These Tools DESTROYED My Workflow in After Effects

the smart tools well at least that's what i call these time-saving after effects tools that i have been developing for the last couple of weeks a month or so and well today they are finally released on our website so you can either go to euchremedia.com or in the description of this video you can click on the link it'll take you to the same place and there you can download them individually or as a bundle but i do want to thank you for your support and for all of that unbelievable feedback that you guys have been giving me over the last couple of weeks especially people like scott mcmahon and artoom arazana those two gave me some very useful ui help so thank you both but in this video i want to go over all of these tools again as you can see i have quite a bit and we also have some presets so what i'm trying to tell you is that it's going to be a pretty long video and i'm going to go ahead and apologize however i did include a bunch of timestamps in the description of this video so you can click on them and jump around so in the meantime let me show you all of these tools again smart animator is a text animation tool for after facts and if you've done any kind of text animation and after effects you do know the struggle and the clicks and the time that it takes to create something simple i know that very well that's why i created this tool called smart animator but before i show you how to use this thing let me show you the before let me show you what it was like before this script so we have this text in after effects and what if i want to animate it now normally you would just select it here you would go into it you would click on animate and then you would choose which properties you want to animate so position let's add another one opacity is good okay so we have those in here then you kind of have to know what you're doing here you have to go to the advanced here and we're gonna set it to based on words and then let's do shape we're gonna change it to ramp up so some of these things you do have to know and i do know i've done this so many times i know what i'm doing here so ease high i'm going to set it to something like 85 and then load to 100 so that's good we're almost done then you have to animate it so instead of animating start or end that's what you probably would initially think but you have to actually animate offset because the way i have it set up you need to do it with offset so we would take our time indicator to the very beginning and we're going to start at negative 100 set a keyframe and then go forward like 20 frames or so and then set it to something like 100. so now we have something here but it's still not animating because we need to adjust the initial position and opacity here so for the position we're going to animate the x we're going to say 500 like that and then opacity let's do zero so it's starting at 0 and 500 on x so it animates like this perfect exactly what i want but that's just animation in okay then you would do this you're like all right so let's maybe duplicate this and uh let's move these keys well let's see where they're at right here we're gonna move them right to the end here like so that's good so now it's animating well it's all messed up now so now we have to do some kind of adjustments real quick let's see what would what would work here because it's kind of messing it up so instead of ramp up let's try a little ramp yeah that works but it's not going the way that i want it to go so let's go negative 500 okay so it animates in animates out we're we're pretty much done so this is this is it right here now as you can see it took a lot of steps just to set this up and if you if you don't do this daily then it's something you constantly have to remember and it can be a bit problematic it can give you a headache and it can kill a lot of time so that's the animation now this is only one layer can you imagine if you had a bunch of them you know if you duplicate this and you have a bunch of different animations that can be very time consuming now what if you have to adjust them so then you have to go here and move the keyframes for every single one of them but what if you want to do different animations instead of to decide what if you want to you know maybe go from the bottom up then you would have to go into each the each property here you would have to find all the i mean i don't i don't even want to do it because it's so time consuming and that's why tax animation in after effects is uh hard in a lot of ways you kind of have to know what you're doing and it can get very messy very quickly so i think i think i painted a pretty painful picture here let me get rid of all of this let me show you what smart animator can do and how it can save you time so let's do this we're going to get rid of everything we just created so we're starting from the very beginning as you can see everything is gone that's good so let's do the same thing when i just did the exact same animation but we're gonna do it using this now i'm gonna do it quickly and then i'll explain what everything does so all i have to do just i'm gonna go to position we did i think on the x we did like 500 and then we're going to copy this let's do what is it negative 500 i think that's what we did and then opacity we took it to zero zero on in and out and uh easing i think it was 85 100 that's good so then i just select this run it and let's see what it does there you go the exact same thing with a couple of clicks and this thing is so smart now you're probably just watching me working you probably already have an idea of what it does so let me go further now when you run it it creates animation and they use the exact same tools we use to create the the other ones as you can see it's the same animators as you can see it's using it but it is so smart let's keep going with this as you can see i quickly did this it's super awesome but what if you're you know what if you have a bunch of layers again i can duplicate this many times i can select all of them run it it's the same concept it will do it for all of them but what if you want to keep going what if you say hey let's go to position and instead of you know going side to side let's reset him so we have x it resets it based on like this one will reset the position only in right so the in point adjusts the end point the out point adjust the out point so you can reset them like that just it clears it to zero now if you want to reset all of these you would do it globally just reset reset and it will do it for all of your properties so okay so instead of to the side let's do maybe like 200 and we're going to these kind of like copy copies this to that or if you want to take this to this you just do that not 20 but 200 that's what i wanted so 200 and then we're going to say negative 200 on this and then just apply boom and then as you can see it slides in beautiful you can go to blur here and we can on the y we can adjust the like the blur so we can add blur so watch this now it kind of blurs in that's awesome so instantly no problem and it's not a motion blur it looks like a motion blur but it's not so it's much faster than motion blur because immersion blur will have to generate uh the blur and that can take some time so what else can we do maybe scale we can go over here and maybe scale on the y 500 just for n only so in again this side out this side it's very intuitive so click on it and let's see now it kind of slides in that's nice you can even go to position even more you can say let's do something like 500. so i'm just trying to show you how easy it is to alter and come up with something very interesting everything that i'm doing here once i hit apply it also creates a pseudo effect that you can adjust in here as well so you