How to Add Cool Text Effects in After Effects

This post is intended to teach you how to add cool text effects in After Effects. Adobe Premiere Pro doesn’t provide you with many options to make your text characters appear the way you want them to. There are effects aplenty, no doubt, but you can’t make your individual characters react to those effects (or you could but that would require you to do a lot of work!). And that’s where Adobe After Effects slides in. To help you not do a lot of work.

Adobe After Effects as the moniker might suggest is something you should turn towards once you are done with your Premiere Pro editing. Meaning it’s the last step of Video Editing. When you think you are ready go ahead and install Adobe After Effects from the official Adobe website. Here’s the link for the same:

http://www.adobe.com/in/downloads.html

There would be an ‘Ae’ symbol as shown in the figure below.

Just click on it, download it and install it. Remember they give you a trial of sorts for a week or something, and then you need to buy it for using it perennially.

Once you have installed it, open it and follow the steps to learn how to add cool text effects in After Effects.

Steps on learning How to Add Cool Text Effects in After Effects

When you have opened After Effects, you will get a screen that looks something like this:

This will be, of course, after you select File > New > New Project or press the Ctrl + Alt + N button. Also, the screen might differ depending upon what workspace you have opened. I am using “All Panels” in Window > Workspace option. Don’t worry how things look just move on.

Then follow the following simple steps on adding cool text effects in after effects and you will be fine.

Create a Composition

Step 1: The very first thing you need to do is create a composition. You will be able to do so by pressing Ctrl + N directly or going to the Composition menu and selecting New.

The moment you click on it you will get a composition dialog box demanding you to enter a name for the composition. Enter a composition name here. You can also choose to specify how long you want the title view to last by specifying the duration at the place shown in the figure below:

You can also specify the frame rate or let it stay at default depending upon your choice. The resolution can also be specified.

Step 2: Once you are done specifying details click on Ok.

What happens when you click Ok. Buttons become highlighted, your video timeline becomes green ready for deliverance, right?

Since we are learning about texts here, what’s the first thing you do? Select the Text option. Good answer! You were slow, but you understood, and that’s what matters.

Writing Texts

Step 3: There’s a button marked “T” on the top toolbar. Select that!

Step 4: When you select that go to the black area in the center and click on it.

This will create a new empty layer called the text layer.

Step 5: Start typing the content of what your title. I am going to go ahead and type “Valar Morghulis”.

Notice that the moment I start typing something in the black area, the layer name gets updated to whatever I type. It helps you identify layers when you have a lot of layers to deal with. You can easily rename the layer too by right clicking the source name (area pointed) and selecting the Rename option.

As you can see the title isn’t centered. Time to make that happen.

Text Alignment, Font Style and Color

Step 6: Find the align box on the right. If you can’t find it, the option would be still available in Window > Align.

Step 7: Select ‘horizontal center alignment’ and ‘vertical center alignment’ options (the one that have been marked in red above) after selecting your title and you will have your content placed in the center of the black screen.

Don’t like the way your font looks? Go to the Character dock on your right, and select the font of your choice.

There is a color button right next to it. Clicking on it will reveal the color combination box using which you can add color to your text, to a word or even a character to make things look cooler.

Cool Text Effects in After Effects

Time to do what we had started out to do.

Step 8: Look out for the “Effects & Presets” bar on the right-hand side of the screen.

If you can’t find it you could always look for the option in the Window menu or even better press the Ctrl + 5 button on your keyboard.

Step 9: In Effects & Presets dock click on Animation Presets > Text.

Step 10: Click on it and more option will flare. There are some really great options available for text animation here, and they will all help in making your text appear awesome.

Step 11: To try any of them, simply select an option and drag and drop it on your text in the black screen. Alternatively, you could simply double click on it when your text is already selected and the effect will be auto-applied.

There are many cool text effects in after effects like the one called “Flutter” in Organic tab of Text. I will drag and drop it on my text, and it will be automatically applied to my text.

Step 12: To see whether things have worked or not you can simply press the “Space” button by selecting your timeline. Here’s the snapshot of the effect in action:

You can try some other cool text effects in after effects like there is this one called “Quiver” that makes your text quiver at its very own location. It’s really cool to look at.

Alternative to Locating Cool Effects

If you want your text to appear like typewriter keys, you can choose to go for “Typewriter”. When you don’t want to waste your time finding a particular effect, you can type it in the search box as shown below, it will show up.

Each effect has its very own property which you can access once you have selected it to use on your text. You do so by clicking on the triangle button next to source name and then looking for the option “Animator” to define the amount of say quiver in quiver effect, or the range in the typewriter effect etc. Based on your inputs the changes will get affected.

That’s it! When you are done time to save the file.

Saving the File

Step 13: Go to File > Save As > Save As…

A Save As dialog box would open. Give an apt name to your file, and save in your desired location.

When you save the file you will notice the type has been saved as “.aep” meaning Adobe After Effects Project format. It is good news since you could use this project file in Premiere Pro easily.

Now, how you are going to slap the same file on Premiere Pro? The next section will explain:

How to Import the Adobe After Effects Project in Premiere Pro

If you are not aware of how to work on Premiere Pro you can check this article.

Step 1: Open Premiere Pro and whatever project you are working on. If not on any you can simply move on to the next step.

Hope you are on the following type of screen before proceeding though.

Time to import your sucker.

Step 2: Go to File> Import or simply press the Ctrl + I button on your keyboard.

It will open the Import dialog box on your screen.

Step 3: Select the .aep file you had created in After Effects by navigating to the same location, and click on Open.

When you do, a dialog box titled “Import After Effects Composition” will flare:

Select the composition that you had created and click on Ok.

This will import the file in your Project as shown below:

Now you can drag and drop it into your timeline and begin working:

Now that you have learnt how to add cool text effects in After Effects it is time to continue with your video editing project. Happy Editing! 🙂