- I am so sick of seeing
the exact same thing being tweeted by streamers,
when they go live on Twitch or YouTube. Do people actually think that
tweeting or posting to Discord with the words I'm live
followed by their Twitch link is actually going to get people to click through and visit their stream. That might have worked five years ago, but nowadays you've got to
put a little bit more effort into grabbing people's attention and bringing them across
to your live stream. So rather than just sitting
here and complaining about it, I thought I would teach
you guys how to create your own GIFS or GIFS or
however you want to say it so that you can share something
a little bit more unique and a little bit more creative,
next time you go live. And the best part is that
this doesn't even have to be just about you posting when you go live, once you follow this tutorial you're going to have the skills to be able to create animations like these for absolutely anything
you would like to share such as inviting people
to your Discord server or posting when you uploaded
a new video to YouTube or anything like that. So go and grab yourself a cup of tea or whatever it is that people
outside of England drink and let's get creative. (upbeat music) Just before we get started, I would like to give a big shout out to the sponsor of this video Flixier. Flixier is a cloud-based video editor with direct integration
to Twitch and YouTube, allowing you to easily edit your streams without needing to download
and upload big files, which saves you hours of time. They even have a large
library of call to actions and custom assets you
can add to your videos. Join over 30,000 people using
Flixier to edit their videos and get a whopping 30% off your first year with coupon code GAMINGCAREERS. Check out the first link in
the description to learn more. Okay, so for this tutorial we're going to be using
Adobe After Effects. Now, if you don't already
own Adobe After Effects, they have a free seven day trial. I'll leave a link down the description or you can just Google
After Effects free trial. I think it's seven days, but
it's completely limit free so you can use the software fully. And another thing worth mentioning is in the Gaming Career Discord server we have a channel there
called Free Downloads where I will be uploading the finished project file from this video with some really easy control so you can customize your username, which platform you're
streaming to, all the colors and even add your own logo
or avatar into the start, so that'd be the really
easy way to create this. But I'd recommend following
through with this tutorial and actually creating it
for yourself from scratch 'cause then you're going to
have the creative skills needed to make things like this in the future. But the project file will be
there in Discord for those that just want to quickly get on with it. Okay, so in After Effects, we want to start a new composition and here you can name
this whatever you want. I'm going to call it Now Live GIF or something along those lines. For the resolution we want to leave this at a 16 by nine ratio because that's what works
really well on Twitter, and in places like Discord where you will be posting this GIF. I am going to set mine to 1920 by 1080. I might, when I'm rendering
out lower this resolution, if we need a smaller file size but it's a great starting point especially if you want to
include this looping GIF in a video or anything like that. But frame rate, let's leave it set to 60, a nice high frame rate to keep all the animation super smooth. And then for the duration I know because I've
previously created this that I want it to be roughly six seconds but if you want something
longer with more words feel free to up this 10 or 20 seconds. I'd just recommend that
if it's for a looping GIF, you want to keep it quite short. So six seconds for me, and
then we can press okay. Next we'll import our logo or our avatar or whatever image you want to use. I'd recommend using whatever
you use on stream basically so come up to the project window here right click, import file, select
the file you want to import for me, that's the Gaming Careers logo, and then we want to drag that
down into our timeline here, so we can see it appearing
in our composition. If you need to make your logo
or avatar smaller or bigger, you can just highlight
the layer down here, press S on the keyboard to
bring up the scale properties and then just drag this a
hundred percent to the left if we need to make it smaller or to the right, if you
need to make it bigger but a hundred percent
seems to work well for me. The last thing that we need to make sure that we're doing to our logo
before we start animating it is to make sure that this anchor point is in the very, very center of our logo because we're going to be
applying some rotation to it, we want to make sure it's
rotating around the center. So to do that, make sure
you have the layer selected and then press control alt and home, and that will move the anchor point to the very center of the image. Okay the next thing we're going to do is add our background layer. So to do that right click down in the
timeline here, go to new solid and it's going to bring up
the options for a new solid. Here you can select the color I'm going for this sort of
