want this to remain exactly as it is with the insides of the mask visible. So for me, both of these need to be set to add.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you might be wondering about the final piece of our project that’s missing, and that’s the text. This thankfully is really easy to add, almost as easy as working inside of a text document. All you have to do is go up here to the type tool and click on it. Now, wherever you click, you’ll have a pulsating line up here that you can start to type out exactly what you want it to say, and it automatically produces a text layer inside of your timeline. Editing it is also really simple, just make sure that you have it all highlighted, and then you can immediately move to your character section here. And if yours isn’t present, just go up to window, character. Here you can edit things like font, the color, the size of your text, and really any parameters that you would have access to changing inside of a text document.

And finally, it’s important to point out that this text layer works in the same way that all the other layers do, representing its presence over time. So we can grab the beginning here and move it backwards so that it only appears at the end. But now guys, after all of that, we have a basic skeleton for our motion graphics sequence established. We have basic shapes created and styled, we have basic timing laid out, and we have a progression established through that timing. Plus, we’ve also gotten a handle on a lot of tools that you’re going to be using in future motion graphics projects. Like I mentioned before, this is incredibly basic right now, but that’s okay. In a different video, we’re actually going to be going over how to create the animation to each of these individual elements to really bring them to life.

But guys thanks so much for joining me in this video and I can’t wait to see you in the next one.

Thanks for joining us in this video all about motion design and specifically animation. We’re going to be diving in After Effects and looking ahead at take existing shape layers and give them life through motion. It’s animation 101, so let’s dive in.

So in different videos, I’ve actually already created the storyboard to the intro sequence that you just saw. And I’ve also already gone through After Effects to create the base shape layers needed for each of the individual elements that you’ve seen in that intro. But besides the basic timing, we really don’t have anything moving, and this is where animation comes in. Now, even though we’re recreating that intro sequence you saw at the beginning, we’re not actually gonna be creating it with all the stylized versions and all the bells and whistles, It’s gonna be a lot more basic. This is so that you can feel comfortable following along step by step, even if you’re relatively new to After Effects. This is also so we can focus in on some of the more core elements of animation, and the best place to start is going back to our storyboards.

We have here a circle in the center of frame, check. Bounces up and starts to morph into a triangle. Okay, so let’s start with a simple little bounce, and one of the things that we’re gonna need to create that are called keyframes. A keyframe is just basically a marker that tells your program to have a specific value for a particular parameter at a particular moment in time. So for us, we can create a keyframe for the position of this circle by toggling this drop-down here, or by hitting the p key on our keyboard. Over here is this little stopwatch symbol, and that’s how you start creating your keyframes. Before we click on it, to create a keyframe, we have to know where our play-head is in our timeline, because wherever it is, that’s where our keyframe is gonna show up.

So let’s move it to the point where we want our circle to start moving, not at the very first frame, but let a little bit of time pass, just some breathing room. So right here feels about good. So let’s click to add a keyframe. But you should notice that nothing changes, this is because we only have one keyframe. Basically, we’re telling our shape to be here at this point in time, but there’s no other information that’s telling it anything different, so there’s no movement. We need to add another keyframe, either before or after it, in order to change that information. So let’s add one by moving our play head forward a little bit and then all we need to do is change the position of our circle. Doing that will automatically create an additional keyframe. In fact, whenever you make a change to the position of the shape, it’s going to add an additional keyframe, or if your play-head hasn’t moved from where you set the original one, it’s gonna overwrite that keyframe.

We just move it up a little bit here. You can move the position by either clicking and dragging on the object itself or by using the position parameters here: The first set of numbers here is the horizontal positioning value. Changing these numbers will change the position in either the left or the right direction. And the second number here is for the vertical position, so we can click and drag on the second value here to move the position of the circle up. So now that we’ve moved it up, let’s move our play head back to the start and press spacebar to see what we’ve actually created. Really basic movement.

Whenever you have two or more keyframes present, the movement happens in between those keyframes. And when that second keyframe has passed, no more motion happens because there’s no more information telling After Effects to change the position, It remains where that last one ended off. But now we don’t want our circle to stay in the air, we want it to come back down for a second bounce so we can either lower it back down again manually or what we can do is click on the first keyframe and copy it with control/command + C. Then let’s make sure our play-head is in the correct position and then we can paste that same keyframe in this location with control/command + V. The benefit of doing it this way is that you get exactly the same position that you started at, pixel perfect, which would be really hard to do just by trying to line it up manually.

Now we can play back our animation again and see what we have. A little trick here is that if you drag these ends in or with your play-head in a specific position hitting the B or the N keys, you can set the in and the out points to loop your playback in just this region. So clicking spacebar allows to see only what’s happening in this region here. This is what we have. It’s a start, but you’ll notice that it’s really jagged and rough and starts and stops the entire movement in a linear and robotic way. We want to make it feel more organic, and we can ease it out and make it feel more fluid through what’s called, well, easing.

This is a way to tell After Effects, to take the change between one keyframe value to another and make sure that it changes in a non-linear way. Let me show you what that means. Let’s take the middle section here. If we’re going to throw a ball up in the air, it wouldn’t immediately shift directions at the top. It would slow down until it reached its peak and then slowly start to accelerate downward again. And we can actually do that with one simple function, right-click on the middle keyframe, and select keyframe assistant easy ease. Or you could also just click F9 on your keyboard. You’ll notice that when you do this, it changes the speed and motion. I’ll show you on a side-by-side comparison so you can really see the difference clearer. Adding that easy ease caused the transition from getting to that middle keyframe and moving back down, to happen in a much more gradual way. Easy ease Keyframe assistants are a really simple way to add a more organic, natural feel to your keyframe changes because it eases things both before and after your keyframe.

But there are two other specific types of easing that I think would be really helpful for you. They’re the easy ease in, and easy ease out keyframes. Ease out just basically gives the starting keyframe a smoother initiation. While easy ease in can help to end keyframes to settle into a natural conclusion. These tools are incredibly useful and can immediately help to make your animation feel less linear and robotic and more smooth, organic, and natural. But now here’s the thing, we’ve only been adding keyframing to the position parameter of our circle, but you can add keyframes to almost anything: size, opacity, which is transparency, rotation, effects, and even things like color changes. Almost anything that you can edit and give a value to, you can add a keyframe to, to help change those parameters over time.

So let’s add some keyframes to another part of our shape layer that can help to give it some more energy and life. Let’s go back to the very beginning here, and we can see that we left a little bit of a dead space before the animation starts. This is intentional because we wanted to add a little bit of a subtle build before the ball actually pops up. Basically, we wanted to make the ball compress like a spring and then expand again before it pops up into the air. In traditional animation, this actually has a term ‘stretch and squash,’ and because I’m terrible at drawing with the pencil, I’m really grateful that this is actually really easy to do inside of After Effects. And we’re gonna be doing this by using keyframing again, but not on the position parameters, but on the scale parameter.

We can toggle down the scale of our circle here by clicking this dropdown, but we can also just highlight the layer itself and click the S key. And now that’s the only thing visible, making it a little bit easier to work with. Now, if we change the scale of our object, we can change it in a uniform way. So clicking and dragging on the scale will either make our circle larger or smaller. But if we uncheck this link here, we can see that we can independently change the width and the height of the scaling. You can probably see where I’m going with this. So keeping these horizontal and vertical parameters unlinked, let’s add a keyframe at the beginning before anything happens. Now let’s move forward a couple of frames and add another keyframe. We should now have two keyframes here that are exactly the same and don’t make any difference. But now let’s go between them and add an additional keyframe, but only change the vertical scaling and decrease it so that we squash the circle down here and make it look like it’s compressed. Awesome.

