Lessons

Lesson Info

Working with Text Layers

All right, well, we've been talking about key frames and moving stuff now we're going teo look att text in some of the different ways we can deal with tax and we're starting with a blank palette right now I'm going to just start with a new composition and just make this a standard size that were on the same page here there we go okay, so I've just got a blank cop here and there's a lot of ways you can add text to a cop you can come up here to layer uh select the comp there we go laywer knew and then he could go text that's one way to add text and then it just throws the cursor in the middle of the page force there so we can put in creative live and we'll notice that it shoved it all off the side there well, that's because by default my settings were last used to start with a left justified character placement. So this has all the text properties that your typical layout program or even like word or any kind of text based application works, you've got your character and your paragraph s...

ettings there so I can go left justified center justified, right justified then r different spacings and everything so we're going to go center justified here to start off and that puts our text right in the middle there and then with our character we can choose whatever fonts we've got installed and I'm going to be covering a little bit about the type kit fonts as well, but first we'll just start with just basic text here and this is helvetica and you can change your scale of your font by pics or you can set your preferences teo show different point sizes if you want typically in a video application oh our imaging application point sizes aren't is relevant just because we're not dealing with print we're dealing with video on screen video so being that we have seventy two d p I for our project and it's twelve eighty by seven twenty uh pixels are our friend so that's where we're going by um as I had mentioned earlier as faras the anchor point position by default it's along the bottom line here and you can't really see it unless we zoom way and we're going to like two hundred percent we can see there's a little hint of it there if we go down to our layer and hit a for anchor point and move it, we'll see okay, there it is it's right down there that's important to know, especially if you're going to be doing some kind of animation with it uh we do like three d flying in tax things like that it's going to want to fly in on its access, which is the where the anchor point position is same thing if we scale it, if we go to scale it's going to scale around that anchor point so it won't notice that it doesn't scale from the centre, it maintains that anchor point, and this is where guides come in that air quite helpful with text, and somebody had asked a question earlier about guide placement it's, a very simple kind of concept it's similar teo photo shop where you just hit command our control are to get your rulers up, and then you can pull your guides down just out of the ruler and pull him down to where you want your horizontal lines and your vertical lines, you can set those wherever you want. Those are great for being able to just see where you are in conjunction with everything, especially when you're zoomed in, you're zoomed way in, then you don't know really where you are in the in space, unless you've got a guide to work with. So in this case, I'm going to zoom back out, too, our auto fit and I want to show you that when we snap that we've got snapping on, I guess if you come out here to view in our guides, then we can snap two guides. I usually leave that on that only use guides when I really want to control where everything's going I don't use them all the time but if you want that off you turn off snapped the guides and it won't force it to to hit the guide but it's really helpful when you have your guide set now if I want to change my anchor point well I can do it here on the timeline to stay letter a on the keyboard and I can center it in there and this is where the guides help may see where I'm centered actually in the center of my text so now I know my uh anchor point is set there if I'm to rotate it it will rotate right in the middle of my word or my fun I mean my text in this area so if I had a whole string of text great big long line so I can change at any time say I go welcome to creative life then change my font down what's got to select the layer there we go and bring it down here then I noticed a couple things one is my anchor point changed because I changed the scale of my layer so I need thio keep an eye on that hit my anchor point go back up so make sure that when you do set your anchor points and you're doing your animation that you don't change that much content um that's really important if you are animating a long string of things say and you say well we could do that and then we're just going to change you know, blah blah blah in the text later and it will follow the same animation don't be fooled by that because you can see right there that could really mess you up if I was counting on that to rotate right on that access or move somewhere on the path right where the anchor point is that could really screw me up later on but just know that you can change it there but say say I changed it but change my text everything so instead of moving my anchor point there because I really wanted my text oh hang there I didn't want it moving up and down like I just did I can use that pan behind tool that we used on our last project and grab it there and move it down course after zoom in to see what I'm working on here and bring it down here whoops I just moved my guide sometimes if it's snapped right to the guide it wants to grab the guide instead so you have to move my guides, which is counterproductive right? So if I want to just grab the guides without moving a layer or anything notice I'm holding down the command key that would be the control key on a pc and I could move my guides back to where they belong ok so now I can move this along the right axes to where I wanted it to be so let's see if that's pretty much centered between the two and they're so what what I just did there is I just moved the anchor point without moving its position on screen if I chose to do that if I don't care I really want to change the position on the screen but I want the anchor point to be correct again I've