SMOOTH Lower Thirds in After Effects! (EASY TO MAKE!)

hey everybody welcome into this Adobe After Effects tutorial brought to you as always by Chuck vidcom if you're new around here my name is Nathaniel Dodson today we're gonna take a look at creating this little lower third type of fact it's just a fast relatively easy to create smooth lower third I'll show you how to create a motion graphics template out of it as well so you can easily ship it over to Premiere and replace the contents on the fly as you edit in Premiere it's really really easy to do it's a whole bunch of fun if you enjoy this tutorial you want to see more After Effects and Premiere tutorials make sure you subscribe to the channel hit that subscribe button and the bail notification because the subscribe button as we've learned lately doesn't do that much to keep you informed when new videos come out ladies and gentlemen let's get into this video right now okay I have my video here in After Effects and the first thing I'm gonna do is right-click it and choose new comp from selection new composition that is from selection there is my video in my little layers area I'm gonna right click on the video out here and choose transform and choose flip horizontal because I want my lower third to come out of the sort of lower left corner area and this just looks a little more natural next I'm gonna hit this little tiny icon here and I'm gonna choose to turn on titles and action safe area right here and I'm going to grab my rectangle tool now if I just begin drawing out with this layer selected it's gonna create a mask I don't want to do that so I want to make sure I click over here to just deselect and then I will drag out a lower third type shape something about this big you see how big that is and I'm aligning it with the bottom line of my sort of safe area now we can make this taller shorter you know longer or whatever we'll adjust the size of this a little bit later but you can see I've got a fill of this sort of tea lush color I'm just gonna set it to black and I also have a two pixel stroke I am well I don't want to change the color of it I'm just gonna hit the word stroke and I'm gonna say look cancel out the stroke we don't want a stroke for this and hit OK now I'm gonna select shape layer 1 hit the Enter or return key and I'm gonna name this a base shape just like that so I know what it is again I'm gonna deselect this and I'm gonna grab my text tool you can see we're not quite exactly on that bottom line but we're close enough that I'm okay with it I'm gonna click a single time and I'm gonna type maybe this guy's name or a made-up name I'm gonna stick Jack the Ripper how about that and then command return that's ctrl enter on the PC to commit the change now the text that I'm using here is a font called Antonio and it is a bold wait I've got 75 pixels for my size and align heart line height of 210 really the line height doesn't matter for us here but what I am doing is setting it to all caps see and instead of Jack the Ripper all lowercase I want it to be all caps and then over here in my paragraph panel I just want to make sure that I'm aligning to the left so I'm going to move this over so it kind of begins right where the outer most safe margin line is that way when we come in and replace names we can do that and by the way when you're creating your lower thirds you probably want them all to be the same size so what you'll want to do is go through your film your documentary whatever you're doing and find the person with the longest name then you can make sure that you create a base shape that is long enough to accommodate even the longest names so I could push this out to like here and you can see you know we have yeah sure Jack the Ripper but we can handle something a little bit longer than Jack the Ripper as well and by the way if you want to make this a little bit longer see our little center point is all the way up here in the middle of the video what we can do is over here our Pan behind tool you could hold down your command option or ctrl Alt key just double click that and it's going to move that point back to the center of our shape and then we can use our scale tool and we can just scale this out a little bit something like that and then maybe I'll drag it over a little and we could make our lower third a little bit longer for us just like that all right I'm gonna select my text and I'm gonna duplicate it command or control D and I'm gonna drag it straight down holding the shift key to keep everything kind of in place now I'm gonna come back to my character panel and I'm gonna change my font to Adobe Garamond so I'm gonna find Adobe Garamond right there Adobe Garamond Pro I'm gonna change the size to 45 pixels line height here I'm gonna set to auto we may adjust that a little bit I am gonna set the leading to 40 or letting I should say to 40 because I want a little bit of space there and instead of this being all caps I'm gonna set it to small caps which what that's gonna do if you can see it's gonna really capitalize and make the first letter of each word or really any letter that I make a capital letter it's gonna make it much bigger than the rest of the text so I'm gonna select this text I'm going to move it up a little bit maybe kind of like that double click on the text and I'm gonna type out something like professor of humanities Columbia University great and you can see just like that we have our texts in place I can now adjust again you're going to want to make sure this