gray blue sort of color. I will leave all the hex codes that I use down in the description below, but anything you want to use really, you can select it here, press okay, and it will add in the background layer. You'll notice that we
can't now see our logo, that's just because the
layer audit is wrong. So if we drag our background
layer below our logo, you can see it now appears properly. And the last thing to do is this is going to get a little
bit complicated, this project. So it's worth just renaming your layers so that you know exactly which has which, so right click going to
rename this background. And then right, click on the top one, I'm going to rename this logo. So time to start actually
animating this logo to make it appear on our screen. So what we're going to do is play around with the position key frames of our logo. So select the logo layer here
and press P on your keyboard, and we're going to change
to our position key frames. And a handy little tip when
it comes to animating things, especially if you want them to end in the center of the screen,
is to actually work backwards. So what we're going to do
is we're going to scroll across on our timeline here to roughly halfway
through the first second, maybe 35 frames through. And we're going to add a key
frame by clicking the stopwatch. And that basically means
that at this point in time, the logo will be exactly in this position. So moving backwards to the very start when we want our logo to be off screen, if we move our timeline back to the start, and then we drag our logo down, and then if we hold the shift
key, it will lock it in place and we'll just drag it
so that it's off screen. And if we play this back we're going to get the
world's most boring animation of it moving up into the
middle of the screen, and we're going to play around with that. But there's one more key frame
that we want to add first, and that's sort of 20 frames in, we want this to actually be
at the very top of our screen. So again, 20 frames in drag our logo hold shift because we
want it to stay in place somewhere around about there. And again, a super boring animation. You can start to see how it's going to animate on the screen. Just to help make our animation look a little bit more natural, what we're going to do is
select these two last key frames highlight them both so that they turn blue and then right click key
frame assist, Easy Ease. And this is just going to
help with the animation, looking a little bit more smooth as they ease into the key frames. We can actually customize this
animation a little bit more. So if we go to the 20 frames in key frame and then click on this button here which is going to open
up the graph editor, you'll see a graph that looks like this. If you don't see this graph and instead you see the value
graph that looks like this, all you have to do is right
click anywhere on the graph and change it to edit
speed graph like that, and you should see the animation now the actual speed that the logo is moving. And what we want to do is
we want to change this one at the 20 frames in by dragging this right
anchor point to the right and what that's basically going to mean is rather than the smooth animation, it's going to sort of
hover at the top point and then slam down. So if we go back and
watch this back again now you can start to see the animation has a little bit more life. One last change that we'll
make to this position key frame is again, if we look at
the 20 frames in key frame, we're just going to drag this top anchor point down a little bit, which will reduce the
height that it goes to. If we play this back now you're going to start to see
that we're really nearly there with our animation, for the
logo appearing on screen. The last thing we want to add
is a little bit of rotation. So to add rotation key frames, we can just press R on our keyboard to bring up our rotation key frames but it's useful to see both rotation and position next to each other. So we can click this
little down arrow twice and that will show you all
the transform key frames that we have added. So what we're going to
do is go 20 frames in when it's at the top of
it's sort of lock-in points. And this is where we want our rotation to be at zero degrees, so in this correct position. And then if we go back to the
beginning of the composition where the logo is off screen, we're going to drag this
right value to the left, to turn it back, maybe
a hundred degrees or so, something like that. And then if we play it back you
can see it spins into place, it locks at zero degrees at the top and then slams down
into its final position. So the last thing we'll do here just to make it look a little smoother is Easy Ease this last key frame by right-clicking key
frame assist, Easy Ease, and now we have finished our animation for our logo appearing on screen. I said, we were done
with the logo animation but there's actually one last
change that we need to make. You'll notice that as
the logo is moving here it might not look the most realistic, and that's because for human eyes, when we see an object moving quickly we see some blur artifacts
in there as well. And you'll actually add
that in after effects it's called motion blur. All you have to do is
click this button here to enable the motion blur