got my snap on I've moved the anchor point I can either do it here or there so I've got my anchor point set in there I could do my rotations I can do any of those type of animations that do rely on the anchor point to be at a certain place so as faras modifying text there's a lot of lot of things we can do in here with text so one thing is and I use this a lot too because I cheat because I don't always have the fonts that I really need like oh well there's hell that a canoe um I guess that's how you pronounce that any u e I've always called it new s so you do have some things like, you know condensed bold on dh just regular old bold but you can kind of tweak these a little bit because they are fonts they are victory so you can modify your you're letting encouraging of course you can modify the height uh scale and the wit scale so you can kind of fake fonts you don't normally have um if you need to and your spacing there so you could kind of create a foe condensed font in away just by playing with your your settings here a little bit but notice as I do that where's my anchor point it's no longer in the center so if I do my rotation it's going to rotate a little off center so it's really important that you keep an eye on where that anchor point iss for your text if you're going to be animating anything that is going to be center centred on an access point if you're just flying text on an off screen it doesn't matter as much as long as you're not you know changing your baseline so um that's all important to know a ce faras fonts are concerned uh let's go take a look at what we have with type kid I go out here to my creative cloud launcher come here to fonts and we see that I've already selected a few fonts um so say want to select something it's going to launch the actual font paige web page so you do have to be online for that to have access to that uh I said yeah I want to use that font want to use it on my desktop because we are working on our desk top we're not doing a web page here um so let me hide safari for a second and there is it's already installed it's already sink so I've got access to it so if I come in here and I just start to type in lush there it is it's already in there so there's my font and that's my faut tied to my creative cloud license my creative count cloud account so I go to my machine at home I go to another client goto my portable whatever as long as I'm law dan to my creative cloud of sink everything, then I have access to those funds it's just like having him installed in my machine if I log out response go away they disappear so it's always good to know that if you're going to work on a project like this and you hand it off to somebody else make sure that they do have the creative cloud that they do have access to the fonts and it will come up and say, hey, you get fonts that aren't installed on your machine or you haven't selected them so if I come up here to fonts and I want to say look at some more fonts I just say brows, fonts on type kit and there's quite a few here it's quite amazing I could spend hours just looking a lot because it's just a lot of fun fonts out there some that you're looking for something specifically that you don't have installed or you're looking for something to get some ideas you can just go and access these guys and it really helps move things along so um well let's find something that might be fun to install here this one looks crazy I go for the crazy fun sometimes so I just say use fonts and I select this sink to your computer using creative cloud yes and it launches this little guy and it will tell me in a second once it's uploaded downloaded whatever thinking it's thinking come on sink please well, while it's thinking we do have a quick question from a thomas in austin he asks is there a cliffs panel to access special or or alternative characters a glimpse panel? It would probably just be within your font selection so I'm not aware of it doesn't mean it's not there but I'm not aware of us separate panel just for special characters so this says right here that it is indeed sink so let's see if it isthe just go through there just double check let me hide safari and then let's go back here type in willow okay well that is making a liar out of me so that's two bags I really wanted to show that that work flow so I did something wrong unless I've gotta sink here that I need to do so uh, something I may have missed on that part but typically they'll just show up once you say I want to use it on this machine it will just show up here um in my listening it may maybe it's trying to do it in the background and I'm just ignoring it so again with the uh the type kit fonts they just work just like any other installed fought on your machine it's just that they're tied to your license that's how their license through there okay, so let's take a look at just, um basic animation with our text and let's go back to just good old helvetica okay? And similar to our other animations we've got a lot of control of every type of transformed function here with our text uh key frame our position we can khun key frame our scale rotation opacity, key frame all of those and you do all kinds of crazy stuff with it. Um uh move it around, scale it up, turn it around and faded out so just by setting your key frames you can do quick little animations just like that um probably something like that if I really wanted to use it, I'd be easing in because I don't want it to just go and then be crazy so so if I wanted text to just come flying through that's, what I would do another thing again is our it's, another layer just like everything else. You can get a little motion blur on it, which helps so that's what's nice about aftereffects, anything that has a stopwatch next to it. Any transformed function, every kind of setting, most your plug ins that have things that can be changed over time could be animated, so you can do just I mean that alone. Just to a static layer like text or an image, you can create all kinds of animation with it and offsetting some of this stuff over time. Clean with your key frames you can you make it a little crazier. Um, so everything, everything can be done to a layer text is no, uh, nothing different. So let me let me reset all these and actually can just hit the reset button here in that reset everything back to where it wass turn off all the stop watches and there we're all set.