can adjust the same thing we're doing for the position when you let's say 500 now it's set to 500 if i take it to 1000 and when i hit apply boom it adjusts in here so everything that you're doing here you can also do it in here as well so that means it's a pseudo effect that means you could take all of these properties and carry them over to something like premiere as a mogurt and you can apply expressions on them and do all kinds of stuff so that can be very helpful so yeah what else can we do with this well let me keep going we also have the skew you know you can do uh all well all of these things but honestly i i hardly ever do the screw thing so i'm gonna reset this don't eat this right now we have rotation apply so it's going to rotate things in you can do it based on let me start start over so you can do it based on if you over here you can do based on words so let's do characters we'll just do a simple animation maybe like a 200 and let's do negative 200 apply so it just kind of does this as you can see it doesn't be some characters again that's based on characters on the in on the out it's based on words so when it animates out it does it based on words so that's simple you can do rotation here right you can maybe add like some kind of rotation so it's going to slide in like this maybe opacity i like this tool because it takes the awkwardness out of text animation and you can be creative you can actually come up with with complex animations without the headache and that's something i always struggled with as far as like using the native tool so this allows me like it saves me time but it allows me to play and get creative okay so something like that that's pretty cool maybe get rid of our rotation so rotation let's reset it boom done so we have just something like that now let me show you another one called order that one is super handy especially if you you know have a language that reads from the right to the left so right now we have animation it's going starting at the left side it's going to the right just like this arrow says right here but i can reverse it for both in and out so in and out so i can reverse instead of left to right i can say go right to left and then boom now you can see it starts from this side it goes to the other side you can go back any time boom and just reverse it very easy you can also randomize the order right now it kind of nicely does it one by one by one but you can say randomize and now it's gonna do it differently you can uh you know get a different seed if you don't like this random order you can maybe just play with different seed make sure you select the layer and it will give you something different so that's awesome you can get rid of it very easy so what else can we talk about now we talked about position scale skew rotation opacity blur easing now easing right now as you can see everything is kind of has a smooth start and then it kind of arrives smooth and it has easing both on in and out as you can see right here easing in and then out now now in has start and end well what does that mean well start means each word or however you have it set up it has a starting point as it animates has a starting point and then as it arrives that's the ending point so right now you can see oh it's starting and then it arrives so starting point i can say hey don't have any smoothness just be like zero linear like have speed already so if i apply you can see it's not going to be as as smooth at first watch this it's just going to have like really fast and then arrives really quickly now i can get rid of i basically have 0 0 and it's going to be a very linear animation so watch this is just going to be very linear but easing allows you to get something very interesting so maybe on the starting point let's have a smooth and then have a snappy kind of end maybe like a 20 percent easing right like this let's see what it does so it kind of snaps maybe we can do it based on words uh let's go based on words again the fact that i'm doing it this fast is just unbelievable okay let's okay apply this let's see what that looks like maybe randomize it a bit yeah so it's very snappy maybe that's what you want so that is smart animator but we also have buttons at the top right here and another thing i want to point out remember the in and out points is what driving the animation so based on in and out so we have duration and it's set to one second so it takes one second exactly one second to animate all of them so as you can see if i play this by this point they're all animated so one second you can set it to 0.5 a half a second and make sure you select the layer and then it's going to animate it half a second so it can also be done based on frames so you can if you're comfortable with animating with frames a lot of people animate with frames especially if you do 3d then you can do frames you can set how many frames you want let's say 10 frames just make sure it works so right now 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ten in ten frames it it's animated so this feature is super handy but i said to just one second and done so then so that's what duration is and again you can alter these things it's gonna animate because it's based on in and out points it will animate in and out and you can quickly adjust when you want it to end and you can like duplicate this have another one so when this one ends this one arrives trust me it will save you so much time but it does it based on in and out points i did add a custom animation option in here to where you can set it based on custom time you can set it you know start at zero and animate out by five or so you can you do have control but i'm not i'm not advertising it that much because i think in and out points are so much quicker so that's it but let's talk about these top actually this pull button real quick so this pull button right here just like you can clear out let's go to position real quick so we have this animation right let's say we close this project and we're starting fresh let's say everything is reset in my user interface here let's just reset everything so everything is back to zero and so but i open the project and i have text that i animated using smart animator but what if i want to adjust it now to adjust it naturally you would have to go over here and take all these like the we have the position values we have the uh what else the opacity value so i would have to literally take everything in here like i mean you can adjust it in here right so we have it animates in and then animates out but i would have to copy everything in here and put it in the ui to keep adjusting it because if i move the position and apply it it's just going to overwrite everything and that's a problem so for that i've added this pull button right here for in and out for just the properties for example if i'm in the position and i want to copy the position of this animation i can just pull it in boom and it pulls it in as you can see here's the in position starts at 200 so whatever you value value that you have in here you can pull them in easily and then you can adjust it and send it back so let me undo this real quick okay so that's what the pull in so pull feature has it for in and out just a single property but you can also pull for everything you can pull for everything in and then out so we have global values we have local values so let's pull everything in so boom boom and now we have everything for opacity everything adjusted even easing everything's adjusted so that's what those buttons are and trust me these will save you so much time and in the future i'm planning on adding a feature to where you can actually save presets and i mean it will definitely evolve into something even bigger than what it is right now so then we have the motion blur i mean