option for all layers, and then make sure you have
it enabled for our logo layer by ticking this box here. And you can see instantly
as soon as we enable that it goes from a sharp
image to a blurry one, and it looks much more natural as it's moving through the composition. Now, we don't want this logo to stay in the middle of the screen throughout our whole of our looping video. Once the animation has finished roughly at about 50 frames in, we can actually end the logo
and stop showing it on screen. So to do that have our logo layer selected and go to about 50 frames in and press control shift D, which will split the layer at that point, and then we can just press the delete key which will get rid of the hop split layer. And then we have our
logo appearing on screen and then disappearing about 50 frames in. So next we're going to add
some texts to our video and to do that we need to make sure that we're showing certain
windows in After Effects. So come up to the window option here and make sure that you
have the align character and paragraph options enabled, and they'll show somewhere
on the right hand side here. To make sure first text layer we can go, right-click here, new text. And then we're going to
type out the word, Now. To play around with the
font color and sizing, we're going to open up
our character options here to make sure that we can change our font. I'm going to use Montserrat, and I think black is
the biggest one there, and we're going to change the color from this horrible green
to that Gaming Career is just off brown whites. I'll leave all of the hex codes that I use down in the description, but obviously feel free
to play around with fonts, colors, sizes, whatever you want. It really is your playground to play with. And size-wise, I reckon
anything around 200 pixels of the words that we're going to be using, I'll set mine to 190 there. And then you'll notice that's not in the very
center of our composition. So to make sure that we're centering it make sure that the paragraph is centered, so it's not left aligned or right aligned it's center aligned and then go to the align tab and click this button to align it horizontally in the center and then this button to align
it vertically in the center. The word Now isn't actually going
to show on screen on its own, it's going to show Now Live, so let's duplicate this layer by highlighting it and pressing control D and then we can double click on the layer and actually type up the word Live and you can see them laid
on top of each other, so you can't really read
the words different. But if we change the
color of the word Live by opening part character options, clicking this button, and then entering in any hex code, I'm going to use Gaming Career's red, you can see that there's
two different words here Now and Live and we need to play around
with the position key frames. Let's start by doing the Live layer and positioning that properly. So highlight it, press P on your keyboard to bring up the position key frames, and just like we did with the logo, we're going to work backwards. So let's go to a round about 110, 130 and you can see the time over here, so that means one second and 13 frames in somewhere around here is where we want Now Live to be in their final positions. So let's add a position key
frame by clicking the stopwatch and then you can just use the right and left arrows on your keyboard
to position these properly. So I'm going to hold down the right arrow until roughly we think
it's in the final position that it's going to be in for it to read. So I know that Now it's
going to move to the left, so somewhere around about there is the final position
that I'm going to keep, and that key frame has now been added. If we move back a little bit in time, maybe 10 frames or so we are going to position this
completely off the screen. So again, we can hold down the
right arrow on our keyboard to move this. If you want to move it quicker, you can hold shift and right, and I think it sort of moves
at 10 pixels at a time, something like that. But now we have this really
bad animation of Live coming in from the right-hand side. For the Now text layer, we once again press P on our keyboard to bring up the position key frames. And we want this to start in the center of the screen
where it is currently so let's add a key frame there. And then at this end point at 113, where we have the Live coming in and ending and its real position, we want to move this to the left, just so that it reads properly. So let's leave a normal space gaps something along the lines
of that I think looks great. Now, if we play this back, there's a couple of changes
that I want to make. I want it to sort of
appear like the word Live is pushing the word Now out of the way. So to do that we're just going to move
this person key frame on the Now layer, to
the right a little bit, some things around about there. And now if we play it back, you can see that Now doesn't start moving until Live gets much closer to it. Last things that we're going to do is obviously enable the
motion blur for both layers, so tick that for both layers and you can see it adds the motion blur and then we're just going to Easy
Ease all of these key frames. So highlight them all, right click, key frame assistant, Easy Ease. And now if we play it back, you can see it's much more animated and we get that nice pushing