So now we’ve got a subtle animation of some compression in our circle right now where circle doesn’t look like it’s realistically staying in one place, It looks like it’s sort of hovering in the air. I’m just gonna add a quick little line here with a rectangle tool just to show you what I mean. Right now, it doesn’t look like our circle is compressing onto the ground, It looks like it’s compressing in mid-air. This is because we don’t have our anchor point in the correct position. A good way to think about it is that that’s what After Effects considers to be the true center of your object. And changing where the center of your object is, changes the way other parameters influence it. Ours is directly in the middle, but if we move it to the bottom of our shape, it’ll start to look like gravity is pulling down, as if it’s like a spring squashing down, getting ready to pop back up. So we can use the anchor tool here by clicking on it, and then click and drag on the anchor point here down to the correct location, holding control/command as we do that, so that it snaps to the edge of our shape.

Now our motion looks like this, way better, and you can start to feel how this really captures what the object would look like in real life. Awesome. So now let’s add a few more keyframes to create an additional bounce, and we can copy and paste these position keyframes again to get exactly the same bounce as before, but just increase that middle keyframe so that the ball goes higher. And to add a little bit more realism, we can decrease the horizontal scaling, during the vertical ascension of the circle to give some additional life and character to our ball, so that it feels like it’s accelerating upwards and then bringing those scales back to normal at the top of the arc.

Now, if we playback, you can see that we’re actually getting somewhere with our animations, by all means, it’s not perfect, but you can absolutely see the progression and you can see how much of a difference adding those easy ease ins and outs makes to giving an organic feel to your motion. But you might want to have even more control over how those keyframes interact, more than just a binary yes or no to whether or not there’s easing. And this is where the graph editor comes into play. Highlight the keyframes or the parameters that you’re interested in, and then you can click on this button to change the layout of your timeline, to go from portraying simple keyframes to showing you a graph editor, for the actual motion of your object. There’s a lot of different ways that you can use this feature, but I feel like the best way to start with and the most intuitive way to start with is through what’s called the Speed Graph editor.

A lot of animators will like either the value graph or the speed graph, and please play around with them and find what one is most intuitive to you personally, but if you’re just new to After Effects and you don’t know where to start, in my personal opinion, I feel like it’s easier to understand the changes to speed rather than the changes to position. But that’s just my personal preference. So you can select the kind of graph you want to use by going down here to this icon and selecting it. And for me, I’m going to choose edit speed graph.

Here now our keyframes are displayed as a representation of how fast the object is moving. Left to right is still the progression of time, but lower means slower, if not stopped completely, and higher means faster. Now let’s say that you want our circle here to come to a stop even more gradually than it does just by using the easing features. To do that, you can pull this tap out here, which will control how quickly or how slowly it comes to a stop, with an incredibly high degree of specificity. I’ve put it on loop here with the animation on top and the speed graph value on the bottom so that you can get an even more clear sense as to how the speed graph represents the finished motion in the shot.

Now we’ve covered a lot, not just in this video, but in all the videos we’ve created on this topic of motion graphics. But I wanted to tie everything together with one last thing and giving you a way to implement all of this information into a new feature, a transition. So we’re going to be working now with rotation. Now, if you were to rotate the circle we have here, you wouldn’t really see much, would you? You can’t really tell if it’s rotating around, so we’re actually just gonna be rotating the triangle that comes next in the sequence, as a way to morph and transition from one shape to the next.

So let’s try to bring up the rotation parameter of the triangle by selecting it and then hitting the R key. And here we get our rotation parameters. Now it’s starting in a nice position, and this is actually also the position we wanted to end in as well. So let’s make our first keyframe and then move forward a bit, and then click and drag out the rotation to rotate it more. But we should notice that as we pass one full rotation, we see the number here with an X present. This number denotes the number of full rotations, so you can keep track of the motion, if for example, you wanted it to start and end in the same rotation amount, but make a few rotations in between that. So what I can do is actually just leave this number at zero and then key and the number of rotations that I wanted to have. So what we have here is that our triangle starts and stops in the same rotational alignment, but it rotates between these keyframes. Awesome.

So how does this help us to implement a transition? Well, let’s take what we learned with keyframing and easing and start to make this animation feel a little bit more smooth and organic. Let’s add an ease-out at the start and an ease-in at the end. Then go back to our graph view here and pull out these handles to make it a little bit more extreme. I like that a lot more. And from here, all that’s left to do is to match up the motion between our triangle and the circle that we’ve already created, and what’s nice, is that we can actually just copy and paste those keyframes to save a lot of time. This also has the added benefit of making the motion line-up exactly without having to manually move things around and try and line them up perfectly. A helpful tip is that if you’ve hit the U key when a layer is highlighted, it’ll pop up all of the elements that have keyframes associated with it. So then we can just take these last few here and highlight them by clicking and dragging our mouse over top of them so that they turn blue and copy them with control/command + C. Then on that first blue keyframe, put the play-head over top of it, highlight our triangle layer and then paste them with control/command + V. And then if you click U to pop them up, you should see that they’re matching identically. And if you were to extend this line back, the triangle would be matching the motion of the circle.

And now from here, we can start to animate the triangle back to the position that we want it to end at. Add some easing and use our graph editor to make sure that it starts slow at the top of the arc and then hits the ground going faster. And now we can play it back and see what we’ve got. It looks okay. We can kind of see a transition forming, but our timing is slightly off. A great tip for making your transitions look better is to hide them where the motion is the most extreme, and from what we learned before, we know that’s in between keyframes. So let’s find where animation is traveling at its fastest right about here, and then move our triangle layer back so that it starts at this point, and then move our circle air forward so that it ends at the same point, and we can pull our rotation back a little bit to start at this point as well. This won’t ruin the easing, it’ll just make everything happen a little bit slower. Now, if we playback, you can see how much more that fast motion hides the cut and it already looks way better.

From here we could even add some effects to help morph and smooth the change between the circle and the triangle but that’s going a little bit beyond the scope of this particular video. The biggest thing to take away is that you have everything that you need now to continue on animating this project up until the end of the square. You’ve learned what a keyframe is, you’ve learned how to add them and use them, you’ve learned how to manipulate them both with easing and with a graph editor, and you put it all together to create your own fully animated shape sequence.

Congratulations. This is just the beginning of your animation journey, but let me tell you that it gets even more fun the further you go along. I’m so glad that you could join me on this brief introduction to animation in After Effects, but guys, that’s it for me. Thanks so much for taking the time and I can’t wait to see you in another video.

Today, we’re going to show you how to make these slick and sexy Apple-style titles.
Wasn’t that sexy? Yes, it was. Now let’s jump in.

So I have my project open, we stripped away all the titles, we’ve used footage from Artgrid and we used music from Artlist. I want to show you the clean edit and I want you to notice all the movements and cuts. So let’s take a look.

So let’s start with the first title and the first technique. So this is a simple mask in and out. We’re going to start with our title. You want to do it from the center. So center text. Let’s create the text box. Some shots. Let’s scale it up right here. So always set your anchor point to the middle, and that will definitely save you a lot of trouble down the road. If you want to know if you’re centered, you have this title, action safe and you have this cross right here, so you can bring it right here. We have movement from left to right with this astronaut. So we want to mask in the title from left to right and mask it out from left to right as well. We’ll go with the mask, actually, I’ll create something with the pen tool and I’ll do something like that. More of a cross. We definitely want this mask more feathered. So let’s go like this. Double-click it and put it like that. Yeah, that looks good.