it's the same concept as turning the motion blur here but if you have mini layers selected you can just do it instantly with one click it's going to turn it on and the same thing for 3d because right now rotation is only the z right if you want to rotate this on the z i can apply it and it's rotating on a z but i can't really rotate the 3d because 3d is not activated so it doesn't matter if you push it doesn't doesn't work but you can activate 3d and then it's going to work right so now let's take this to zero and that one as well but let's do this one at like 90 90 degrees so now you can see it kind of flips so yeah that can be very useful and you can turn off 3d at any time and it's going to do that for all selected layers and last button right here is the remove smart animator so if let's say you created the animation and you realized hey i want to go back to the way the text was i just want to get rid of the animation and basically here's what it will do so you can see it visually we have these animators that it generates when you create a smart animator and it also generates this pseudo effect so when you select all layers or just one layer multiple doesn't really matter and when you click on this remove boom it gets rid of all the animators that it created and also the pseudo effect and now you are starting from nothing smart balance is a very simple tool but it's so powerful it will definitely spice up your animation and let me show you what it does here it is as you can see smart balance is very small it only has like five buttons but it's very effective so in this example we have just a simple image kind of flipping like this but i can select any keyframe properties and i can select which animation i want i can either have like an elastic animation or a bounce animation like bounce back so in this case i'm going to select elastic and then i just hit apply and then it's done as you can see my property value right here is lit up in red which means the expression or the code is now driving this animation so it's using these keyframes but it's adding on something to it so watch this now we have something like this very cool and not only that you can select this layer right here and we have a pseudo effect called elastic and we can adjust all these things you can disable it you can you know crank it up a bit so the sky's the limit you can create your own stuff but yeah very effective you can select the same property again and this time let's do bounce back and then apply and now it creates a pseudo called bounce you can adjust the settings you can disable it and now let's see what it does this time instead of going i guess past the point it bounced back right so it's very effective if you want to maybe animate like a box dropping so it doesn't go through the floor this will do the trick and another button that's very very effective this right here it's just remove buttons so you select a layer that has any kind of like elastic or bounce effect on it and once you click the button it gets rid of it smart mask is an after effects tool that creates a responsive rectangular mask and i find it extremely useful that's why i created it so let me show you what it does right now we have just a simple text and i guess i want to show you the before and after i think it's so powerful for you to see before and after so we have just simple text doesn't have any animation we're going to create a simple animation using the smart animator and now it has a simple animation kind of slides in and then slides out now i'm going to take my time indicator to the mid point right here and just use a masking tool to draw a simple mask so something like maybe this is good right i want to create that very popular effect that a lot of you guys use so it kind of slides in like this and then it slides out perfect however what if i'm creating this for a project and maybe a template and someone comes in and maybe changes something so maybe they decided to scale too maybe they say hey let's scale this up a little bit and maybe even add another word like eight okay and let's see what that does as you can see it's just not working well so then you would have to select the mask and you know go in here double click on it and adjust the length of it and that's not a problem if you're dealing with one layer but it is a problem if you have a bunch of them and if you like creating a template and i've created so many templates for fox sports to where like things change constantly and you do want to have something like this so you've adjusted it and now it works you know obviously you can adjust the animation but that is a problem in other words you want to have a mask that sticks to your text that is responsive if the size changes the mask will respond to it and that's exactly what smart mask does so let me undo all of this i'm going to do all of the things we created and let's start over so we do have the animation let me show you how awesome smart mask is so here it is this is what it looks like and we have five buttons in here so these five buttons are essentially just your way of telling after effects where you want to create a mask if you want to create a mask at the end point of a layer based on where you know what it looks like right now then that's exactly what it would do you select it create it and then it's going to do that but then if it animates it will be just locked into the end point you can say midpoint and it's going to do it based on the midpoint so if you have a bunch of different layers selected it's going to take those layers and find the midpoint of each and then create a mask like this now instantly we created something really interesting right so it's super awesome you can do the same thing based on out again select it out and now it does it based on out points right but it's going to be locked into that you can do it by default it's set to this which is a current time but it's animated value so when you select this and you apply it it's going to create a mask but this mask is going to be moving with your text animation now i'm showing you text animation here but you can apply this rectangular mask to just about anything images footage so you can do it on anything but it's very effective with text so as you can see it will move with your text and that's awesome maybe for some things that's important because this thing does create a pseudo effect where you can adjust the left the right maybe you want to cut things out or something or maybe you want to i don't know somehow take this and add some expressions maybe it's part of your design you can push the mask here and there you can also the adjust the feather so maybe i can bring this in we have feather for the width you can adjust this in here we also have height so you can bring this well let's bring this closer on on the top here so you can see the feather so as you can see it does work and we also have opacity and expansion so you can expand the mask so yeah again you can do this for text any layers really i'm going to do this we're going to apply a new one so it does it doesn't reset it so let's reset everything to zero that's good so what else can it do obviously we have this animated value which will follow the animation but you can also do it based on current time but it it's static in other words you can say hey give me a mask based on this here but keep it that shape so then you would do boom and it will keep it that shape it's still responsive you can still add things like you can go to the end here and add another word like eight and it will respond but it will just be locked in so let me undo this for a second all right so let's do this let's create a mask based on the middle point let's do that so we're going to select this go to smart mask and do middle so now we create the same