the word Now out of the way. Just like with the logo, we don't want these to stay on screen throughout the whole video, so about one second and 35
frames in somewhere around here we're going to end both these layers. So make sure you have them both selected by holding down shift and
clicking on both of them and then control shift
D, to split the layers and the delete key to delete the split. And then we can see that
it now pops in Now Live and it's ready to move
on to our next word. Next word is super simple,
it's just On no animation, so let's do as we have done before. Right click new text, type out the word On we're going to highlight it, change the color back to
white or whatever color it is that you want to use. And then we're going to use the paragraph make sure it's center aligned and then align it in
the center horizontally and vertically to make sure it's in the very center of a composition. Again, we don't want this to start at the very start of our composition, so come to where we want it to begin drag this across to the right so that it appears once
Now Life has disappeared. And then we want to end
this layer at about 155, so that's been on screen
for a short amount of time. So control shift D to split the layer, delete to delete the split, and now we have the next word added. So we should be getting pretty used to adding new text layers now, but this next one we're
going to add is the platform, so Twitch.tv in our case but Youtube.com or Facebook or whatever platform you're streaming to. Again, we come down here, right click new text, and then we're going to type out Twitch.tv forward slash so
it's going to be the full URL. And we can see it's appearing
on top of our current layer but don't worry about that, we'll fix that in a second. So let's do exactly
what we've done before, let's start by changing the color. Actually, we need to
highlight all of the text here before we changed the color. So I'm going to use Twitch purple here, again, I will leave all the hex codes that I've used down in
the description below if you do want to copy them, or you can just find the Twitch hex code with a Google search. So Twitch in purple, we're going to make sure it's
center aligned in a paragraph and then align it
horizontally and vertically in the very center. And then we want this to appear when On disappears from screen. So drag this across to the right to make sure that it's
not overlapping at all, and then we have Twitch.tv. But we're going to add another
different effect onto this, where it actually looks
like it's typing out the dot tv forward slash parts. So it's going to say Twitch and then dot tv is going to be typed out and to do that, we're going
to be using an effect. So to add an effect, we need to make sure that After Effects is
showing the effect window. So come up to a window make sure that we have this one
Effects and Presets enabled. And then over here maybe
on the right hand side or wherever you have it set up, you can type in the word type writer, and there's going to be a
text effect called type writer that we can drag and place onto our Twitch.tv layer. Now you'll notice that the
word Twitch has disappeared. If we drag our mouse
across the timeline here, or just play it back, you'll see that it is
actually typing it out, but we want to play
around with this animation and make it much quicker. And we also want to make sure that we're starting with the word Twitch. So to do that we're going to pop open the Twitch.tv properties here then go to text and then animator one, and you can see that we already have, if we open up range selector, we already have these two key frames which is where the animation starts and the animation is complete, so 0% and 100% on our typewriter. So the first thing we can do is actually increase the
speed of this animation by bringing the 100%
key frame to the right to end somewhere around
about here I would say, and then we're going to have a
much quicker typing animation. But like we said before we don't want it to
start with nothing typed, we want it to start with
the word Twitch typed. So if we bring our timeline across to this first key frame,
make sure it's highlighted and then we can drag the start percentage from zero to the right until we have the word Twitch typed out, we don't want the full stop, so somewhere around about there 63% with the font that I've used. And now it's going to
start with the word Twitch, and then add on the dot
tv as we need it to. Now if we watch this back, it's still looks a little bit naff, and that is mainly I think,
because the word Twitch when it's on its own is to the left. You can see that something else
needs to come to the right, so this would look a lot
cooler if Twitch word was in the middle and then
as dot tv was typed out and moved across to always be centered. So to do that, it's really, really simple. We're going to play around with the position key frames again, let's drag our timeline to
the finished key frame here where the full word is typed out, open up our transform property
so that we can see position and add a key frame here 'cause this is the position
we want it to be in at this point. But if we move back in time to when just the word Twitch is typed, here in this key frame,