It also gives us a nice spacey look. It goes well with the footage that we have here in the background. So now we just need to create the movement with the mask. So to open all the mask attributes, all you need to do is double-click M on the keyboard. So we have the mask path and this is what we need to animate. So I’ll click the stopwatch here and I’ll create the first keyframe. I’ll take the mask from here. Here is where my animation needs to be finished. So let’s double-click the mask and we’ll do a full-out mask. Now, this is how it looks.

Select my keyframes by clicking the F9 that will make my keyframes Easy Ease which means the motion of the animation would be smoother, we want it a bit slower, so all we need to do is create a bigger gap between these two keyframes. So pushing this keyframe further than the first one will create a longer animation. I think we’re going to feather it a bit more.

Great, so this feels a lot better. Basically, all I need to do now that I’ve created the movement of the mask that I wanted to do is just duplicate this specific title and just type in something else. So by clicking Control D, that will duplicate my title.

So the key for creating these type of titles is simplicity. First of all, you need a clean, good-looking font. There are great free options on Google Fonts. We linked it in the description below, so you can go in there and look for the fonts that you like. Specifically here at Artlist, we are using the Railway font and this is what we’ve used in the video. Now, the second thing is matching the movement of the title to the footage and to the rhythm of the music. If you have a specific shot that goes from left to right, maybe use a small animation to your text that goes from left to right. And you can see how it all comes together in the end. And the last thing is to use different keyframes and working with null object to create small and simple movements.

So here we have the footage cutting to the beat. So let’s see that. Excellent. So basically, we just want to put one word for each frame. And that’s going to work very well with the edit, and you can see also that we have pretty abstracted footage except for this powerful shot that we want to leave clean.

OK, now that I’ve built the title sequence, I want to start animating it. So let’s see it without the animation. Great. So here’s a fun fact regarding how fast can you make your titles. So the human eye can read a word in 0.3 seconds, so that’s all you need to actually put on screen your specific words. I’m going to definitely scale everything, so all I need to do is select all my titles, click S on the keyboard, that will bring up the scale parameter, and I can just scale everything up. Yeah, that looks good.

So now I want to create small-scale up movements for each title. And basically, I need to create it for only one title and just duplicate that movement to each of those titles. So let’s bring up the scale parameter. So I’ll take our first keyframe and I’m going to push it a bit forward because this is our final size that we want the title. And we’re going to just scale this title down. You don’t want to go all the way to zero. You just need small movements to give that impact. So let’s go back to 100. So let’s see the movement. OK, that’s pretty cool. But it stops a bit abruptly and we want to ease this movement more. So I’ll go and select the keyframes and I’m going to click F9 and I’m going to do the Easy Ease for these specific keyframes. Now let’s see the movement, that looks better. I know it’s a bit hard to see, but we can make it even smoother. Select my scale parameter right here, and I’m going to go into my graph editor. So I have the movement here and I want to play with the speed of the movement. I can choose the graph type. And now we have the value graph, but I want to play with the speed graph. This graph is a representation of the speed of the movement. So here the movement is in top speed, so each one of these dots is actually the keyframe. And when I start toggling this point, I can see the graph moving.

Now think about this as a slide. Now, if you are going to go down this slide, you’re going to go fast. And here you’re going to start going slower because the curve is more round. So basically, I want to take this, all the way, because I want the title to be fast going in and to slow down by the end of the animation. We can make this more noticeable by just clicking this keyframe and toggling this point backwards. So now we are starting super fast and we’re slowing down by the end of the animation. If I’m going to toggle this and I’m going to push it forward, now, the animation is longer.

So let’s go frame by frame so you can see how the movement is very abrupt from here to here, but here we have the graph slowing down. So here you’re going to see the rest of the movement slowing down. So playing with the speed graph can make a lot of difference in your animations. Great. So now that we’ve created the animation and we’ve played with the speed graph for this specific title, we can copy this movement to each of our titles. So let’s click on scale, copy the parameter, go to this title. Let’s do the same thing to all of our titles. Everything looks in place. Let’s play it. Excellent.

Now here, I think we can add another movement of it scaling down just to make this more interesting. So let’s do another keyframe here and scale it down. So you can see straight away, this made this more interesting. Can add more interest by creating another null object. But here I have two different groups of titles. So you want to create one controller to this group and another one for this one. So let’s do another null object. And now let’s parent these titles to our first null object and create a scale-up movement just to give this more interest. And we’re going to do the same thing to this. And now let’s see our first six seconds of titles.

So here we have one shot, which is a grid of clips from Artgrid moving up. We have our titles and they’re on the beat. So naturally, we’re going to do an animation that is from bottom to up. So let’s open up the position by clicking P on the keyboard. And we also want the opacity, so we’re going to click T on the keyboard together with shift, and that will give me only these two attributes. So this is where I want my title to actually finish the animation. So I’m going to create a keyframe here and I’m going to go backwards and I’m going to create another keyframe, but I’m going to play with the y-axis. So basically, I’ve created an animation from up, from downwards to upwards.

But I also want this title to stop and then I want it to fade away going upwards. So I’m going to create another keyframe here, and I’m going to play with the y-axis again, but this time I’m going to take the title upwards. Let’s push this keyframe here, and we want to ease everything, so F9 and the keyboard. And like I’ve said before, we need to open the speed graph just to give this a smoother motion. So we want this to ease more in with the animation, we’ll start fast because we’re going to fade it later. Expand the gap between those keyframes, it will take more time for the title to finish the animation. Let’s try to fade this title in. So this is my first keyframe, we’re going to push it forward. And this we’re going to go with zero. Push this animation a bit forward and create keyframes for the opacity. And fade it out. Let’s expand the gap here, and let’s go back into the graph and make this a bit more smoother, so we want this movement to start slower.

So try to imagine you’re climbing a hill, and it’s going to take more time if I’m going to make the curve steeper. And here I’m actually going to leave it as it is. I don’t want this animation to finish and this animation to start, I want it to be parallel to each other. So I’m going to take these two attributes and I’m going to copy them, and I’m going to paste them to this title. If I’m going to push this title and I’m going to give this animation more time, now we’ve created a sort of a push effect from one title to the other. So let’s see it in real-time.

So we can do this with the other titles. So like we did a scale in with the null object, we can just do a small movement on the y-axis. Let’s select these, parent to the null, and give this some movement with the position. So basically, we want a bit of movement. And we’re going to spread the animation across the titles, and now we’re going to have a continuous movement.

And what we can do here is just a cut to this footage title getting bigger. Let’s bring in the scale, and we’re just going to go a few frames forward. And just give this a pop like that. Let’s ease it, and let’s see how it feels. Excellent. One thing which can make a lot of difference in the feel of your titles is motion blur. You can just select all the titles that you’ve done up until now. And click here that will activate the motion blur for all the titles. You also need this to be selected and let’s see the last title sequence we did.

You can see how it smears the title, according to the movement. If you want to make the motion blur more blurry or less blurry, you can do that by playing with the shutter angle, which you can find on the composition, composition settings, advanced. The higher the shutter angle will be, the more blur you’ll have.