effect that we created earlier right well this time because it is responsive you can actually go and select two here and we can go to character and maybe size it up a bit some and we can actually add another word like eight and you can see everything adjusts super awesome and remember if you have a bunch of different layers i mean it's it's really really helpful by the way i forgot to mention one more thing if you select this layer or if you select a bunch of layers that have smart mask you can easily get rid of all of them by going over here to smart mask and by clicking on this remove button so when you click on it it will get rid of it smart anchor is an after effects tool that i find extremely helpful so if you constantly find yourself adjusting the anchor point i believe you like this tool very much but before i show you what it does let me show you the before and after so for example we have a simple animation here we have a bunch of images kind of flip in and then the text slides in from the right and so what if i wanted to change the anchor point of these images right here right now they're at the bottom left corner and because of that it kind of flips from that or it pivots from that corner but what if i want to change the pivot what if i want to move the anchor point to the top right how can i do that easily well you can do that easily by activating snapping maybe get the anchor move tool and you can easily put it like this just move the anchor point to the corner you want it to be in it will snap in no problem and there you go now it does become a problem if you have like hundreds and hundreds of layers then yeah that's a problem and obviously you can do the same thing for the text at any point you can put it in any corner you want and it will work just fine when it becomes a problem is when you have a lot of layers or when you are creating like a mogart or if you're doing some expressions and you're rigging your composition and you want certain i guess text to be in certain places then it becomes a problem for example right now i have this design and what if i wanted to move this into premiere now i would move this anchor point right here because i want to maintain the distance right here if anyone were to change the text i want this kind of gap in here so naturally i guess you can select this press s and you can see it is it's working it's scaling from that pivot point that's fine it it works fine until you start actually altering the size of your text in the character panel so if you select this and go to character panel and you start altering the size then it breaks everything it's just not going to work for you so then you have to go a bit further you have to use some expressions not everyone knows how to use expressions so i mean normally i would just go into the anchor point and create an expression and write my code and i found myself doing that over and over to points where i realized hey it's time to create smart anchor and that's what i did so let me show you what smart anchor does on the surface it just looks like this and by the way a guy named scott mcmahon helped me to design the ui so scott thanks for for the help i did put his name in the credit he's a super awesome guy so on the surface it looks like this we are familiar with these buttons so you can alter the anchor points using these buttons so whatever you select right now this current button means current time and if you don't have this button selected then these two right now mean the same thing it only like this one is different when you select this button but we'll talk about that here in a second so current time is based on current time so right now current time like this this is what we see i want the anchor point move from the top right corner to the bottom left and for that i can just select all of them even the text so we're going to select all of them and then i can just say boom like this and they all go to wherever you know i put it so you can put in the center and now animation is different it's pivoting from different points and that's super awesome it saved you quite a bit of clicks and if you do that all the time you'll find this very helpful now you can do it based on in points the the in of each layer you can do it middle and you can do it out and that's the same concept as smart mask if you saw that one but where it becomes very helpful is when you can apply an expression when you select this button this time when you click on any of these it will apply an expression so right now even though like let's let's do this let's uncheck this and we're going to say hey put the pivot point or the anchor point right at the top center here so like this and now if i select this and if i change the size of it in here it's still not working but this time i'm going to go to smart anchor and we're going to activate this smart anchor expression and we're going to do the same thing this time it creates a pseudo effect and also it applies an expression to the anchor point so now i can select scale and it will still pivot from that point which is exactly what i want but i can also go into character here and i can adjust things all day long it will always pivot from that point now because i had let's go back to smart anchor because i had this current time animated so it will affect my animation as well because it will lock everything in in that you can see animation is not looking the same it's kind of doing some weird stuff but this is where these two buttons come in handy so this one will mess up your animation it will basically take the anchor point it will constantly be adjusting based on the size so it's always going to keep it in the center if you have text animating but this right here gives you a custom current time so it's going to it's basically set the anchor point on current time where whatever your time indicator is at but it will keep it locked in so right now i'm going to do this now it's going to be locked in so if animation is changing anywhere else if the size is changing anywhere else it will still maintain that anchor in that place and it's still responsive you can still select this you can still go to character you can still change the you know the size whatever you want you can even you know go over here and change just certain letters it doesn't matter what you do it will always be locked in to that position and i don't know about you but when i create mogurts when i rig my compositions for whatever it might be something like this is very handy it definitely saves me time from coding by hand and i don't mind coding but if you do a bunch i mean you get exhausted smartsizer is a sizing tool for after effects and before i show you what it does i do want to show before and after and for this example we have an image and we have two text layers so let's say we're doing this we want to size our text both of them down to the same width as our image here how can i do that quickly well i can select each layer right here and kind of size it down and that will do the trick i can move it up and all that stuff so you get the idea and what if i needed something like this what if someone would say hey we need to maintain the width of all of them 500 pixels in other words size all of them down to 500 pixels i guess what you can do is maybe double click on the shape layer here and go to the rectangle path and the size is actually in pixels so you can type 500 so that gives you like a reference and then you know maybe you can select layers and size them down so that can work i can see that working all right well but that's not ideal so let me show you what smart sizer can do let me undo all of this and let me do the same thing but using smart sizer so this is a smart sizer right here this is what it looks like and let me show you what it