we want to center this. So again we can use
the right and left keys to center this word and I'm just going to eyeball this. You can probably get super technical with rulers and things like that to make sure it's completely centered. There's something rough around about there looks about, right, and if we play this back, you can see the word Twitch is in the middle and then as dot tv gets typed out, it moves to the left to make
sure that it's always centered. Now because we've added
a little bit of motion to this layer, it's worth adding the motion blur by again, ticking this box here, just as it's moving, it's going
to add a little bit of blur and look much smoother. We can now close all
the properties for that and watch it back. So Twitch.tv, that's looking really nice, Now Live on Twitch.tv. We just want to end this layer when the full word is typed out. So somewhere around about
just before three seconds, 250 is what I've got it set to. Control shift D, delete the top layer and then let's have a look
at what we've got so far. Nice. Okay, so making really good progress. The last thing that we have to do in terms of text animation is that username stack that
I've shown in the beginning, probably the most complicated effect that we're covering today, but certainly not impossible. If you follow along, you
can have it done in no time. So it does apply a
couple of new techniques but the reason I wanted to use this effect is 'cause it teaches you about masks, which is a super important feature in Photoshop and After
Effects and Premiere Pro and all these kind of editing programs where you can make sure
you hide certain things behind a mask. So let's do as we have
done so many times before right click, new text layer, and we're going to type
out the word Username, obviously here, write
out your real username. And if it takes up too
much room on your screen, you can play around with the size and do whatever you need to do. Use a custom font, however you want to do it. I'm going to just write the word username and I'm going to change it back to the Gaming Careers's off-white and Oh, I need to
highlight the whole layer to be able to do that. Gamin Careers off-white. And again as always,
we're going to make sure it's center aligned and then aligned
vertically and horizontally in the center as well. As always, we want to make sure that this starts when the
Twitch.tv layer has finished, let's drag this to the right to make sure it doesn't
appear before then, and then we can see that it's
showing at the right time. Okay, so this is our sort
of placeholder username that is always going to show in the very center of our screen. So what we're going to do is come across to our lay here, right click and go to pre-composed, and here we can just type in username and we want to make sure that we're moving all attributes
into the new composition. This is just because we're going to be duplicating this layer and adding those stacks above and below and adding different
masks to each of those. But we still want to
always be able to come back and change this word if we need to, and it will update for all of the stacks, so that's why we've got to pre compose it. So let's create that first stack, which is going to move from the middle and move up just once. So let's duplicate the username layer by control D, press P to open
up the position key frames, make sure our timelines at the beginning add a position key
frameworks in the center and then move forward,
roughly 20 frames or so, and we're going to move it up just by using the up and down arrow. So we're going to move up, so there's still a little bit of overlap which we'll get rid of
when we start to use a mask something around about there. Next we'll play around with the actual animation
of these key frames, so highlight them both,
right click and Easy Ease. And then we're going to go back into the graph editor,
highlight both of the key frames and drag these anchor points as far right and left as they go. So they go all the way
to a hundred percent. So this animation is
really going to go slow, pick up a lot of speed and then a lot of speed
back down to slow again. So if we watch back this animation just for the top username, we can see that's looking
exactly as we want it to do. We just want to add that mask in. Before we add the mask for
the top stack, let's make sure that we've got the bottom
stack done as well. So let's take this top
stack that we've done duplicate that layer and drag it down to the bottom, just so we keep a nice border and open up the position
key frames for that. And then if we highlight the
second position key frame for the bottom stack we just want to change this to be down. So we can now hold down the down arrow. We want it to roughly match up with the same position
as the up one was so I'm looking at this A gap
here to be able to do it. So there's a little gap between the A, I'm just going to sort of
match that gap here as well. And if we play that back we've got the exact same
animation of it going up and down. So before we add our masks we need to pre compose
both of these layers again. So take the top one,
which is our top stack right click pre compose,
and do this as top text. We want to make sure that
we're doing this option move all attributes into
the new composition. And then we do the exact
