How to Make a Lower Thirds Template You Can Use Anywhere | PremiumBeat.com

hey guys in this tutorial we're going to take a look at how to create a universal lower thirds template that we can easily reuse for any project it's great for quick turnaround projects but also adaptable for many different looks it can even be used as a title card it's going to be a motion graphics template that we build from scratch and after effects but then we can customize it and render it in premiere pro for any future projects all right guys so our goal is to have a universal lower thirds template that we can easily reuse for any project and i kind of had four guidelines in place when i went about creating this and the first is it needs to be simple to create in after effects even for beginners next it needs to be simple to use in premiere pro because if it's not simple let's face it we're probably not going to use it it needs to be adaptable so it needs to have some level of customization and finally it has to render fast in premiere pro and if you've never created a motion graphics template before or maybe if you've never even used after effects before no worries because we're going to walk through this step by step and if you just want to skip to using the lower third template you can download the one that i created for free from the blog post on premiumbeat.com so check for that link in the description all right guys let's jump over to after effects and create the template let's start by creating a new composition let's go ahead and name this lower third and we want the size of this to be 840 by 120. i'm gonna have mine be 24 frames per second so you can set that to be whatever frame rate you typically use and we'll have it be eight seconds long go ahead and click ok and the first thing we're going to do is create the background bar so i'm just going to right click here and go to new solid and i'll just have this be a white solid i'm just going to name this bg for background make sure it's comp size and go and click ok now i want this to actually animate in and i'm going to have it slide in from the side if you want to slide in from a different direction feel free to do that so i'm just going to select my background here and hit p on the keyboard for position and i'm going to come out here to be about one second let's go ahead and create a keyframe there and let's move this back over the very beginning and i'm going to grab the background hold shift and just slide this over so it's completely off the screen and now we can see we've created an animation of that sliding in now i want this to be a little smoother so it's like this last keyframe and hit f9 that's gonna make that an easy ease keyframe and with it still selected i'm gonna click on the graph editor right here and we can see we have this curve let's just grab this last point and pull it all the way over and when we let go of that and look at this it'll create a nice smooth animation i'm going to ram preview this so it kind of comes in and in smoothly now we also want to go ahead and animate this back out i'm going to have it started about six seconds so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to create a keyframe right there at six seconds when it's on the screen let's go ahead and select our first keyframe i'm gonna hit ctrl c command c if you're on a mac and let's move over here to seven seconds and just do control v to paste that or command v to paste on a mac and now we can see we've just pasted back in that beginning point so now we have a nice animating out and just to make sure this is easing out the same way i'm going to select that first keyframe here when it starts to ease out go back over to the graph editor and we just want to pull this handle all the way over again so now you can kind of see we have a reversal there but we had in the beginning so it should animate out exactly the same way finally the last thing we need to do on the background with it selected i'm going to hit s for scale and we want to go ahead and unlink the scale see a little chain link there go ahead and click that and that's going to come into play a little bit later on when we're using the motion graphics template but now let's go ahead and add in our text it's almost like the text tool and i'm just going to type in title text here and let's go ahead and take our text and i'm gonna have it set to be the center for the paragraph setting there you can see you have different options there you can use whichever works for you but i prefer to have these centered and i'll show you that as well and then i have the align window open if you don't see that it's up here under window you can select a line and with my text selected i'm just going to center align this in the composition now we want this background bar when it slides in to actually reveal our text so you can actually see right now if i turn on transparency our text is already here so in order for this to work we need to select our background and we need to duplicate it so i'm going to ctrl d to duplicate that command d on a mac let's go ahead and move this above our text and i'm going to hit enter on that i'm going to rename that i'm just going to call it text matte now we can select our text and we want to set the track map for the text here if you don't see this go ahead and hit f4 on your keyboard and that will kind of toggle the different switches there in after effects but for the title text here under track map we want to select alpha matte so now if we look at this it's actually going to be revealed now by that background when it slides in and we want to adjust one more setting here on our text mat go ahead and hit s with it selected to bring up the scale and you can see with our original background here i have the scale revealed for that as well if you don't see that just hit s on the keyboard so we want to see the scale for both of these and then we're going to come over here to the parent and link and i'm going to select this little pick whip they call it here i'm just going to drag it down to the scale of the original background layer and what that's done is it just links those two together so if we adjust the settings here for the original background it will do the same thing for our text matte background now we need to create one more matte for our background this is super simple to do let's go ahead and just right click here let's do a new solid we'll just call this bg matte make sure it's comp size and just so we can see this a little differently i'm going to change the color of this to red but we actually won't see this color it's just going to help us when we're setting this up i'm going to go ahead and click ok and we want to move this bg matte right above our background layer here and now we want to select our background and over here for the track matte for that we want to also set that to be alpha matte and then the last thing we want to do on that bg matte layer is select it then hit s on the keyboard to bring up the scale again and just go ahead