does now so what if we wanted to size both of our text to the same width as this image right here how can i do it quickly well all you have to do is select your text and whatever layer you select last that's the layer it's going to grab the size from so in this case we're going to select this image last because we're going to grab the width from that layer so once we've made our selection then we just go over here to smart sizer and we have five buttons right here those are the buttons that apply action so the first one is fit to the width right it will stretch it out it's not going to maintain the aspect ratio so and remember it grabs the width of the last selected layer which in our case is this image so i'm going to click on this boom you can see it sizes everything to that width now can you imagine if you have a bunch of different layers i mean that will save you so much time okay so that's this button then we have the second button which it does the same thing but it grabs the height of last selected layer and adjusts all selected layers to that height so like this boom they're all the same height okay then we have the same thing here it's adjust to the width but this time it will maintain the aspect ratio in other words it's not going to shrink it it's going to maintain the size so if i do this again the last selected layer is the image so grab the width of that and boom it adjusts everything and it does maintain the the aspect ratio so it's not stretched and that's exactly what i need let me undo this now we have the same thing for the height it will size it that height but again it maintains the aspect ratio so that's what that does so four buttons and the last one right here essentially is going to grab the width and the height of this last selected layer and apply to all selected layers in other words it's going to create similar shape of all the stacks later so watch this boom they're the exact same shape you can see i can snap it it's the exact same shape so that's awesome but that's not all you can also select all of these and you can go to this portion of the script so the first two inputs right here those are just the size so the width and the height and then the second is the margin so we have the width margin height margin so what does it do well you can say maybe like hey what if i wanted to shrink everything down to exactly 500 pixels on the width so you can come over here and type 500 and then i'm going to click the first one here it's going to squeeze everything to that right so it's going to shrink them but it's not going to maintain the aspect ratio so that's exactly 500 pixels in fact we can double check let's do this let's do the same thing we did earlier and let's type 500 and as you can see perfect that's exactly what we want so let me undo all of this all right so let's keep going here and now what if i wanted to do this what if i select a bunch of different layers instead of typing 500 you can click on here and by the way the same is true for the height as well you'll see the same options so you can click over here and you have more options so you can say let's do comp width so basically shrink everything or whatever button you click shrink everything to the comp width so when you do that it's going to shrink everything to your current composition width that might be helpful helpful in some areas you can do the same thing but keep the proportion then let's keep going here we have first selected layer which uh you know just whatever layer selected first it's going to shrink everything to that last selected that's it's set to last selected by default then we have smallest selected so if you click on small selected and if you run the shrink right here it basically it will take everything and size it down to the smallest selected layer in our case it's this image right here so watch this boom that's exactly what it does let's keep going here and let's select largest selected so it's the same concept but this time it's going to size everything up to the largest selected layer in this case it's this layer right here so let's see if that works perfect so again the same concept is for the height as well so that's what it does and you can also reset everything like that so that's what it does on the surface but it can do a lot more than just that we also have this button right here for expression so if you have this one checked this time it will do the same thing right whatever last layer you select and if you hit this like keep it proportional then it will do the same thing but this time it applies an expression to the scale property and it also gives you this pseudo effect in other words now the scale will no longer control uh the image it will this controls the image and it's in pixel value so you can adjust it in pixel value and you can change it to like the fit to width and we'll talk about that here in a second so let me undo this for a second so what i like to use this for sometimes so if you select this and you select one image and right now this image is size based on the scale value right and it isn't percentage but sometimes you wanted to convert it into pixel value so this script also converts percentage to pixel value and you can size it that way so if you select this and do it you know click on this to where it adjusts the width and height so now you can control the width and the height of the layer based on pixel value that's exactly pixel value so let's do this whoops 500 so that's exactly 500 and width now obviously it stretches it because it's set to fit to width and height so it will stretch it but you can say fit to width only and preserve aspect ratio so now if you do the width it will maintain the aspect ratio and that can come in very handy when you're designing any kind of mogurts if you're rigging your compositions using expressions i used it many many times and you can also use the anchor tool right here smart anchor you can say apply an expression and let's put it down here so it maintains it so when you size it it will size it from that point so you can see how you can instantly build like an interesting composition you can rig it and i think you'll find it very useful the same thing here we're going to put anchor at the top here so it's locked into that so if i change the size or the scale of it it will be locked in now but here's something else smartsizer does that's not very i guess it's not on the surf it's kind of hard to know so i need to do a better job at explaining this one so for example with when you have the expression code checked and when you use these two buttons for example when you select the text and you apply it to the text basically when you click on it it will keep the text the same i mean it will convert to the pixel value but it will keep your text the same width so if you double click on it here it basically kind of um i guess it kind of limits to that width so when you type anything you'll be fine in size but as soon as it approaches that original width then it's going to start sizing it down it will always maintain that width and based on where you put the anchor point it's going to kind of pivot into that and again you can expand that with you're not i mean it sets it the limit based on what the word was then but you can set the limit right here based on width you can say hey make sure you're always at 50 or 500 pixels right so it's going to be fine until it reaches 500 pixels then it's going to size down so that again can come in very handy for a lot of mogrit's designs and stuff like that so and the same concept goes for the height as well smart controls is an after effects tool that converts any selected properties into expression controls and before i show you what it actually does let me show you the before and after as always so here's an example