is also aligned to the left this is gonna make it easier later on when you decide you want to change the text a little bit for this you can very quickly swap in and out and I can shut off my guides now and see what the lower third would look like now that I'm looking at what me actually want to make the lower third a little bit less wide something sort of like that I think will be a little better for us and as I'm looking at it I think I'm gonna shift-click both pieces of text and nudge them down we're just a couple pixels trying to get it aligned as best as best we can right there in our lower third base shape all right with the lower third base shape what I'm gonna do is select it and hit the letter T which is going to open up the opacity setting and I'm gonna reduce the opacity to 25% look at that and what we're gonna do here is animate this shape and then we'll duplicate it a couple times but I'm noticing here I misspelled professor sorry for those of you who have noticed it for the last couple minutes I'm in screaming at your screen there we go professor of humanities Columbia University but let's take this a base shape and animate it so it begins off screen it's totally gone and then it slides out and bounces into place here's how we're gonna do it select base shape and hit the letter s for scale and the first thing we'll do is we will uncheck the little chain link which is going to constrain those proportions I don't want to touch them and we're gonna simply change the width here so this is the scaling of the width and scale it way down to zero but you can see we have a problem it's scaling to the center instead of scaling off screen so how do we change that well we're gonna select our shape we're gonna grab our pan behind tool and I'm gonna grab that center point hold down command or control and just move over and you'll feel it snap to that Center far left point right there and leave that there now what we can do is set our width to zero and the whole lower third is now compressed down into that thin little sliver we're gonna hit this little stopwatch next to the word scale to begin our animation it drops that keyframe and then we'll come out I don't know a second let's go a second we'll do it more than a second if we have to and we're gonna reset our width to what was at about a hundred and seven percent and then deselect and we can see here the animation that we just created it's relatively simple it's going to want to render the video for us but we can see here just a relatively simple animation nothing fancy let's make it a little fancier though shift-click both of those keyframes and we're gonna right click and choose keyframe assistant and easy ease them and then with them still selected I'm going to click on this little graph editor icon now look at this this looks fancy when I use my plus button on my keyboard to zoom in on this a little bit I'm even going to make this a little bit bigger here so we can really see what we're doing we'll keep an eye on our animation up here what I want to do is make this bounce in but shoot out past it's finished point and then snap back to it and I'm gonna do that here by grabbing or clicking on this bottom point and grabbing the tangent handle for it and pulling down and maybe over this way a little bit let's go something like that let's see what this looks like it's gonna come through its gonna shoot past and snap back see that so it comes out and boom pops right back into place just a really cool smooth little animation looks really professional and just really nice so here's how we're gonna have fun with this I'm gonna click on graph editor to get out of here and let's duplicate our base shape twice so I'm gonna select it commander control D command or ctrl D now what I'm gonna do is come down here to my base shape to layer a twirl down transform remember we edited our scale and I'm gonna take this and say look shifts like both these keyframes maybe but wait until about the 7 frame mark before you begin animating and then also with these two keyframes selected go to graph editor and let's just change up maybe we'll make this shoot out even further and do something crazier let me zoom out a little here so I can see what's going on I'm gonna pull the tangent handle down this way a little bit more so this is gonna be a really extreme see that see how it's kind of two parts bouncing into place now right I mean that's a little it might be a little too extreme let's back that off just a little bit and then we'll come up here to the third base shape I'm gonna twirl down transform let's get out of graph editor once more I'm gonna select both of these keyframes let's move these so the first keyframe starts around the 10 frame mark right if I open up base shapes to see the first keyframe this animation is beginning at about you know 7 frames something like that so this is good and I'm gonna collapse base shape to again here in base shape 3 let's hit graph editor and let's just tweak this as well let's make this shoot down quite a bit something like that and we can look and see we're gonna have this multiple - sort of three-pronged effect now as everything bounces right into place so we building out the first part of this effect all right let's collapse base shape - let's duplicate this commander control D I'm gonna hit the enter or return key and I'm gonna type the word stroke because this is gonna be our stroke layer let's get out of the graph editor as well I'm gonna twirl this down let's go down to transform