Let’s take this down because I actually like to work with less of a motion blur, let’s say, 90. Yeah, that works better. This animation, I just copied and paste the animation from here, and we have here some beautiful footage that integrates well with with this title. Now here we have a push-in with a small pan to the right, and this guy is rigging up the camera and he’s pushing it from left to right. I’ve divided this title into two, but in the end of the animation, it’s going to be in one title. This title right here will reference how the title should end up looking in terms of position in the frame.

So let’s start animating. We want to scale it. This is the end movement, so it should be scaled in at first. So let’s say like this, let’s Easy Ease the keyframes. Go into the speed graph, and here I don’t want it that fast. But I do want it to go in pretty nicely. So let’s check it. Maybe the movement is a bit too much. So let’s just reduce the scale. Yeah. What we want to do is take the word top, push it left, and that will reveal the word cinematographers. So we need to expand the title right here and let’s put up the position attribution so the animation should start from around here.

So this is our first position and now is actually the time to put my reference title because I know where I want the movement to end according to the reference title. So we’re going to put it up. Now we’re going to take the position of the word top to my reference title. So we do want this animation to end here because this is where we’re going to reveal the word cinematographer. Here we have our scale down and I don’t want the movement to stop, so I’ll take the keyframe and I’m going to parallel it to the scale movement. And now we’re going to ease it in, play with this, also with the speed graph, and here, I don’t want it to start fast. I actually want it to start slow because it’s parallel to the scale movement. And I also don’t want it to abruptly stop at the end of the animation, so doing that, that’s what’s going to happen. But if I’m going to take this point further into the middle, now we have a situation where we’re starting slow, increasing the speed, and slowing down again.

OK, so you feel how we have the push in and the scale down together that works well and now this is going to move left, but this guy here in the footage is going to push the camera right and that’s what’s going to happen with the word cinematographer. So basically, what we’re going to do is let’s reveal the word cinematographer, and let’s reveal again our reference title for the position. And now we’re going to put the position attribute for the cinematographer. Let’s do a keyframe, and let’s start with our end position for the title just to see it more clearly.

OK, that looks great. Now, basically, we can get rid of the reference title. We don’t need it anymore. We have our position and we want this animation for the cinematographer to end not that long after our top, our word top is finishing its animation. So let’s take this title and put it from left to right. Let’s get rid of the word top right now just to see the animation for the cinematographer, so it’s going from left to right. Let’s ease the movement. So we want an effect that the word top reveals the word cinematographers. So we can do that by just creating a white-shaped layer just like that. Over the cinematographers. And let’s bring it on top of our word cinematographer and now I need to toggle switch.

So by choosing the words cinematographers and giving it this attribute, basically you’re saying that wherever there’s white with the shape layer, this is where we’re going to see the title. So now we have the shape layer right here so we can see the whole title. But, the second that the title is starting to go left, it’s actually going outside the white box, the white shape that we’ve created, and now it’s being cut because there’s no white solid right here. So we need to move this shape layer, according to the word top. Now let’s toggle the clock watch for the positions for the shape layer. We’re going to follow the word top like that. Now we just need to go and do some small adjustments. And now we’ve created an effect that the word top reveals the word cinematographers just so you won’t feel that straight, unpleasant line of the borders for the shape layer.

So just adding some motion blur to the shape layer itself will give you a nice, smooth, borderline. Excellent. So basically, you can see the shadows in the footage going from left to right. So this is why we are doing this simple animation of word after words, sort of like word popping from left to right, around the world, and that is super simple to do. Take the sentence, write it down, and then duplicate it three times because you have three different words here, and mask out each of the words from each of the duplicate layers. I do want to give them more interest, so I’ve created two different null objects. This null object will make the sentence going from left to right. In the beginning of the animation, I’m going to parent the whole sentence to this null object. And now I’m going to have a small movement to the right. And what I’ve created is another null object, and I’ve parented the small movement null object, which is this one, to that null object. And that null object is basically doing a fast motion to the left, with this guy punching the air from right to left. So that’s what’s going on right here.

So now we have those words popping in one, two, three. We have a subtle movement from left to right, and then we have a fast movement from right to left. So the only thing that isn’t that smooth here is how the titles are just disappearing out of the frame. We’re going to take those three different layers, which is the sentence, and we’re going to pre-comp them. And of course, we need the pre-comp to the null again. So there is a cool effect called linear wipe, and you can apply it to the composition. And now basically what it does, it just wipes out the sentence, the layer, the pre-comp. So we just need to keyframe it, that it would be together with this movement and maybe we’ll Easy Ease it.

Another great animation technique you can do to give more dynamics to your title sequences is playing with the tracking. You can open here the text and you have this play button near to the animate. So clicking on that and clicking on tracking will open this specific animator, which you can play with. And what it does is it spans the gaps between each letter in your title and of course, you can animate this. So what we can do here is start a bit with a closed gap and animate the spreading of the gaps and then closing back up. So closing like that.

So now we’ve created this animation where we have the spreading of the title and then it closes up again. And of course, we want to ease everything in. And let’s go to the graph, the speed graph, and we need to be on the attribute to play with it. And I specifically want it to start really fast and then slow down. And then start closing slowly and speeding up to full speed. The end of the close. So let’s see how it looks. Excellent. Of course, adding motion blur will make it even cooler. And this is a bit weird because the letter D here doesn’t move, but what we can add is a bit of a scale down to the title. With this folding back animation. So let’s do that. This works well, maybe that’s a bit too much, I would… do less of a scale down. And just to make everything a bit more smoother, maybe we’ll do a small, small fade out. So let’s add the opacity in and go all the way to 50. This should work well. Let’s see that.

So what we can do to add more life into this animation is use this null object as a controller for another scale. We’re going to do just a scale up from 100 all the way to 120. Let’s see how it looks. Of course, we need to parent at the beginning of the animation to the null and see how it looks. Yep, that looks great. Another cool technique to use your title sequences as transitions is actually creating movement on a cut point of your footage. So here we have another titled transition we did right after the tracking animation. So we have the word flying in, moving to the side, pop, pop and then we have here a cut point and this title is just going from right to left. And basically, all we need to do here is take all the movement that we did and pre-comp this specific sequence, and basically just create another position. And make this whole title sequence go pretty subtle, not a big movement. Let’s play with the graph. So here we just have those two titles going on top of each other, which is OK, all we need to do is the linear wipe, basically, it needs to wipe out the entire sentence. Let’s feather it a little bit just to give that more of a nice feeling.

So let’s see this transition in real-time. So what you’ve done here is motivated the footage transition with your title sequence. So this is our last title sequence. We’re going to learn two things here. The first thing will be a title flying into the screen, and the second thing will be a counter with numbers. So this is our titles up to 8K, so we want the numbers to go up all the way to 8K and fly into the screen and pass the camera. So first of all, let’s do the counter. So we have the title right here and I have a reference title, and I’m going to tell you exactly why because we need to separate the letter K from the numbers going up. So I have a reference title and then I’m going to have the letter K separately, and we’re going to parent the two together so they can move in the same time in the same way. So to make the numbers go up, basically, you need to go into the effect panel slider control. Drag it onto your title and now open this up and you can open the text box. And what you’re going to do is click alt, and while you’re clicking alt, you’re going to click on the source text, stopwatch, and that will create an expression. We’re going to open the effects up and we’re going to open the slider control and then we’re going to parent the expression from our source text to the slider control.