let's say we have a position property and by default position property has x and y all on one line kind of thing but what if i wanted to split the dimensions what if i wanted to separate them into each individual slider how can i do it quickly well position property is the only property in after effects where you can just right click on and separate dimensions like this and it will separate it no problem you can right click again and get rid of it but that's not the case for other properties and like you can see scale right here has the exact same setup two dimensions if i right click on here you can see that separate dimensions is grayed out which means i can't really use it so naturally what i would do before i would select this i would go to effects control and then i would go to expression controls and bring in a slider i would call it x and then i would duplicate it and call this one y okay then i would have to go back to the scale here alt click on the stopwatch and then i would write an expression i would say something like x variable you're going to be this slider right here i want the value then i would say y you're going to be this one right here i want the value of that slider and then i would marry them together in an array i would say x and y which means x the first slider right you're going to be applied to the first value here and then y you're going to be applied to the second value so now when i click away i mean it's working i can go over here i can adjust the scale so that's one way to do it but can you imagine if you do this over and over again for every single property i mean that can take you quite some time you'll get tired and that's exactly what i did i got tired of this so that's why i created this smart controls so let's talk about this now obviously with sliders you can create your custom menus you can bring in all the expression controls and you can do it that way but this thing does more than just splits dimensions i'll show you here in a second so let me undo all of this let's start from scratch let me show you how easy it is to do the same thing what i just did using smart controls so here's how we do it so smart controls right here has four buttons the second button right here is is to split dimensions if you enable this if you highlight it any property that you select that has two two or three dimensions it will separate them into each slider so in this case i have that one selected i'm going to select this scale property and then if i hit apply boom right away you can see it separate them in two different sliders and now i can adjust them like this pretty easy you can see it only took a few clicks but not only that you can do it for multiple properties for example let me do this you can select this one you can select that one you can select the position and then you can hit it and it's done you can see each layer this one has all of them split in here that one has those two split in here so you get the idea let me undo this now what's cool about this we also have this other feature called last selected layer and what this one does if you enable it whatever properties you select in this case we're going to select scale here and scale that or this one so whatever you select and whatever layer you select last in this case i just have a control it's just a shape layer just basically an empty layer so if i select scale here ctrl select that scale and i can select many more and whatever layer i select last in this case i'm going to control select this controls layer and if i have this enabled and if i hit apply it's going to apply an expression and create controls all in the last selected layer so now you can see we have controls for scale in the last selected layer here so we can control the scale of other layers from here so this could be very useful especially if you're creating again mogurts anything like that to where you can create your own custom menu you can select any properties that you want and put them on the last selected layer now i do have split dimensions enabled and because of that it splits it but you can disable it and now essentially you can grab any property so we can grab all of these maybe all of those and even things like check boxes so this is like on off side it would be check box so again make sure you select it and then run it make sure you select the last selected layer so that's where it's going to apply all of my selected properties too so when you have this last selected enabled and when you run it it will convert all of them into this layer as you can see we have angle control we have a checkbox right here so all of that stuff is working you can control multiple layers all from one layer and only few clicks so smart controls supports just about any properties effect properties layer properties but the only thing it doesn't support yet is the drop down menu but every other property as you can see we have angle control we have the two dimensions slider you name it and even check boxes smart rect is an after effects tool that creates rectangular shape layers with advanced settings i don't know about you but i'm a huge shape layer fan i've been using shape layers for many years in fact i don't remember last time i used a solid and with that i do realize that shape layers do have some limitations and that's why i created this smart rack years ago well let me show you what life was like without smart wrecked first and then let me show you what smart rec can do so shape layers and particularly i'm talking about the rectangular shape layer so if you double click here it creates a shape layer it's a rectangular shape layer you can actually go over here and control the size you can adjust the x and the y it is in pixel value which is awesome you can be precise so that's awesome now the problem is with rectangular tool it doesn't size from any other pivot points only from the center now you can adjust the position and get it to where it does it from a certain pivot point but the problem is if you want to be responsive you have to do some expressions you have to go in position and add expressions and it just takes time to set it up and any extra clicks and stuff that can wear you out throughout the day so that's what i used to do i used to would you know apply certain expressions and have the setup but eventually i created smart rect and i'll show you how easy it is now so that's one limitation that really bugged me but then also if you wanted to create like a shape layer that's the same size as these text layers you would have to you know go over here and select this rectangular tool and you have to draw one you have to be precise right to where it fits it and then put it behind it here and then do this i mean it can take you some time and if you have a lot of different layers it definitely takes some time clicking dragging and all that is just a mental uh i guess exhaustion that wears you out at the end of the day so something like this then you can center the anchor points anyway it's not perfect but it does the job and that's what i used to do but let me show you what you can do now with smart rect so i'm going to delete all of this now we're going back to square one and this is smart wreck this is what it looks like you can click here and you can go through different options we have size margin fill stroke and name the name of the layer that it creates so let me show you what i can do so before we have to double click here to create a shape layer but smartrack does it in here so if you have size right here set to zero zero and if you created smart it just creates it the same way it does it there it just creates a smart rack but it has all these different options you can size it from the center but you can also say pivot point go to top left corner and it'll be the top left