and I'm gonna select both of the scale keyframes and just get rid of them so we're not gonna we're not gonna hang on to them what I want to do here is go into contents and we have this little Add button I'll click on the Add button and say look add an offset paths here that's gonna you can see that expands the path around what we have and I'm gonna twirl open offset pounds I'm gonna say look offset this 15 pixels essentially move it out away from the edge by 15 pixels now it just looks like we've added more of our 25 percent opacity black fill to this so I'm gonna come down here to rectangle and actually I'm gonna go into transform first so use the transform parameters applied to the contents of our shape layer down here you can see opacity it's still at 25% so we're gonna set that back to 100 it's gonna make it solid black don't worry don't panic nothing to fear here we're gonna go up to rectangle and we're gonna say hey look rectangle you have a fill applied to you you also have the potential to add a stroke to you that's what I'm interested in look the stroke is shut off remember we shut off the stroke way back early in this tutorial up here in the top toolbar let's shut off the fill and we're gonna turn on the stroke and here I'm gonna twirl down stroke I'm gonna select the color and the color that I want to go with is well I actually have in place already 0 0 is CB d6 I'm gonna hit OK and then I'm gonna change stroke width here from 2 pixels to let's go 5 pixels make it a little bit more unnoticeable and here's where the fun begins let's collapse stroke let's collapse rectangle we're gonna go back to our little add menu and choose to add a trim path as to this and here for the trim path we want to drag this all the way down beneath the offset paths right there so here's trim paths and what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna start this at frame 0 and I'm gonna say hey look I want to animate the both end and start parameters but I'm gonna begin with end first so I'm going to say end I actually want you to be 0 and and I'm gonna set the offsets to like I don't know let's go 1 by 65 degrees something like that so let's begin with end and I'm gonna hit the stopwatch to drop a keyframe and then I'll move about I don't know 10 20 frames maybe something like that I mean maybe about 20 a little over 20 frames a little less than a second and then I'm gonna set end to 100% so what's going to happen we'll see the the path is just gonna draw itself around the shape but it's going to begin here at the bottom Center that begin point is what we set here when we chose this offset 1x 65° that's what you're looking at you can play with this instead it's whatever you want I'm just setting it to this because of what I know is coming later now I'm going to come in a couple frames and I'm going to animate the start position so I'm gonna go start from zero and then I'm gonna animate start up to 100 now what this is going to do as you can see it's gonna wipe away the stroke that was just created so now we're gonna have this effect where the stroke appears to be shooting around our lower third and see how that effect works pretty cool right now this is just the first stroke so we're gonna collapse all the stuff and I want to do two more of these strokes and adjust them so command or control D - well make sure we select a stroke layer commander control deem we've got our stroke layer selected I'm gonna come down to contents I am gonna go to the offset paths because that's what I want to play with first you can see I have to trim pounds that's because I shrimp have selected the first time I hit command or control D so I duplicated the trim paths that means here on the original stroke in the contents there's another trim pounds just make sure you have your layer selected and not like that individual effects see commander control D it makes the second trim paths we don't want that so here up on stroke two we are going to adjust the offset paths first I'm gonna reduce this to ten I'm also going to go into rectangle and I'm gonna change the color of the stroke so here under stroke I'm gonna change the color of the stroke - let's go with like an FF eight one zero zero so more of an orange color stroke with the v is still great and I'll collapse rectangle Weaver offset set to ten and we're gonna come down here to trim paths I'm gonna change the offset first and foremost I'm gonna set it to like two by I don't know let's go like two hundred and eighty degrees something kind of crazy and then what I'll do is start and finish is I'm just going to adjust them all adjust how fast they happen where they begin where they end all that stuff in fact you can even select all these keyframes right click keyframe assistant easy ease them as well so now we're gonna have you can see is multiple lines beginning at different times beginning at different places animating around our lower as it pops out from the side of the video this is great I'm gonna collapse trim pounds make sure we select the stroke to layer command or ctrl D to duplicate stroke to open that up and here I'm gonna go to offset first and foremost we're gonna reduce that from 10 to 5 pixels so it's a little bit closer even to our lower third now I'm gonna go back to rectangle and under the stroke I'm gonna choose a different color I want to go with more of a red so I'm gonna stick with FF I'm gonna say zero zero one five so more of a red color collapse the stroke and then I'll come down to trim pads in fact I'll