same for the bottom one right click, pre compose, going to call this bottom text make sure we have this
option enabled and okay. And now we have our
placeholder in the middle and our first stack above
and our first stack below. So to add a mask, let's
start with the top stack. So highlight the top stack, and we're going to add a mask while going up to layer, mask, new mask, and then you can see it's
added a rectangle mask for us. All we have to do is use
the up and down arrows, so up arrow for the top one, going to keep dragging this up until we've deleted a little
bit of this top username. So you can see as we're
moving up now it's deleting it and we want to leave a small
gap, something like that. And you can see there it's masked out the
bottom of this top stack which is exactly what we want. We want to repeat that
for the bottom text, so highlight the bottom text layer, layer, mask, new mask, and then instead of using the up arrow, we're going to use the
down arrow on this one and just delete the top bit of the, or not delete but mask
out the top of the text with a similar sort of gap. As you can see now we have the top and bottom
stack, the first stack done. And now really all we're
going to do is duplicate this a couple more times to
add a couple more stacks. So let's create our next stack, that's really easy to do. All we need to do is
duplicate our top text layer by control D, and then we're going to actually move the position of this full layer just by using the up and down arrows until we're roughly in place. What I'd recommend doing here to make sure that you're
making the same gap again to create the same gap again, but we want this to be
a smaller mask don't we? So what I would actually
do is update the mask first and then update the position. So with the layer enabled like this press M on your keyboard
to bring up the mask, click to highlight the mask and then use the up and down arrows to actually change the mask position. So we're going to make this a smaller mask something around about here, and then we can go back to the layer without the mask highlighted and use the up and down arrows again, to move this back into place. So we want to leave a similar
sort of gap that we left before and end up with something like this. Maybe move that up just one more pixel and a gap like that looks perfect. To repeat this whole
process for the bottom, I'll try and explain it again in case we didn't get that, duplicate the bottom text layer we're going to move the
position of it first using the up and down arrows
and just to put it into place. And before we create the mask, we want to put it into position where there's a small gap
obviously we want this layer to be masked off even more. So highlight that layer, press M on your keyboard
to bring up the mask, highlight the mask, again use up and down in your keyboard to delete a little bit more. And we're going to match
this up with the top one, so about there will be right, and then de-select the mask re select the layer and then use up and down
in the keyboards again, to position this in the
correct place with a gap, something similar to that. If you want one more stack,
repeat the process once more, I'll do that quickly now. (ethereal music) So we now have three stacks above and three stacks below our
username placeholder layer. And if we play this back, you can see it doesn't look great just because they all animate
at the exact same time. So we're going to offset
some of the animations, which is super easy to do. So here is our placeholder
username, the one in the center. We want that to start right away at two seconds and 50 frames in, then we forward, roughly 15 frames or so we want the next stack to start here. So highlight the first top tech stack and control click the
bottom tech stack as well to select them both. and then drag these both to the right. Then move forward, maybe 10 frames or so we're going to do the
same with the next stack. So select this layer control click the bottom
layer to move them across. And then finally, 10 frames
further, we want the top and the very top and the very, very bottom
stack to start as well. And if we now show this, you can see that they sort of fan out animating one at the time, which is great. Last thing to do is enable motion blur for
all of these layers, 'cause there is some movement on them all except for
the center one, I guess. And then we have a really
nice looking animation. The final thing we're
going to do with this stack is actually play around with the colors. And this is something
that's super simple to do, we don't have to go back into
loads of animation presets. We're just going to drag an effect onto any layers that we want
to change the color for. So up to you, if you want to, you can play around and
use any colors you want. I'm just going to actually
make them slightly more gray but play around with
the opacity to do that. So to do that, we come back up to our effects
and presets panel here, where we typed in typewriter earlier, and we're going to type in fill. We want to make sure that we're taking the generate fill effect dragging that onto our username layer. You can see that that's changed the middle username layer completely red which we obviously don't want. So we come up here to