corner now the problem before when you did this it would shift the whole thing which was annoying because you positioned it but now because we have a tool called smart anchor it actually works with smart rect i especially coded stuff into where if it sees if the selected layer has this smart rect in it then it will work with smart rack tool so for example if i want to put the pivot point at the top here it's not going to adjust the anchor point here it will adjust it internally which is awesome so watch this so i'm going to select this we'll go to anchor smart anchor tool and here i'm going to say go to the top left watch this boom works like a charm it's upright so you can and as you can see it changes in here but you don't have to like constantly adjust so this smart anchor works super well with smart rect that's a new addition that i think a lot of you will like so you have a tool that you can quickly adjust and get different pivot points and you can start sizing it from that pivot point you can say you know you can also adjust the scale you can adjust the roundness you can add some roundness in here you can do it based on percentage or pixel value so you can use a pixel value in here some of you like different ones i used to have just percentage but then or a pixel i'm sorry and then i added percentage and you guys love it so that's that's awesome then you also have sku so that is the basics of smart rack as far as the shape itself now it is more than just that you can create smart shapes or smart racks based on your selection so you can select all of these layers and remember how i did it hand by hand i mean that takes a long time but now i'm just going to select them we're going to go to smart rect right here and because it is selected it doesn't matter where the type and size it just grabs the size of each selected layer and now when i press smart you know i can click on any of these we're going to create each shape and we're going to put the anchor point in the center like this watch this so now it created one puts it right underneath each text and that saves you a lot of clicking a lot of time and it's precise too now that's one of them and you can keep adjusting the shape you know you can use the smart anchor tool to put the anchor point at the top here top left and you can size it from here i mean the sky is the limit what you can do with this now the problem is when you start typing you can see it's uh it's not going to follow it but i do have a fix for that so again select the same the same text layers and then go back to smart rect right here and now we have these icons in here so the first one is just parented so let's say i'm going to create these well let's create these two the bottom two without parents so we're going to create one without it and then the top one we're going to create with parents so now watch this so i can select this text layer and i can move it and you can see the shape doesn't go with it the same for that but this one it does so it automatically parents it so that's super handy let me undo this now let's uncheck this let's talk about masking so i'm going to create these two without masking and then the top one we're going to create with the mask selected so these two didn't have mask select selected so if i move the text it just goes right out of it but watch this with this one it automatically adds mask on top of that text layer which is great let me undo all of this let's keep going with this all right let's undo this now we also have auto size so i'm going to select these two and we're going to create a shape layer without this selected and then the top one we're going to select auto size now watch this so make sure you run it by the way so now if i change this text not much happens right so the same thing for that one if i change it not much happens but because if this one had other size selected now if i type you can see it will follow it so if you are not good with expressions this will save you so much time so that's what that feature does let me undo all of this again all right trust me this tool will save you so much time so let's keep going so we've talked about all of these let me uncheck this for right now and we also have margin so if you create let's say this one if we create a tool without with everything zeroed out you'll get that but if i select these let's do these two and i'm going to add maybe like a 20 pixel to the top and the bottom and then left side and right side so we're going to do like 50 pixel on both and then i can run it you can see create something really interesting it's a good starting point and let me do this you can activate auto size masking and also parenting and do this and now you can i mean you can do all kinds of stuff you can change the text it will maintain it super handy alright so let's undo this what else can we do so we have talked about the margin now let's talk about fill and stroke so you can change the color of the orange to maybe something more bluish that's good you can uncheck it check it and you know obviously when you create it it creates it that's awesome but you can uncheck it you can go to stroke you can activate it you can change the color of it if you want you can adjust the size of the stroke and basically on your selection remember we still have margin so when you run it you can see it creates well we have masking so let's deselect that and you can see it creates something very interesting it puts stroke around it and you can change the text it will follow it so that can be a nice little element that you might want to plug in in your mogurds in your after effects compositions so let's undo this let's keep going what else do we have here so we also can change the name of the text that it creates if you want to create a new layer it says that but you can change it but smart just does all kinds of amazing things let me show you how quickly i can create an interesting animation so we have these text layers we're going to select this we're going to go to well we're going to keep the margin the same by the way this resets it so if you click on it it resets it that's awesome so let's create with a mask make sure fill is activated and stroke we're going to disable it and let's run it like this so we have a shape underneath each layer right here so we can go to the first one we can animate the x scale so this right here so you can see because it has a mask applied so we can create some interesting animations so something like this let's see it maybe take it to 100 let's adjust easing to something like 75 and something like this so we have this animation very easy so i can select all of them copy it i can select this one maybe set a keyframe for x and the same for that one x and now press u to see all your keys so we can paste them in here like that maybe even move them some so one two three like this maybe and something like that but you can see in no time i created something very interesting and not only that you can actually change the text and it will adjust so your animation will stay the same because you're animating the scale and not the actual size which is super handy and you can keep adjusting your margins all kinds of stuff it will be amazing you can adjust the roundness and the sky's the limit you can instantly create lower thirds in no time so that's smart wrecked in a nutshell and it's my number one tool i use it all the time smart size is an after effects tool but it's more of a reference tool it doesn't really do much other than give you information that you can use in your composition and essentially it's kind of like source rect at time method that gives you the width and the height of a layer but it also gives you a width and height of multiple layers let me show you what i'm talking about and for example let's say