collapse the whole rectangle area trim pads here I'm gonna set my offset to like 2x but I'm gonna reduce the the angle to like I don't know 125 something right around there is good and then I'm gonna push this out even further so we have our our lines sort of wrapping up add a little bit of a different time so something kind of like that and we can scroll through and see we have all these colored lines now shooting around our lower third as it drops and dips into place and I want I want my final line to kind of disappear right as right as the black of the the base of the lower third comes into place right so you can see how it all come together really nicely Bing just into place and the red shoots off the screen all right I can collapse this one other kind of interesting thing you can do is you can simply select the base shape layers and if you have your normal black arrow selection tool selected you can change the fill color so I'm gonna just move my timeline down a little bit we could say hey you know what I might want the fill to be more like let me grab the eyedropper here maybe this this really cyan color you can see that's already changing the color remember it's only 25% opacity let's go to base shape too let's kind of do the same thing grab the eyedropper maybe we'll choose that same color off the background you know for this particular frame obviously you're gonna have different frames in your film and your documentary whatever or just having a little fun here base shape and maybe we'll go with that same color so that's a little bit too strong so maybe I'll take this and darken it up a little bit maybe darken and desaturate a little something like that and now we're gonna have an animation that kind of flows with the entire look of our composition here and it's got those cool little colored lines that that shoot out and around and through it and it just looks really neat in fact one in one interesting thing you could do is shift select all three stroke and drag them beneath the base shaped layer that way when the strokes are passing underneath the semi-transparent panes of sliding lower third base shape it's actually going to affect them and add another layer of effect to what you're working on and can just make it look that much cooler and now what we want to do is create the masks to make our text fade in or slide in I should say so I'm gonna make sure no layer is selected grab the rectangle tool and just drag out a rectangle the color doesn't matter I want to drag it all the way out to the edge of my lower third good because remember we want to make these lower thirds work for even longer names then I'm gonna select this shape you can see I'm selecting the rectangle shape I actually want to make sure I select the shape layer you can see I've got my center point way out here so I am going to hold down command option double click a pan behind to get that back in the middle of my shape grab that center point hold down commander control and click it all the way over there to the left side of my well what's gonna be my mask now I'm gonna grab my selection arrow I'm gonna make sure I select that and I'm gonna look to see all right where do where should my texts start to come out so maybe like right about there when the final sliding piece of the lower third base is coming into place I'll start it there so I'm gonna select my shape layer I'm gonna hit the letter s for scale unlink the proportions and here I'm going to set this to zero you can see it looks like our shape disappeared that's totally fine hit the little stopwatch to begin our animation here and then over the course of just a couple frames maybe it's a like right there I'm going to reset the width to 100 and at this point it would uncover the entire name would be uncovered we're gonna select both of these keyframes right click keyframe assistant easy ease and there we have our little mask which is going to unfurl our text and how you might be saying what in the world it's not unfertile in anything I'll show you how to set that up in just a second let's let's go ahead and select this shape layer 1 hit the enter return key and I'm gonna call this text 1 mask because this can be sort of our primary text I'm gonna drag it just above the Jack the Ripper layer before I do anything here I'm going to duplicate this commander ctrl D and drag this up above the professor of humanities text layer I'm going to rename this text to mask and we're going to move this down and animate as well so let's just drag it straight down and you can see the animation is essentially already in place what we may want to do is open up scaling and we don't need a keyframe anything we're just going to maybe scale it the the vertical - I don't know 105 percent something like that but look what happens when we do that we're dropping another keyframe obviously we want to delete that let me show you a better way to do this we want to expand this a little bit so let's actually open up the text to mask layer we don't want to transform the whole layer let's go into the contents into the rectangle we could select the rectangle path here which is well we could we are going to and I have my size options here so I'm gonna unlink them and say look instead of being 96 tall let's make you a hundred and three tall something like that maybe it may well make it a more like a hundred and six tall how about that and then we would nudge the whole thing downward just a couple a couple arrow key clicks and now we can just make sure that if if we