the effect control panel and we want to change the color red back to our original color or whatever color you want
the center layer to be, so for me, that's white. But actually this is really useful 'cause we're now going to
copy and paste this effect into all of the other layers. So to do that, just highlight
the full effect up here control C like you would
on any computer program, and then we'll take the top first stack and paste it in here, and it's going to paste
the effect properties. Or you could change the color
to whatever you would like if you want the first tank
to be a different color. But what I'm actually going to do is play around with the opacity, which is going to make it
look like a different color but really it's just getting
more and more opaque. So I'm going to change it from 100% opacity to 70% and you can see that makes
it look a little bit gray. We're going to copy and paste this effect to the first bottom layer to
give it the exact same color. You can probably see where this is going, we're going to go up to the second stack paste the effect in and change it to 50%, which is going to give it
a slightly darker gray, copy that and paste it to the bottom to give it the same color. And then finally for the top effect, we're going to change it to 30% copy and paste that down
to the bottom stack. And now you can see we have this really nice stacking effect where the shades of white
gets slightly greyer. Now, the reason we put so much effort in pre composing all of those layers is because if you ever want
to change this username if you want to maybe render out a graphic for one of your friends
or something like that it's really simple to do now, all we have to do is go
into our placeholder layer this one in the center,
double click to open it and then change whatever we write in here. So it can change from username
to whatever you want it to, and if we go back to our
now life GIF composition you can see the animation is updated and the text is all updated as well. Now our composition is starting
to look a little bit messy, so I'm just going to grab all of these by clicking the bottom one
shift and clicking the top one and pre composed all of
these into a composition just going to call this Stacked Username. And again, move all attributes
into the new composition, and you can see now we just have one layer which controls all of
the static usernames. So if we watch back
this full animation now you can see that we have
all of our text in place and it's looking really good, but what I want to happen is
for the stack of usernames to open and then actually close as well. So right now they're just open and stay on screen until
the GIF reloops again. So to be able to do that, don't worry, we don't have to go about creating that whole
animation again in reverse. We can actually just duplicate this layer and play it backwards. So go to roughly on
your timeline somewhere where the animation has finished somewhere around four seconds. We're going to do control shift D make sure we have our layer selected, control shift D, delete the top layer, and then we just have this stack opening and then disappearing off screen. So what we're going to do
is duplicate this stack with control D and then move this across so that the animation is playing twice. So right now it's going to
play open and then open again. So what we want to do is
reverse this second layer, so it starts to open and then closes. So highlight it here, right click, go to time and then time reverse layer, and now if we play that back, you can see it opens the stack and
then plays in reverse, which is looking perfect. One thing that I noticed
that we forgot to do is just make sure that we
have enabled the motion blur for both of these layers as well, since they're now pre compositions, and then the last thing
that I want to do here is just I'm not happy
with how this username disappears off screen like that. Just looks a little bit plain
for it to be purely curt. So what we're going to do
is add a white transition just to wipe across the word username, to make it a little bit more clean at the end of our animation. So to do that, it's really
simple, there's an effect for it so come across to your effects
and presets panel again, type in wipe, or wipe's not going to
give us enough options, so linear, there we are, linear wipe, and make sure you're not
taking the presets one, we're actually taking the
transition linear wipe here, drag it down onto our second
duplicated layer there. And you can see it's probably
not done anything so far because there are no presets. So what we want to do is
pop open the panel here go to effects, linear wipe and you can see we have
three different controls here transition completion,
wipe angle, and feather. Wipe angle is fine at 90 degrees, 'cause we want this to
wipe from left to right, so what we want to do
is position our timeline roughly when it's just the
single username on its own we're going to add a transition
completion key frame here at 0% and then move forward in time to the end and then up this from
0% all the way to 100%. And now if we watch this back you can see we wipe across the username. It just looks a little
bit harsh, this line here. So what I'm going to do is add a feather, something around about 20, and you can see that adds a
