People always over-complicate text boxes in
After Effects. You've probably seen videos using expressions
and math, multiple layers, or lots of effects stacked together. Today, I'm sharing my favorite quick and dirty
textbox technique that renders fast and is easy to update on the fly. So type in some text and follow along! First go to Effect, Matte, Simple Choker. The magic button is to change View, to Matte. That's going to create a solid black and white
matte of your text. Turn it off and we can see our normal text
layer. Turn it on, there's our matte. Next to expand it, we're going to go to Channel,
Minimax. Change the Channel to Alpha, and now we can
increase the Radius. Lastly, because our text color doesn't work
anymore, we need to reapply it. We'll use the Tint effect to replace the black
and white with custom colors. Now we can choose any colors and easily swap
between them. Now you can change your text, add extra lines,
reposition, resize, change the paragraph alignment, and it will always update correctly. And if you select all these effects, you can
even save it as an Animation Preset and apply it in one go. I'll delete all these effects and search for
my "Easy Text Box" in the Effects and Presets window and apply by double clicking. So, yeah, easy text box. One issue you may run into, is if you rotate
the layer, you can get an unpredictable expansion of your matte. To solve this, just pre-compose the text layer
and then rotate it like normal. However, if you collapse transformations,
the issue comes back. Alternatively, you can add a Transform effect
to the bottom of the effect stack and rotate from there. To fix this offset of the layer's bounding
box, open up the Position property of the text layer and pick-whip the Transform effect's
Anchor Point and Position to the layer's Position. Now you can move the layer around and still
have access to sharp vector edges when you resize. Just remember to use the Rotation on the Transform
effect and not the layer's Rotation for correct results. This effect stack is great for quickly iterating
through designs with text boxes, and it renders really fast. However, for precise control over a text box's
position and size, you really need to master the sourceRectAtTime method. Learning sourceRectAtTime is THE secret to
building responsive design motion graphics and MOGRTs. Nick Howell is an engineer and designer who
has a great introductory video demystifying sourceRectAtTime, and explaining with visuals
what it's doing behind the scenes, while Jake Bartlett has a deep dive lesson in one 34
minute video. I recommend watching Nick's first, and then
Jake's, for a complete understanding of the topic. I'm excited to share more videos soon. Thanks for watching and catch you in the next
one!