OK, so now we have the expression. And basically, if I’ll start moving up and I’ll try to animate this. So basically, this is what happens. We don’t need or want those dots. So to fix this problem, all you need to do is go into the expression and type in Math.round, open parentheses, close parentheses. Now we’re going to put this expression down in the description below. So you won’t have any troubles, and now we can animate our numbers going up by using the slider control. So we want this to start at 1 and go all the way up to 8. And we want this animation to go across all of this.

Let’s Easy Ease the animation, and to make this soothing to the eye. You can go into the speed graph. We’ll play a little bit with the speed. OK, so we did the counter-up. Now we need to make this title fly into the camera and actually also help us with the transition right here from this footage to this footage. So because we’ve parent the counter up to the letter K, all we need to do is actually play with the letter K. Now to create this effect you’ll need to actually make those two layers 3D. Just like that. Now to do that, all you need to do is play with the z-axis on the position. And this is how it looks. So I’m going to do a keyframe here and a keyframe here, and I’m going to move the position and boom flew straight to the camera. Let’s ease this in. Let’s play with the graph. So we want this to slowly fly into the camera and then just pick up the pace. OK. It’s a bit too fast. Maybe we can just do this, across the whole counter up, so it starts slowly, like in the graph, and flies into the camera. Let’s see how it looks with the motion blur. 12345, whooo. So that’s it. That was the last title sequence. Basically, all you need to do is use a clean and good-looking font.

Keep it simple, short, and sweet animations based on the movement of your footage and on the rhythm of the music. So keep it simple, keep it sweet, and you’ll see how you’ll get beautiful-looking Apple type motion graphics. So after all of that, let’s see if the final product.

So that’s it for this video until the next time, stay creative.

Today we’re going to be taking a look at five unique text effects that you can keep in your back pocket to spice up your next video project. So all five of these text effects are all unique from each other, meaning that you can use different ones to achieve a different style or feeling in your video. But what binds them all together is the idea that you can achieve them all inside of Premiere Pro with no third-party plugins. And even though some of them will take a little bit more time than others, you can achieve all of them with relatively little time, effort, or energy.

But let’s jump right into it with number one, Track Matte Titles. So this style has a few different applications. But the basic idea is that your text will look identical to writing it out normally, except that the actual writing is using negative, empty space. You’ve probably seen this application where you have a black screen and negative space where the video fills in the letters. It looks so cool, and it’s super simple. Here’s the basic idea. You’ll want a plain color that the text will be cut out of. So let’s just create a solid color map. Then we can create a text layer with control or command T and place it a layer above the solid, type what we want it to say, and position it exactly where we want it to be. Imagining that when we’re done, this plain text will be the stencil cutout. Now go here to your effects and choose the track matte key and drag and drop it onto the solid matte layer. Here you’re going to need to know a little bit about your timeline specifically.

Right now, I have my solid layer on layer two and my text layer is on layer three. So when we highlight our solid matte layer and go up to effect controls, we can see here that we’ll be drawing from a specific layer. And that layer for me is layer three, where the text is actually located. Once you choose this, you’ll see that a stencil is created. But one slight problem it’s using the white solid to basically just create a cutout, but it’s opposite of what we want. That’s no problem. Just one last step. Go here to reverse and hit the checkbox and boom, this is what we’re going for now. It’s a transparent cut-off that we can see through. And once we place some footage underneath everything, you can see that the footage is showing through. But because you had to reverse it, you might also realize that there’s another way that you can get this effect. What if instead of taking a solid white, we take a video that we want the text to actually display instead of looking through the text to see the footage underneath?

Let me show you what I mean. Let’s take this video here of an ink cloud and place it on our timeline, but not on the bottom layer at least one layer up, then place your text over top with no color matte at all. Then let’s add the track matte effect again, and you can see we get a similar effect to what we had before, but now with a black background. So what’s the difference? Well, this basically gives us a little bit more control now to add another solid matte underneath everything where you can choose the color. But instead of choosing it to be pure white, let’s take a sample of the off-white color in this video. Now we get this. Our text is showing the whole time, but it’s only revealed when the footage actually changes, causing it to be revealed in a fun and interesting way.

Number two, the Write-On effect. This is actually a textile we used for our opening logo for years on this channel. It’s a basic reveal that occurs in a way that makes it look like your text is literally being handwritten in that moment. This works for almost any type of text, but it works especially well for cursive font. The process is simple just create your text that you want to work with to start. Or another option is that you can use this for your logo if your logo is mostly text. Whether it’s a text box or still image with a transparent background, the process is going to be the same. First, before you add the effect, create a transparent video layer. Do this by right-clicking in your project panel and select new item transparent video and place it above your text layer. Now, go to your effects and search for the Write-On effect. And drag and drop it onto the transparent video layer that you’re working with. Cool. Now you’re ready to start tracing. In effect controls, you’ll see that you have a bunch of different parameters. But the big one to consider first is the brush size. This should have a diameter that’s able to show the full width of the area of the text that it’s revealing. So, kind of like so.

Next, you’re going to want to change the stroke length and the brush spacing. Make the stroke length a large amount, as this is the number of seconds that the stroke will last for before disappearing in the same trail that I started. And for our purposes, we don’t want it to trail off at the end. We just want it to continue existing exactly the way that we traced it. So make it a big number like 25 seconds. For the brush spacing, you’re going to want to make this the lowest possible number to get a solid line, which the lowest number you can key in is 0.001. This will ensure that you don’t just get small repeating sections of circle, but instead a continually painted line based on the brush size. OK, now let’s make this effect actually display, so it’s literally tracing the outline of your text.

You do this by starting with it off of your text and then moving the key frame of the brush stroke here over time. You don’t need to have it do every single frame because when you move forward a few frames and create a new keyframe, it’ll count the difference between the keyframes. So I’m going to go about every three frames. You can also click and drag the brush around itself to make it easier. Move forward a few frames and then drag the brush stroke to the new location. Your goal is to create an outline in the same way that you would actually write the text normally. Move forward a few more frames, move it again and rinse and repeat the process. And keep in mind that when you make new portions of the stroke, you can actually adjust the path with some of these little handles here without interrupting your keyframing. Cool.

So now you should have something that looks like this. It’s a really messy drawing of your text. But now let’s make the magic happen by going up to our effects panel and searching for the Track Matte Key. Yup. We’re using the same effect as before but in a new way. Drag and drop it onto your text layer and set it to look at the layer that’s got the Write-On scribble effect and bada-bing bada-boom. You’ve got a drawn-on version of your text.

Number three, color mattes and blend modes. This one is actually far less about the text itself and more about the situation around it. I’m sure you’ve run into this problem where sometimes text is difficult to read against the background you’ve got, like here in this example. But the problem is when you try to change the text to a different color to compensate, it starts to look unprofessional. So what’s the solution? Change the color of the footage instead.

Create a new color matte and choose something that’s not too extreme and also lines up with the color palette or mood of your video. For me, a deep blue actually works pretty well. Now, place the color matte over top of your footage, but underneath your text. This leaves us with very legible text, but hidden footage. So to fix this, instead of just dropping your opacity of your color matte, Highlight this matte layer and go to effect controls and select a new blending mode underneath the opacity section. What this does is shows through the footage underneath, but in a unique way for every different part of the frame, depending on the color and luminance present. Play around to see what you like. But for me personally, I found I really like the effect that comes from the multiply and screen options.