little bit of feather there, and you can see now it looks super clean. If we watched back the full animation we should have a really nice looping GIF. (ethereal music) Okay, so animation has been finished now, we're very, very happy with
the project that we've got. The last step is actually
to export it as a GIF so that we can include it in Tweets and Discord messages and things like that. And that sounds like it
should be very easy to do but actually it's kind of complicated. So I'm going to go with
the easiest method, which I think is to export as an MP4 and then use an online converter to convert it into GIF format. That means we don't have to
mess around with PNG sequences and importing into Photoshop and loads of other complications. It's just a nice, simple way to do it. And then you'll also have
an MP4 version of this, if you want to include it in any videos. So to explore it as an MP4, all we have to do is
come up to file export, add to Adobe Media Encoder queue, which means it's going to
open up Adobe Media Encoder which it comes included
with After Effects, and we're going to be able to customize some of the options there. Once that opens up, we're going to get some
different options here. You might not have H.264
selected as your format to start, but don't worry. Just click whatever word is here, and we can actually change
it to H.264 very easily. So you should get a window like this, and you want to change
the format to H.264. This is going to make an MP4 file that's really readable by a
lot of the online converters. In terms of export video and audio, we obviously don't have
audio, so we just have video and here you can choose exactly where you want to save the video, so I'm going to save
this one to my desktop. Now in the video settings, you can customize things
like the width and height and the frame rate. So if you do want to try
a lower resolution GIF you can do so here or you can customize those
things in the online converter. I'm going to export my now as 1920 by 1080 and 60 frames per second, exactly as we set up in the project. I don't think any of the
options need to be changed here. A bit rate of 10 megabits per
second is absolutely plenty. So you can just hit, okay, and then this little start
arrow here to start the render. So since it's such a small animation it should only take a few
seconds to render out, and the last thing we need to do is convert the MP4 to a GIF. So I've included a link down
in the description below to my favorite MP4 to GIF converter it's very, very simple, you simply select the MP4 file
that we've just rented out. Our target format is a GIF, and then we have some options if we want to change
the video size bit rate, frame rate or aspect ratio. One thing I will mention is it's worth here changing the frame rate from 60 like we rented it out down to 30, if you're going to be using this GIF on places like Twitter and Discord, just because Twitter and Discord, they don't actually play
back 60 FPS GIFS very well, they sort of playback at half speed. And so you need to change
the frame right here to 30 if you're wanting to use
the GIF on those platforms. But it was useful to
render our video in 60 FPS, because then we can use that video project in any other videos that we make if you want an N card for
YouTube or anything like that, but we're going to change
the frame rate here to 30. And you can of course
change the video size down here to something
like 720 P if you wish to, but 1920 by 1080 should be fine. This shouldn't be too big of a file size. So once we've set that up, we can simply click convert now let it do a thing, it'll only take a couple
of minutes really, and then we can save it and send it off to Twitter and Discord. Okay, so the conversion has finished, all we have to do now is come over here to the output file name, where we have our GIF, right click, save link as,
save this wherever we want, I'm going to save it to my desktop, and you can see now we
have a two megabyte GIF which is absolutely fine for places like Twitter and Discord. And if you need to lower the file size I would recommend firstly starting with the resolution and lowering that from 1080 P, you can see a really high
quality lovely looking motion GIF that we can include in our Now Live Tweets or our Discord messages
or anywhere like that. Hopefully this video has been helpful and you've learned a few
new things in After Effects, and you can now take those on
and be as creative as you can. Please feel free to play around with this. I want to see different words, different colors, different logos, whole different animations,
playing around with where things are appearing
and disappearing from. But I would love if you
could share those with me on Twitter, I love seeing
what you guys create when I teach something new in a video. So I hope this wasn't too
complicated to follow, I've tried my best to keep it simple but still create something
that you guys want to use at the end of the day. Obviously the project file, like I mentioned at the beginning is in the Gaming Careers Discord, if you want to have a look
at the finished project, and ever to compare anything, but I'll catch you guys
in the next video, peace. (ethereal music) This stool is getting way too creaky to sit super still. How'd he make this look natural this whole like touch the
camera thing. (laughs)