and unlink it as well with that little chain link icon just so those two properties are no longer linked this way we can scale it on the side and the top at different percentages we want to adjust this later finally the last bit of setup we need to do is we need to add a fill effect to the text and to the background so we can change the colors with our motion graphics template so i'm going to select my text layer here come up here to effect and come down here to generate and select fill and that's going to default fill it with a red color so i'm just going to change this back to black i don't see that same thing on our background layer so select it come here to effect generate and fill and let's go and change this back to white now we've done all the steps kind of build the background of our lower thirds template so now let's add the actual settings we want to adjust in premiere pro and we're going to do that with the essential graphics panel so just come up here to window we're going to open up the essential graphics panel right there and the first thing we need to do is select the composition we want to start with that's going to be our lower third template so i'll just select that it says lower third now let's go ahead and give this a name and i'm just going to title this universal lower third and i like to put an underscore at the very beginning of mine that's totally optional that's just so it appears at the very top when we look at this in premiere pro in the essential graphics panel now let's go ahead and create a thumbnail for our lower third so i'm just going to drag this out here to kind of where everything's on the screen just select set poster time and that will kind of create a thumbnail for us that we're going to see in premiere pro and now we can kind of build out our settings and the first thing i want to have appear here is just something that says text settings so we know that's where those are being adjusted if you just come down here to the bottom you can see add a comment so i'm going to select that and for this comment let's go ahead and title this text settings and now if we come over here we can see all the properties that we can add to this panel and customize it we just click this solo supported properties so when i click that you'll see it opens up all these different options for us down here that we can actually drag and drop into that essential graphics panel and because we're working with the text settings first we're going to start with our title text so you can see that there and the first thing we want to drag up here is this setting that says source text so just grab it and drag and drop it here into the essential graphics panel and we can rename what this setting is i'll just call it text now we can customize the text here if we want to i'm going to leave it as is for now but come over here to edit properties and we want to go ahead and check on all three of these for font properties here this is just so we can customize a little bit more in premiere pro then go ahead and click ok you can see we get all those customized options that popped up here as well the next option we want to add up here is the text position so i'm going to scroll down here and under transform here for our text we're going to grab that position and just drag and drop that in we can just leave that named as the default for position and then finally we want to add in that color here you can see the effect under fill we want to select that color and drag that in as well this will allow us to change the color of our text in premiere pro now let's go ahead and start adding our box settings and before we do that i'm going to add a comment here and i'll just call this box settings and now let's start dragging and dropping in some of the box settings we have so for our background layer the bottom layer here first setting i want to add is the color so we have the fill effect let's just drag and drop that in next under the transform settings i want to select opacity i'm just going to drag and drop that in this will allow us to actually adjust the opacity of our background you can see go ahead and toggle off transparency there and we can do all this from inside of premiere pro next we want to select the scale here just drag and drop that in and then finally the last setting we want to add in here is actually on our background matte layer so we have the scale option there we want to select the scale for that one and drag and drop it in and i'm just going to rename this one just so i don't get confused because we have two different scales here i'm just going to call this our box clip let me just show you guys why we're actually adding this to our motion graphics template so if i select the scale here if i make it a little smaller let's say i didn't want the box to be quite as wide you can see now when this animates in instead of it starting right here where the box is it actually comes in here all the way over from the side of the composition so if we just set this box clip to the same value as our scale so you can see 74 and 100 so i just type in 74 here it's going to clip that on the side so now it's animating in right from that starting position it'll actually be a little bit smoother when it finishes the ending of the animation as well so that just gives us that option i'm going to set these back to be 100 for each of these but it's a nice option that we'll have in premiere pro when we export this and now i think we actually are ready to export it so you can see we have the export motion graphics template let's go ahead and click that it's going to ask us to save our project go ahead and hit save then it's going to ask us where we want to actually save out this motion graphics template to i typically do this on the local drive so i already have a folder selected here i'll go ahead and click browse i've got a folder set up i'll just save it inside of that go ahead and click save but you also have the option to save this right to your library or your local templates folder for premiere pro there's a couple other options here we can warn you for different things i have this first one checked off because it has to do with adobe fonts the font i am using is from adobe font so if you have that installed you should be just fine but if you don't you also have the option to switch that later to any font you want so let's go ahead and click ok and now that's finished and it's already exported out our motion graphics template so now if i open up that folder where that exported to you can see we do have the template now that we've exported our motion graphics template from after effects let's jump over to premiere pro now and start using it inside of premiere i've got some footage here i'm working with i want to add a lower third too the first thing we need to do is open up the essential graphics panel so i'm just come here to window and we're going to select essential graphics and that's going to open up this panel over here and you can see a lot of the preset templates