Lower thirds type animation

Hi there, in this video were going to create a lower thirds title overlay. So people call it lower thirds, titles, any sort of bit of text that appears at the bottom of the screen explaining, generally you have a talking head and you want to explain who they are, set the scene, what they are, what their credentials are, who were talking to or listening to at least.

To do it, we've got this old project open, I need a new one so I just want to let you know, you save it, you go to file and you go to close project, remember we get given an untitled project to get started for our next project.

So first thing we need to do is create a composition, so instead of going to a new composition, were going to let the video create it, so were going to import video and I'm going to give you your first bit of sneaky short cut awesomeness. Can you see in the project window this big empty area here, if you double click it, it goes to import, awesome aye. So instead of going to file, import, file, you just double click in there. There's one in here called talking head.mp4, bring that in. so we've got this mp4, you can double click it to preview it, this is not a composition its just giving you your little preview, its me talking to myself. So what we can do to make a comp from it is right click it, new comp from selection and we've got this thing called talking head, you could rename it now by right clicking it, talking head work for me. I'm going to save this project and I'm going to stick it on our desktop, where do you stick it, I'm sticking it in this one here, you can out yours on your desktop, I'm putting mine in these production files here mainly, I talked about them earlier, just so that if you get lost you can use my files.

So, next thing you need to do is there's my playing, running through. I'm going to turn the audio down, A because I hate listening to myself talk and you need to be able to hear me talk, weird. But can you see over here this little mute button, with it on I can hear stuff, with it off its just me talking. You have to make sure you turn it back on when you export because otherwise it wont export audio so, I'm going to bring my play head back to the beginning and what id like to do is a white box to slide out over here, or maybe just appear and then type to slide into it and then it all to disappear a little bit later so were going to do a couple of bits of animation and its really just the same sorts of things that we did for our first text animation, slightly different but key framing, adding some motion blur and some easing.

So first thing we need to do is we need to grab this thing here called the rectangle tool, now the rectangle tool is a crazy one, if you're self taught and you start doing this, watch, weirdly it becomes a mask, you just want a rectangle, I just want a white box, so I'm going to undo, undo is under edit and there's one called undo. so I've gone back to it, its fine. What you need to do is grab your black arrow and just click off in here, so you’ve got no layers selected. So if I've got no layers selected here and I use the exact same tool, it will go through and draw a rectangle. So the red one is not what I want. So just make sure you’ve got nothing selected down here, lets give it a fill colour, I'm going to have white and in terms of the stroke around the outside, because it’s a white stroke you're not going to see it but I'm going to get rid of it just by turning it to zero, click in here type zero. Alright and I'm going to draw a box, its going to be like that sort of size. I want it to appear over this side here and I'm going to put some type, I'm going to put Daniel Scott after effects trainer or something like that.

So first thing you need to do is I'm going to grab my black arrow and I'm going to set some key frames, so what id like you to do is actually play for a little while before this thing even starts to play up here. To get it to start later on, at the moment it starts right at the beginning here, so I'm going to get it to start here, maybe after a second or two and watch this, I can drag this guy along just so that it doesn’t exist and you can see there's a gap here now and it exists from then on it just appears at the moment. I've hit a little shortcut; I'm going to leave it in there because I accidentally hit it. I hit the n key on my keyboard. The n key is a shortcut which is really good when you know what you're doing but if you don’t and it starts doing this, you get that error, if you get that it means that you’ve hit the n key accidentally. All it means is that that might be your problem, this is called the work area, well talk about him later on but if you accidentally get this really small, it comes up with errors and you just need to extend that out to be the whole animation and you should be away again.

Not my smoothest tutorial by far but we've worked out a few little problems here. So we've got them along, what id like to do is Id like to play around with the opacity, so I want this to fade it. To do it I want my play head to be right at the beginning here. It’s not very clever, it doesn’t snap to beginning so its not hard to get it to eh beginning here but a nice little thing that you can do is while you're dragging your play head or your CTI, is you can drag it along and if you hold shift on your keyboard, if you hold shift drag, drag, watch when it gets close it just launched out there and snapped to the edge, so its really a cool little shortcut. Two shortcuts in one video, awesome.

So I'm at the beginning, what id like to do is play with the opacity so along here there's a bunch of things hanging out at the bottom of the shape ladder. Lets call this one, lets double click the word, lets right click it and go to rename and lets call this one instead of shape layer lets call this one lower third background. Great, and under transform I want to go down to opacity and were going to set the little stopwatch going again so its like waiting, waiting, click and now its recording what I do. And I'm going to turn the opacity down to zero so it’s completely gone. And after a little while, how long, I'm not too sure yet maybe half a second, something like that, you can drag these icons around afterwards, is turn the opacity up to one hundred percent. Now if you're following along, you can always keep an eye on this, if I say half a second, you can see I've actually put it on, its at one second, and 16 frames. So you can type that in here by going like this, and a cool little trick is you can just go 116 and it will put in the colons and everything for you.

