After Effects comes pre-loaded with a bunch of animation presets specifically designed for text layers. These presets offer pre-made animations you can apply to your text with a simple drag-and-drop. These presets cover a wide range of styles and effects.
Presets are a fantastic time saver; they allow you to quickly add professional-looking animations to your text without having to create them from scratch.
Use priests and learn. By dissecting how presets work, you can gain valuable insights into animation principles and techniques used in After Effects. Also, the variety of presets can spark creative ideas and help you explore different animation styles for your text.
After Effects Presets
Beyond text animation, After Effects offers a vast library of presets for various effects, transitions, and generators. These presets function similarly to text animation presets, allowing you to apply pre-configured effects to your layers with ease.
Text Presets
In the Effect & Presets panel, the Animation Presets section and the Text folder, you can find lots of presets which are classified into various groups based on the changes they make and their kind.
As you’ve been told, you can easily click and drag them to apply to your text layer.
Customizing Presets
A very important thing to know is that you can modify these presets. So, after you apply the preset to the text layer, you can customize it and apply your desired changes to it.
For this, you need to pay attention to several points: some of these priests create new keyframes for you, others use expressions. Some Use both (keyframes and expressions).
For example, if you apply the Foggy preset to your text layer, then select the text layer and press the U key (to show you the keyframes.) You will notice that there are two keyframes for the “Offset” property of the “Range Selector” effect.
Don’t be surprised! You did not apply the “Range Selector” effect to the text layer, but the Foggy preset himself applied it to your text layer and created 2 keyframes for it.
Now you can easily customize the Foggy preset by customizing these keyframes. For example, by reducing or increasing the distance between keyframes, you can change the overall speed of your animation. Or set them to Easy Ease through Keyframe Assistant.
Also, some other preset use expressions. For example, Jiggy presets. This preset uses the Wiggle expression. So, you can change the frequency and amplitude of this expression.
If you are unfamiliar with expressions, you can see our tutorial in this regard. Expression in After Effects.
There are other presets which have used both keyframes and expressions. For example, Slide and Pop Out presets.
Great Idea About Text Presets
A very good idea when working with presets is that you can apply more than one preset to a text layer. Combining multiple presets and personalizing them can have really interesting results. The important thing is to know which combinations will work best to you.
For example, the combination of Screen Roll and Ideas presets brings good results, but for this you must customize the settings of these presets.
To learn better, you can watch the end part of video below.
It is now time to try out different presets on your text and customize them to come up with a great idea.
That concludes this tutorial on After Effects Text Animation Presets! By now, you should be comfortable finding, applying, and customizing these presets to add dynamic animations to your text layers. Remember, presets are a great way to jumpstart your workflow, but don’t be afraid to experiment and create unique animations using keyframes and effects.
For better learning, we suggest you to watch the tutorial video:
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