Now that you’ve got this part down, you can animate it in a unique way so that you also prepare your audience to read the text. In effects, go down to Linear Wipe and place it down onto your matte layer. Start with your wipe completion at 100% and then keyframe it to go down to zero, effectively revealing the color. Finally, add some beziers to the keyframes to make everything feel a little less robotic. Nice. It’s looking great, but you can go one step further by copying the same linear wipe effect with its motion keyframes and paste that onto the text layer itself. This will prevent the text from showing up before the color backdrop is actually present, and it actually reveals it along with the wipe. Pretty cool, right?

Number four, typewriter effect. Now, this one doesn’t have to be used to mimic a typewriter. That’s just one really obvious example. There’s a lot of applications, but the basic principle comes down to having your text set up to look the way that you want, then revealing it in chunks. For the typewriter effect, you could reveal each letter one by one, or you could simply reveal each individual word or phrase to drive home your point. So to set this up, let’s simply write out our word or phrase that we want. And because we want to use this as a typewriter-style effect, let’s also change the font to something a little bit more old-school.

OK, so now let’s go to our effects panel and we’re going to add a Linear Wipe Effect. In effect controls, take this linear wipe and wipe it in the direction that you want to be revealing from so that it’s all invisible. And because most countries read from left to right, you’re going to want to crop from the right-hand side. So set WIP angle to negative 90. Cool. So our text is gone. But now you have two options. You can either use keyframes to reveal the crop, or you can use a different method that I personally like a little bit better.

Take the text layer and cut it up into literally as many pieces as there are chunks that you want to reveal. So for us, that’s ten letters in the word typewriter, plus one for the portion that’s completely cropped out. Now, for each of these different sections, you can simply reveal the crop so that it adds a new full letter. Then go to the next one and do the same thing. Rinse and repeat. I like this method better because if you need to line up these portions with pieces of audio or sound effects, it’s a lot easier to compare them against the audio waveform when you’re changing them in the timeline here, as opposed to the keyframes in effect controls. To make your life super easy, use the Rolling Edit Tool, shortcut key N to adjust these cuts without disrupting any of the other work that you’ve done. Cool. Now, this is what we have.

And number five, place your text in your video. This one is really fun, but if you’re going to use Premiere Pro instead of After Effects, you’re going to need the footage that you’re working with to be locked off on a tripod. Basically, this is what it comes down to. Mask your text so that it appears as if it’s being cut off by something within the frame of the footage. This works best if only a portion of the text is cut off and the whole word or phrase is still able to be read and understood as a whole. And the process is super simple.

All you have to do is place down your text into your scene and make sure that it’s a little bit over top of the section that you would like it to be cut off by. So for us, that would be this area about here. Then all you have to do is highlight your text layer and select the mask pen so that you can create the shape of the area cutting off your text. If it helps, you can hide the text from showing by going here to this part of your effect controls panel and hitting the I symbol. Now simply continue to outline the section of the foreground that you want to block off your text until you end up with a full mask. But chances are you’re going to be telling it to include this area, not exclude it. So all you have to do is hit this box to reverse the effect and boom your text looks like it’s in the 3D world of your footage. If it’s not looking just the way you want it. Play around with the amount of feather, as well as the edge details to make it come out just right.

And guys, that’s just been five text effects that you can use to spice up your next video. I hope you guys found this video helpful. That’s it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I can’t wait to see you in the next video.

Today we’re going to be learning how to use a kinetic typography template to create a lyric video. Now, let me just get this out of the way right off the bat. There’s no one right way to create a lyric video like this. You’ve probably seen a bunch of different ways that people have gone about creating videos like this and displaying their lyrics, and some of them are incredibly simple. The Chainsmokers, for example, have their song closer, which has 2.5 billion views, and all they’re doing is waving a camera in front of a piece of paper, changing the blending mode so that the text is the only thing that you see and then just going through the song line by line. At the end of the day, it’s way more important to do what you think looks and feels best for your particular song, rather than just what somebody else says looks the best.

For me, I’m going to be using a song that’s really upbeat and cheerful, so I’m going to be choosing a template that matches that look and feel. And this one is going to serve my purposes perfectly. And it’s also a motion graphics template. So that’s going to make it really easy, just a drag and drop in and start using immediately. If you wanted to check out everything that we have, we have countless different kinetic typography templates that you can use for your own projects. But with that out of the way, let’s dive into Premiere Pro and take a look at how to create our lyric video.

OK, so the first thing we want to do is get these motion graphics templates into Premiere. So let’s go to our central graphics panel and then go down to the bottom right to this icon and click to install. Navigate to where you’ve saved them on your computer and click to install your selected template. Our template has 16 different variations. So once I’ve installed all of the templates, they should show up in your essential graphics panel within the browse section here. Now that those are installed, we can drag and drop them onto our timeline and we can start to look through them to see which ones work for our song. What can really help if your computer is running slow is to drop the playback resolution down to one-half, one-quarter, or even one-eighth, so that you can see the timing and playback smoothly. So here you can see that right from the start, we’ve got all of the animations and everything already constructed, and it looks great. It’s as if most of the work has been done for us because, well, it has.

But to start actually shaping these what we need, we’ll have to get our song down first. So let’s place it down and choose a nice section for us to use as our example. The chorus should do nicely. So now comes the part where we decide what animation would work for what section. So looking through these, I’m looking for animations that will match the cadence of how the words are spoken in the song in the first line. Here we have two words spoken quickly and then three words spoken slow one by one. So looking through these templates, number two does pretty nicely. It’s got roughly the right amount of words and a sequence that I really like and think that I can use. So let’s drop it in and try to line up the first word with the matching word in the music.

So now let’s go and start to change up these words. All we have to do is highlight the template and go up to the essential graphics panel and move to the edit section. And now from here, we can simply just type in the words as they appear in order in the song. And voila, they appear with our animations in place. From here, we can also make adjustments like repositioning the text in the X or Y axis, changing the size and color, and overall manipulating all of these for each different word in order to construct a framing that we like. I’m going to move this from being off-kilter to being nice and evenly spaced, making more of a box rather than a slew of words.

But now that it’s looking great, there’s just two problems we have. We’re one-word short in our animation, and the text doesn’t line up perfectly with the song. So let’s address those one at a time. First, let’s re-time the lyrics so that they actually line up with the song. And for this one, we’re going to use the time remapping tool.

Right-click on the template and select Show Clip Keyframes, and select Time Remapping, Speed. Now we get a new line here, which dictates speed, and I’m going to show you how to use these to re-time your clips. The timing is pretty great, except for this section here, so I’m actually going to speed it up a bit by holding control or command and clicking here to make a new keyframe right before I want it to speed up. Now here at this point when we click and drag this line to raise or lower the speed, it’ll be changed independently from this section here, which will stay the same. So if we drag this section here to be faster, we can see that now it starts normal and then instantly gets faster as soon as it hits this point. But we can make this a little bit more gradual and fluid by dragging this key frame out so that it makes a gradual increase.

So this is what we have so far. It’s good, but now we want it to slow back down once this section here is over. So just make another keyframe by holding control or command and clicking at the section that you want to start going back to normal speed and bring this section back down to 100% and then give it a bit of a gradual fall off as well. And now this is what we have. Cool. It’s lining up great.

But there’s one last thing that we need to address here, which is that we’re missing one word here at the very end. Thankfully, that’s pretty simple to add with this style here as I know the font and can just create a piece of text to mimic that style. If you’re ever unsure of what font your template is using, you can actually just right-click the template in your essential graphics panel and go to info, and you’ll be able to see the font right here. So now, knowing that I’m going to create a new text layer with control or command T, and I’m going to set it up to look exactly like the text in my template here. Place it down in the exact area that you want it to end once it’s done its animation. Match the color. And then once the visual look is complete, now comes the part where you want to make it actually feel like it’s moving in the style with everything else, so I’m going to slap on a free ease in and out transition from our shifter set. Yes, free. You can download our plug-in transitions to try out for free, and the shifter set won’t have a watermark when you link it up to your free Motion Array account. So feel free to download these and use them however you want, and I’m going to use them to make my text have a classic ease in motion.

I’m just going to drop the ease in and out onto the beginning of my clip here and set it to come from the direction that it looks best. For me, it’s coming from the bottom. Perfect. So now you might think that we actually want to add the same effect going out and we could. But the problem is that the text that’s found within the template has its own unique animation. And so it won’t match up perfectly. So instead, what I’m going to do here is when the text finishes going through its natural animation, I’m going to take my blade tool and make a cut. And then with my play head positioned at that cut, I’m going to right-click this part of the template and select Add Frame Hold. This will make everything from this point on a still frame, and it won’t move unless I do anything to it.

Our template stopped in a bit of a different place because of adding the frame hold, so I’m just going to take the new text and move it over slightly so that it lines up perfectly again. But now comes the magic. We’re going to highlight both of these clips. The template pieces and the new text. And then we’re going to nest them together by right-clicking and selecting Nest. Now I can add the ease in and out transition to the end of this nested sequence. And guess what? They exit at the same time as a single unit. Perfect.

But there’s a consideration here that you should make. You really have two options when making a lyric video like this. You can have an unimportant background that just adds contrast or maybe a little bit of energy. Or you can have an actual scene that you’re placing your text over. If it’s the first one, you can really just place it in the center and go about your business. But if it’s a scene with footage, you may want to consider looking at the best location to place the text within the context of the footage. For example, here’s an empty section here at the top left, where it feels like the text could sit and naturally feel like it’s filling in the empty space. So I’m going to place the text here so that when it’s all said and done, the animation is right here in this section. Since we’ve nested all of our text together, you can just resize and reposition it and everything will move as a single unit. But depending on the motion of the template, you might find that it doesn’t stay exactly centered to where it started. So you might need to keyframe, position, and scale in order for it to start and end exactly where you want it to. Placing these key frames wider apart and setting an ease in for the ending and an ease out for the beginning will help it to more naturally integrate within the animation of your template.

And guys, With all that said and done, the first line of our song is complete. So I’m just going to go through the rest of the three bars of the chorus to show you how you can take advantage of these templates with a few more ideas. Now let’s go through the same process we did for the first verse highlight the template and type in the words that we’d like to see, and I’ll change up my text so that the color and position is what I like. But this time I’m actually going to leave everything a little bit more centered. This is because I’m going to show you a different way to help keep the footage in the background from being distracting and also making it a little bit easier to read the text. You can add a Gaussian blur to the footage below your text and keyframe it to fade in so that it looks like our lens is racking to view the text, which is closer to the viewer. This allows you to start looking at the footage you’d like and then switch the focus to the new text as it animates on screen. Then just line it up and make sure that it’s in sync with the rest of the music. Using time remapping adjustments if you need it, and if you need to slow these elements down, you can actually do that pretty easily. Typically, these motion graphics templates will be based in 60 frames per second.

This means that you can slow down your footage to as much as 40% speed and still have it appear as if it was based at 24 frames per second. Basically, you can go as low as 40% while still having your animation come across as smooth and not choppy. It just gives you more leverage and flexibility in how you can time your text to the music. But even if you add a Gaussian blur, sometimes you might run into a situation like this where you have trouble seeing the text over top of the video, but you don’t want to change the color. Maybe you like it the way it is or you have branding restrictions. So in addition to adding a bit of a blur, you could also change the color of the clip slightly, highlight the footage layer and go up Lumetri Color. And I’m going to go down to the curves section here and drop down the curve slightly. And you can see how much easier it is to read the text now.

And guys with that, we’ve managed to create a simple and effective lyric video in no time at all. And here’s a little trick to make sure that you can save even more time. Once you’re done that chorus or verse and it repeats later in the song, you can just take your work and highlight it and hold alt or option and drag it to that new location where the same section repeats, making all your work even more effective.

And guys, that’s just been a quick tutorial to help you create kinetic typography quickly and easily for a lyric video or really anything else you want to create time-specific text for. This technique also works great for segments of speakers giving a lecture to make sure key points land or that people scrolling through videos on auto-play can actually read your words if they’re too lazy to actually play your work. But guys, we hope you can really get a lot out of these techniques we showed you. Thank you so much for watching, and I can’t wait to see you in the next video.

If you’re like me, then you’ve spent way too long on some video projects, adding things like text and captions to your project. But, Premiere Pro has an incredibly fast way to do all of this work for you. It’s called speech-to-text, and I’m going to show you how to use it right now.

OK, so here’s the deal for a while now, Adobe has had this feature inside of Premiere Pro called speech to text, which basically just takes your existing audio or dialog inside your project and turns it into actual text captions for you. The process is super smooth and simple, but it does take a little bit of getting used to, and there is a bit of a workaround you need to do in order to actually turn those captions into text boxes that you can add things like effects and transitions to. So today I’m going to be showing you a basic rundown of how to actually use this feature, whether you’re creating social media content and you want to have text to help retain users from scrolling by, or you’re exporting out a two-hour long feature film and you don’t want to manually type in every single line of dialogue. Speech-to-text is definitely your friend, and you’re going to be able to get a lot of use out of it. And the cherry on top is that near to the end I’m going to be showing you how to turn those captions that you cannot add effects and transitions onto and turn them into text boxes that you can edit.

So here I have just a 15-second video that I want to post on my social media account, and I wanted to create subtitles for it to help retain users’ attention. But it’s really tedious to listen and add a text box, then line it up, type it out, reposition and fine-tune it, then repeat that. That would just become ridiculous. So there’s a better way. First thing is just to make sure that your Premiere Pro is up to date to at least version 15.4. Once you do, you should see that you have a text option. And to find that, go to window text. From here, under the captions section, you can either import captions from a file. If that work has been done in advance, create a new caption track or transcribe a sequence. We’re going to transcribe this sequence that I have open. Once you click the button, you have a couple of options to set up Premiere Pro to have the easiest time possible. If you’ve already gone through your audio and label dialogue through the Essential Sound Panel, you can select this option up here. But for me, I know that all of my dialogue is under audio track number one, so I’ll select audio on track and track one.

There’s a lot of different languages you can choose from, but I’m transcribing English content, so I’ll tell Premiere to look for that. You can see here that I’ve already set my in and out point for this region here, and by selecting only inside of in and out points, I can make sure that nothing extra gets processed, just the stuff in this area. And if you have multiple different people speaking, you can ask Premiere Pro to distinguish between them. I only have myself talking, so I’ll leave this unchecked. So let’s hit the transcribe button. And here we go.

Now I sped this process up in post, but the whole thing took exactly 24 seconds. Now our video was 15 seconds. So even though that wasn’t blistering fast, that was way faster than doing it all by hand and typing everything out and moving everything around. And here’s the thing if you did have a much longer video, this process is going to take longer, but you can just hit, transcribe and walk away, go make yourself a coffee, do some other work and you can effectively multitask.