Alright, so starts at zero, goes up to one hundred percent, pull my play head back, space bar and I'm happy with that timing, it’s fine. If you're not happy with it, you can drag it further apart, make it go slower, watch this, space bar, slowly comes on and if you want it to be a bit faster you can bring them together and they an go a bit faster, that works for me. I wanted that.

Now I want type to slide in so id like to, you can see if I twirl this up and I twirl that up, I've got two layers, there's my video behind, there's my lower third background, now I'm going to grab my type tool, and I'm going to click once here and I'm going to type in Daniel Walter Scott, select it all, pick a font, if you cant see your fonts, you’re looking at this character one here, I shrunk mine down when I was dealing with this preview. If you cant find yours anywhere go to window, character. And font size I'm going to drag this down so it fits, I'm going to make it a colour I can see, I'm going to click black from there, grab my black arrow to move it around so its going to end up here. I'm not going to worry about it too much because I'm going to end up changing this. And what I might do is double click it, jump to the type tool, put a return in and I am the founder of, I have to use BYOL because its just too damn long, bring your own laptop so I'm just going to shrink that down, might use that as the bold, might use that as the light version. You can spend ages on fonts, I’d like to but I need to get on with this tutorial. I'm going to go to fit as well, the reason its all pixelated as well, why is it all pixelated, did you guess? Its because of this, it will export fine, but previewing in here, its set to quarter, so I'm going to set it to full because I really wan to see my lovely preview, another good error, see this red thing down the bottom here, it says disabled and it all goes black. It means its because I've got my caps lock on. Because a second ago I was typing in upper case, I had caps lock on my keyboard on I'm going to turn caps lock off and magically it comes back. So if you ever have the problem of that, where it goes blank and a little red bar at the bottom, its because you’ve left caps lock on your key board. I've had people re install after effects trying to get rid of that thing and it turns out caps lock was on for their whole afternoon.

So we've got this, we've got that what I want to do is start animating it now. So where, I'm going to hit space bar, that appears and my type here just like this other one. I want it to start a little bit later, so instead of starting right at the beginning here I'm going to get it to start about there. Hold shift to get it to play head. So if you're following me mines at 1.19 and what I'm going to do is I'm going to start it off screen so I'm going to hold shift to get it to play head, so if you're following me, mines at 1.19 and what I'm going to do is I'm going to start it off screen so I'm going to grab my black arrow, and hold shift to get it to go straight, get off. You might have to zoom out a little bit, go back to 50%. So you can see this side here. We’re going to set our first key frame and its full position so twirl it down, transform, set the stop watch going so its going to settle the key frame right there, off screen, little bit long how far is a little, I've got mine at 2 seconds 2 frames and I'm going to hold shift, I think you need to start dragging, then hold shift rather than shift to start with. So start dragging and pulling then hold shift and it will get it in a straight line.

So I'm going to drag it back preview me talking if this happens, can you see its only buffering and only getting to here because it gets to the green thing and loops around, its because I accidentally hit space bar twice, so I might have to bring it back here, hit space bar, if you hit space bar twice, it tries to loop back on itself so if you ever get stuck in that eternal loop. Just drag the play head out again, hit space bar again and it should be fine. There he goes, it’s a bit fast so I'm going to open it up a little bit, back to here, so its sliding on but its missing the magic, we learnt the magic in an earlier video. There's two of them, there's easing and there's motion blur. Because I'm not doing motion blur and easing to the fade of the lower third, the white box is because I find when you do fades is that you can mess around with easing all day and the motion blur all day, It makes no difference. There'll be purists out there that will not agree but I think its just not worth it, I just cant see any difference with easing with things fading in and out.

So what I'm going to do is id like to play around with these two guys. So do the easing, it’s easiest just to grab both of them. It depends what you want to do, I'm going to get mine to ease both sides, you could just do one so it just starts fast and ends slow. I'm going to do both of them because I like the look of that, right click key frame velocity, 70, 70, drag it back, hit space bar and still a little fast, so its smoother but I'm going to open it out a little bit. It looks nice. Now the other magic, so that’s the easing, first step in awesomeness. The second step is motion blur.

Remember you turn it on globally and then you forget and you click play and nothing happens, what’d you have to do, remember you have to go through and turn it on globally and also for the layer, this particular I'm going to twirl this down and make it look nice, you could turn it on for this one as well and this one, its not going to do anything, I think you cant see it at least. So here we go, slide blurry when it moves. Alright, hit save and I will see you in the next video.