Text

Sooner or later (maybe even right now), you'll need to animate text. In this After Effects Fundamentals lesson, you'll learn all about working with text, including how to create, style, and animate it.

Edit Text

Double click on the text to get into editing mode. OR, go back to the Text Tool and then click and edit the text.

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Style Text

The Character panel has everything for your text styling needs.

If you don't see this panel, you can find it under the Window menu which is at the very top of the screen.

Add a Stroke (Outline) to Text

To add a stroke, use the color picker in the top right of the Character panel to set a color on the box with the hole in the middle. If you want to adjust the stroke weight, adjust the number next to the three lines icon.

Point vs Box Text

Point Text

If you click in the Composition Viewer with the Text Tool and start typing, your text will be on one line (sometimes called Line Text). You can use the return/enter key to create line breaks.

Box Text

To create text that automatically resizes based on the size of its text box, click and drag with the Text Tool to draw out a text box, then start typing. This is sometimes called Paragraph Text.

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Resize the Text Box

Click the text with the Text Tool. You should see a red box around your text that you can drag to resize. Or, double clicking with the Selection Tool will also bring up the red box for resizing.

Adjust the text alignment in the Paragraph panel.

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Switch from Point to Box Text or Vice Versa

Click the toggle in the Properties Panel. Or, with the Text Tool, right click on your text. From the pop-up menu, choose either Convert to Point Text or Convert to Paragraph Text (Box Text).

Simple Text Animation

You can animate text using the same Transform properties that are available on most layers (this includes Position, Rotation, Scale, and Opacity). One simple, yet effective way to animate text in, is to have it move down slightly as it fades in.

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Text Presets & Animators

After Effects has a bunch of presets that you can apply to a text layer to animate it. One simple one that I find helpful, is the Typewriter preset. You can probably guess what it does–animates in one letter at a time. The easiest way to find the Typewriter preset is to search for it in the Effects & Presets panel.

You can find other text presets in the Effects & Presets panel under Presets > Text.

If you want to preview these presets before applying them to your text, click the hamburger menu in the top right corner of the Effects & Presets panel. From the pop-up menu choose Browse Presets. This will open Adobe Bridge and then navigate to the Text folder.

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Apply a Preset

There are a couple ways to apply a preset:

• Drag the preset onto your text layer in the Timeline
• Drag the preset onto your text layer in the Composition Viewer
• With your text layer selected, double click the preset

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Adjust the Timing of a Preset

Most text presets add keyframes to your layer. Hit U on the keyboard to show these keyframes. You can slide the keyframes on your timeline to retime the animation the preset has created.

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Get Creative with Text

Its possible to create your own text animations with text animators, and even save them as presets. That's outside the scope of this lesson, but when I create a tutorial on that, I'll link it here.

There are also ways to use shape layer to creatively animate text. For example, you can have text draw in (like it's being hand written).

Check out my classes on text to learn more: