- Getting started
- About text layers
- Installing a font using Adobe Fonts
- Creating and formatting point text
- Animating with scale keyframes
- Using a text animation preset
- Animating imported Photoshop text
- Animating type tracking
- Animating text opacity
- Animating an image to replace text
- Using a text animator group
- Animating a layer's position
- Adding motion blur
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
About text layers
In After Effects, you can add text with flexibility and precision. The Tools, Character, and Paragraph panels contain a wide range of text controls. You can create and edit horizontal or vertical text directly on the screen in the Composition panel, and quickly change the font, style, size, and color of the text. You can apply changes to individual characters and set formatting options for entire paragraphs, including alignment, justification, and word-wrapping. In addition to all of these style features, After Effects provides tools for easily animating specific characters and properties, such as text opacity and hue.
After Effects uses two types of text: point text and paragraph text. Use point text to enter a single word or line of characters; use paragraph text to enter and format text as one or more paragraphs.
In many ways, text layers are just like any other layers in After Effects. You can apply effects and expressions to text layers, animate them, designate them as 3D layers, and edit the 3D text while viewing from multiple angles. As with layers imported from Illustrator, text layers are continuously rasterized, so when you scale the layer or resize the text, it retains crisp, resolution-independent edges. The two main differences between text layers and other layers are that you cannot open a text layer in its own Layer panel and you can animate the text in a text layer using special text-animator properties and selectors.