have a little bit more text there or we have a letter that hangs down lower or whatever it may be everything's going to be covered for this mask as well and the timing should probably be about the same it maybe what we'll do is make it start a little bit later we'll do that pretty easily here by opening this up we'll go down to our transform our scale right we have our keyframes right here let's say when the first bit of text is about halfway finished that's when this will begin I'll just drag these keyframes over just like that so the first keyframe begins at about halfway where our first keyframe where our first animation is is halfway finished so just like that we create sort of that staggered animation now this does no good for us because it looks terrible we need to make it a mask so I'm going to select the Jack the Ripper layer you may need use your toggle switches modes button down here we're looking for the track mat column right the track mat column and here for Jack the Ripper I'm going to click this and say look make my alpha matte text one mask there we go you can see that gives a little mask icon let's go up to professor's of humanity and a professor of humanities I should say and make this alpha matte text to a mask look our text has totally disappeared our lower third shoots out and our text slides right in behind it just like that very cool now how do we take this not really complex but just all these layers of animation and everything move it into Adobe Premiere so we don't have to read do this every single time we have a different person appear in our film well we're gonna go window we're gonna choose essential graphics panel and now here I'm gonna select the composition I only have one man in street talking it's this composition right here see composition man and Street talking I'm gonna select that composition it's gonna say yep I got it I see what you're doing and what we want to do is add a couple editable elements from our composition and those elements are going to be the text in the main text and the text in the sort of secondary line here so what I can do is hit this solo supported properties button which is going to you're gonna see it's gonna wreak havoc on my layers panel if I click it open everything up I don't need to do that I have two little bits that I need to add to this so I'm gonna twirl down Jack the Ripper text layer I yep I want the text the source text that's what I want to edit so I'm gonna drag this and drop it in the essential graphics panel and there we have it Jack the Ripper and now I'm going to do the same thing for professor of humanities text source text drag and drop it in there and then I can simply hit export motion graphics template make sure I save my project first and here you can simply choose where you would like to save it on your hard drive or if you want to save it to one of your Creative Cloud libraries you can do that so I could drop it into my Premiere Pro assets library go over to Premiere Pro open it up use the essential graphics panel in Premiere Pro and you can just drag this right on to your Timeline just like it's any other graphic piece of video whatever and you'll have a little box that pops up that allows you to change the text on either one of these two fields of text right there in Premiere Pro so you don't even need to come back into Adobe After Effects to make changes oh by the way you might want to give your your motion graphics template a name other than untitled something like teal blue lower 3rd or lower 3rd for my movie project or whatever so there you have it we've created a relatively simple lower third using this I guess we can call it a rather comprehensive tutorial at this point but this is how you can create a simple yet smooth yet reasonably professional-looking lower-third motion graphics in Adobe After Effects and easily use them in Premiere Pro alright so there we have it you can see pretty easy right just a nice simple lower third nothing to it little animation a little fading here and there and adjustments to build out what looks like really complex effect but now you know it's not really that that complex it's a few layers a few shifting and adjusting timing and animation you can get some really really cool stuff here in After Effects like most of After Effects a lot of really cool stuff ladies and gentlemen for learning a little bit about trim paths and offsetting paths and animating multiple layers and all the different stuff we covered here today in this Adobe After Effects tutorial that's it get it got it good now they know dodson touch vidcom i'll catch you in the next one and before you go make sure you subscribe to my channel for more great tutorials every day also by my course it helps us do what we do and this channel is supported by viewers just like you you can also just click the thumbnail and watch another video from this channel see you next time guys [Music]

Channel: tutvid

Views: 29,016

Keywords: after effects lower third, after effects tutorial, text animation, lower third tutorial, lower third after effects, after effects lower third tutorial, after effects motion graphics, lower third motion graphics, after effects tutorial lower third, adobe after effects, after effects, after effects tutorials, how to make lower thirds in after effects, tutorial, how to create a lower third, after effects lower thirds, lower thirds tutorial, motion graphics, after effects titles, AE

Id: c2fUoT8EDL0

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2019