that are already in here let's go ahead and load in the one we just created and to do that we go for these three little lines here i'm going to click on that and i'm going to select manage additional folders and it's going to allow me to add a folder we just want to add the folder where our motion graphics template is going to click add i'll go ahead and select my folder go ahead and select folder and click ok and now in here we can actually see our universal lower third has been loaded into the essential graphics panel and you can see we have that same thumbnail that we set in after effects i'm just going to drag this over a little bit resize some of these panels here let's go ahead and add in our lower thirds i'm just going to drag and drop this in to my timeline just like it's a piece of footage now depending on how you have your settings for premiere will kind of depend on how this looks initially so the way i have premiere set up right now is any footage i drag into my timeline it automatically stretches it so it fits the entire width of the sequence i'm working with and in our case here we can see this is way too big so i actually select our lower third here just as i would any other video clip i can come up here to the effects controls and you can see on the scale option here it's way above 100 so we actually want to set this to be on 100 and it's going to resize that back down to the original size that 840 by 120 pixels so let's go ahead and move this kind of into place here for our lower thirds i'm just going to move this over with the position setting here in the effects controls and let's look at some of the edit options we have over here in essential graphics so we have our text settings we have text so i'll just change this to be my name and then you can see we have other options to change the font to anything else we want to adjust the text size if we want to as well and what i like about the position settings here depending on whatever you have this say you can easily kind of re-center that and then we can change the text colors i'm actually going to change this to be more of a premium beat color tone so i'm going to set the text to be white and then for the box settings here i'm going to click on that one and i'm just going to make this one of the premium beat colors and go ahead and click ok now one thing i don't like is how the box kind of sticks out here at the edges i kind of want to be more formed around the text so to do that we just come over here to scale i'm going to scale this in a little bit so it fits nicer around the text and when i do that if we actually come back over here to the beginning we see how this animates on it's like i talked about before if we don't do the box clip it'll actually animate in a little bit farther over and that may be a stylistic choice you want to have but for me i actually wanted to animate in right here from the beginning so all i need to do with this is just set it as the same value as the scale so the scale is at 82 so i'm going to set the box clip here to be 82. now we go ahead and play this back to preview it you can see how quick and easy that plays back just like it's in real time and again that's kind of the big part of this process is making sure this renders very quickly let's add in even more here to our lower thirds let's say i want to have this say after effects artist underneath my name and to do that it's pretty simple as well just come back over here to the central graphics panel let's go ahead and add in another copy of our universal lower thirds i'm actually gonna have this be below our first one i'll just move that in there and with it selected again it's scaled it up so i'm gonna have this be a hundred percent let's go ahead and change the text on this one first let's have a say after effects artist now obviously i want the text to be that big so let's scale it down i'm just going to reposition this in the center and let's also rescale the box size i'll bring this in on the sides and after i do the scale i'm also going to want to set that box clip to be the same so 50 and 50 in this particular case so let's come back over here to the effects controls and reposition that secondary title i'm just going to move this over i'm going to have it be a little bit offset kind of staggered there we can see how this animates in now something else we can do is actually offset the timing of that secondary title so i'm just going to move it over just a little bit and now when we play this back we get the titles offsetting a little bit so it looks pretty nice so let's say we showed this to our client they like the colors we got going on but they don't like the box background so let's take a look at how quickly we can change this up just right here in premiere so i'm going to select my secondary text here for the after effects artist let's say i want to have that be the premium beat color now so i'll just come over here and select the text color i'm just going to pick that off of that background for our original title let's go ahead and select the box opacity here let's turn that all the way down let's come up here to my main lower thirds where my name is and we'll just leave that at white let's go ahead and just turn the box opacity for that all the way off so now you can see we have a totally different look here for our lower thirds and play this back all from the same template and finally with this we can see my clip here actually isn't as long as our lower third so these actually animate out a lot later than the clip actually ends and an easy way we can fix this so they animate out is just using the razor tool so i can select that here just hit c on the keyboard for the shortcut and i'm just going to clip both of these and then we know these animate out at about one second when this ends so i'm going to come back over here what i'm going to do is just use the razor tool to cut both of those again there let's just delete the center part here and then i'm going to select both of these and just drag them over so now they connect so now they should animate in and then animate right back out and something else i could do just to kind of be creative here with this at the ending let's say i didn't want them to stagger out at the end i'll just drag this one over so they're both lined up and just pull that back over and now they offset animate in because they both animate out together so again this is a nice simple template that you can use for lower thirds location reveals custom titles or even for easy list animations rendered entirely in premiere pro alright guys hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial give us a thumbs up if you did i'm charles and i'll catch you guys in the next one

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 11,596

Keywords: After Effects, Motion Graphics, Lower Thirds, Editing Tips, Workflow Tips, Faster Editing, Faster Workflow, Lower Third Templates, Motion Graphic Templates

Id: 599FaLYO_Vk

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020