But now let’s dive in, and let’s see exactly how good of a job it actually did. This was incredibly accurate. No mistakes made apart from simply wanting After Effects to be capitalized. But you noticed that it actually got things like YouTube right even though there’s a unique capitalization situation and even things like punctuation and question marks are flawlessly included. So if we wanted to make this properly capitalized, we can actually just click on that word and Premiere will actually go to that part of the video where that word was said, amazing. Now, just double-click on it and we can either edit it to respell, capitalize or change it to be however we want. And you’ll notice that we don’t actually have any of our text showing up in the video, and that’s because we haven’t created the captions yet. So once you’re ready, just go up here to the Create Captions button and click it.

Once you click the Create Captions button, you’ll have a couple of options you want to create them from the sequence transcript that you just had to create. You can choose the format that you want your captions to be in. There’s a variety like CEA-608 and 708 and Teletext, but for me, subtitle is perfect. And if you know of any other requirements that you need, this is where you would click that option. You can choose a particular style to already create a specific look for your subtitles, and you can see here that I have a couple of options that I’ve already created ahead of time. But if this is your first time doing it, you’re not going to have any styles that you’ve pre-created so you can stick with None. The maximum length and characters is just how far across the screen it’ll reach. I like maximum length of 42 and the minimum duration in seconds. You can keep the default unless you know you have a specific requirement. And then finally gap between captions. I like keeping it to zero, so there’s always text on screen, and it’s not jarring if there’s a frame or two where there’s no text on screen before the next one shows up. And finally, you can choose whether or not you want to have one line or two lines visible of text. I like a clean single line personally.

And there you go. Your captions are on a separate track above your video here, and they’re actually showing up in real-time. So let’s playback and see exactly how this looks and sounds: “Want to know how I made my dog appear out of a picture? It’s easier than you might think. And thankfully, all of this can be done right inside of After Effects. Check out our YouTube channel for the full-length tutorial on this effect.”

So you can see that the captions were perfectly done. There’s not a single point at which they’re off. But if you did need to make any sort of adjustments, you can actually just treat these like regular timeline layers and edit their timing to your liking. But there is a problem. This is not the style that I want my text to be in. I want it to be a different font. Maybe a little bit of a different color. No stroke on the outside. How do I actually do that?

Well, it’s really simple, you can edit your captions by highlighting one or as many captions as you want and then go up to the essential graphics panel. And from here you can see that we have our C1 subtitle being indicated at the top here, indicating that we are actually editing right now these captions here in the C1 section, and it says that multiple items are selected, indicating that for as many items as we have selected, those are the changes that are going to be applied. So if we just had one item selected and we make a change like increase its size, that’s only going to apply to this one caption here. But for example, if we highlight all of them and we increase the size, all of our captions are going to retain those changes. So if you’re making global changes across your entire project, I’d suggest highlighting all of your captions and then making changes here from inside the essential graphics panel.

So let’s go through and just stylized our text a little bit. I’m going to start by changing the font. You can also choose here which zone you would like your captions to be in: bottom middle, top right, left corner. I like bottom middle, personally. I’m going to change the font style to be something a little less bold, and I’m going to take off the shadow. You can also do things like add a stroke, change the color of that stroke. You can add a background, increase the opacity of that background, increase the size of that background, round the corners. But for me, I’m going to take off background and stroke, and I’m actually going to reintroduce the shadow. Take it down a little bit. Push it a little bit further away from my text to create a bit of a 3D sense. And then I’m actually going to soften this a little bit more so you can see the before and the after.

And if you wanted to change the color of your text, you can do that here too. Maybe something a little bit more like a traditional movie yellow text that might suit you personally, but I like plain white. And with that, you can see that my captions reflect all of those changes across the entirety of the project. And if you like what you created, you can easily set a preset to use in the future by going up to track style and selecting create style. Name it. And then all that work is saved so you can just select this preset in the future.

But now we come into a little bit of a problem here. Let’s say that I wanted to add this simple text rise that I created in a previous tutorial. Nothing crazy, but it does add a little bit of energy to the text. I go over here to my presets, but you actually can’t add effects or transitions to captions. So how do you fix this? There’s actually two different methods. The first one is for short videos like my 15-second video here, and the other one is for longer videos. Say that your video was like a two-hour-long feature film that would be a better method for that. But let’s start with the first short method.

Add a new text layer with control or command T and then stretch out that to be the same length as all of your captions. Now let’s highlight our text layer and go to essential graphics and center our text with paragraph styles and then center align it horizontally. This will just make sure that any time we make changes, it’ll treat our text in the same way that we’ve set up or captions to be. Now let’s take our blade tool and make cuts in the same places as the captions begin and end. Having snapping on here will really help us out. Now comes the main part – copying and pasting our text. Super easy.

Double-click your first caption. This brings it up in the central graphics. Now, double-click on the text up here. It highlights all of your text for you. From there, you can just copy it with control or command C. Now highlight your text layer and double-click this same section. It’ll highlight your text and then you can paste it here with control or command V and your text is here ready to go. And once you get the feel for it, you can start flying through your text. And with that boom, that’s a really fast way to turn your transcribed captions into text. Now you can add effects, animations, transitions, whatever you want to them.

So let’s say that you had a two-hour-long video that you wanted to convert your captions into true text. Using this method would take forever, but thankfully there is a better way. Go up here to your text section and export it as an SRT file. Just name it something that you can remember it by and keep it in an easy-to-access place like on your desktop. Your text in this format will be just a bunch of garbled information, but we’re going to fix that. Now go to Google and search for subtitle to XML, and I’ll leave a link to the specific converter that I’m using in this example. It was the second result for me when I searched for it. Here you’re going to select the format you want to convert to as Final Cut Pro XML from this dropdown. It has to be Final Cut Pro XML for it to work. I know we’re using Premiere Pro, but it can actually read Final Cut Pro XML. So just so you know that’s what we’re using. Upload your SRT file and convert it, and that’s it. Your job is done. You can now take this new XML file back into Premiere Pro, and it’ll just be displayed as a new sequence. But you can see that it keeps the exact same formatting as our captions. Just lovely.

If in the rare event that during this process, your text changes to be a different font. That’s very possible but very fixable. And I’ll show you how to fix that in just a second. But for now, we can bring these captions into our main sequence by highlighting all of them and copying them with control or command C. Now find a video track that’s completely empty or add a new one by right-clicking here and adding one. Target this empty track by clicking these areas here so that they’re highlighted. And now we can bring our play head to the very beginning, and when we paste with control or command V our text lines are perfectly lined up with our captions. I’m sure that you can see how if this was a two-hour-long project, this would save loads of time. And right now we have both captions and text visible on the screen at the same time. So for now, I’m just going to turn off these captions here by clicking this little eye symbol. And now our true text is the only thing visible.

But like I mentioned before, if at any point in this process, the text gets messed up from its original font, you can click on an example of that text and go up to the essential graphics panel to see exactly what font it switched to. Now that you know which font it switched to, you can go up to graphics and replace fonts in Project and now click on the font that you want to change. And from this dropdown here, select the font that you want to replace it with. Once you hit OK, it will replace that font in every instant that it’s present in your project. And that’s it. You’re done. Now you can play with it to your heart’s content, adding any sort of text animation or preset or anything creative that your mind can come up with.

But guys, that’s it for me. Thank you so much for watching this video. I really hope it was helpful, and I can’t wait to see you in the next one. Bye.