we have this example right here we have a shape layer it's our smart rect and we want to adjust this shape right here based on what we type in here so if we type something i want like the longest one to follow it or something like that i mean that can take some time right so normally what you would do you would go over here i'll click on a stopwatch and you would point to any of these you would say well let's take the longest one so that's going to be what let's do the title right title and we're going to use source rect.time and we want the width right so then it will work then we would type something and it works however you you do have some limits because what if i want to create something to where it always goes with the longest text or with the shortest text how can i do that now if you're not that great at expressions i mean it can take you some time to figure it out but smart size gives you everything you need so let me talk about the first one so the first thing let me do all this get rid of the expression the first thing smart size by the way this is what it looks like and uh smart size has some options we already talked about a lot of these buttons it basically you can grab the size based on the end point of the layer midpoint of the layer the outs or the current time the current animated value or the current time so by default it's set to this but essentially that's probably a good one it kind of gives you animated value of the size of whatever layer if the attack is animating that it's going to constantly be adjusting so you want probably something like this the current animated value and then you would just pick a layer so for example i want to know the size of let's say this image right here so i select the image and i want to know what the size of it is in pixel value so then i can just apply it and it gives me everything i need to know so the width is here it is in the pixel value the height is in this and that's super awesome the same thing for any layers so you can kind of do it individually if you want but if you don't want to do it individually i'm going to do all this so we haven't applied anything yet so i'm going to select this shape right here and instead of just doing it individually i'm going to select multiple layers so if you have that one selected and you click on any layer it will apply this right here so obviously nothing is going on but what this does it essentially allows you to grab multiple layers and the way you grab the layers is not by selecting them but just tagging them the name of them so for example we have this right here size from layers starting and you can say starting with underscore any of these so i'm going to go with underscore so whatever layer i start with underscore that's the layer it's going to grab the size from so for example i'm going to do this i'm going to point from here to this width right here so right now it's set to zero because nothing has been tagged yet right so the size is zero but then i'm going to say hey let's tag the image right here so i'm gonna go over here remember it's underscore so as long as i put underscore here watch this boom it will tag it okay so that's good then you can say hey let's do this subtitle and i'm gonna tag it with underscore and then it will adjust to the subtitle and then i can say let's do the main title you get the idea whatever you tag that's what it will grab but not only that you can go over here it does have some options in here we have width offset so you can give it a little offset so when the title changes you know watch this it will go with it now the way it's set up right now right here we have the uh display pixel value that's good you can also do percentage in some cases but let's do this right now the width right here is set to minimum maximum so it's set to maximum value so it will always go with the highest value so right now this text right here the title is the highest text but if i go to subtitle and if i start typing it's going to be fine until it becomes longer than the longest text and then it will grab it so that's really helpful for when you're creating kind of mogarts lower thirds you name it so that can come in very handy you can do the same thing for minimum so you can say instead of maximum value on the width you can say minimum so it's going to stay with the shortest one in this case it's going to be the image now we do have the margin right here so that's what you see the offset right here it's just a margin so it's going to go with the minimum now i can size them you know i can select this and push it and see as once it becomes bigger than this then it will grab the shortest one there so very handy now another cool thing about this because if i create like a shape layer like just some kind of null shape layer just a blank layer i'm going to call it controls and i'm going to parent this image to it now watch this if i scale the size of this parent because the child of it is this image watch what happens it will size it and it will not adjust so that's a problem because it sounds like it doesn't recognize like global scale right so but it does if you go back over here you can say hey instead of the local size i want to grab global size when you do that it will adjust so it doesn't matter what you have sized underneath it it will always grab the proper size so essentially that's what smart size is and i need to do more tutorials in the future to kind of show you how really useful it is and just think of it as a reference tool that you can always get the size of each layer without remembering to type source red erected time and all the other methods that give you all the stuff it does it all for you with few clicks and you always have a reference of either a lot of layers or you can do individual layers smart stopwatch is an after effects tool that creates an animated stopwatch and really i mean it's that simple it's just this right here and let me show you how to work it you can either select a text layer like this one right here and then you can go over here and say hey i want a stopwatch starting at like zero and maybe go into like three seconds that's good you can reverse it at any point like by using this button you can flip the two you can tell this one to go to that side by using that or if you set it to zero you can tell it to go the other way then you can flip it but obviously you don't want to flip this but very easy you can use the up and down arrows you can use keyboards at the arrows on the keyboard and other than that is just these buttons right here you can say i want hours i want minutes seconds milliseconds so whatever you highlight so in this case let's do all of them for right now and then you just select it and apply it and there you go so now it's animated you can see it goes from zero to three and then it stops now if you don't want to start here you want to shift it you can actually you know it does create this pseudo effect you can go to start and you can adjust if you don't want to be three you can adjust it in here but you can also say time offset so maybe starting point instead of zero you can kind of shift it maybe like two seconds and at two seconds right here it's gonna start animating so you can offset this if you want you can speed it up right now it's set to one you can say three and it's gonna go super fast so as you can see it's going much faster but we're going to keep it at one and again at any point you can turn things on off like you can turn off the hours minutes all of that stuff and the other things are more for like if you're moving it into premiere using like a mocha do you want to control tracking and colors you can swap the colors like this anyway the sky is living what you can do with these but they are there if you need it but for the most part you're probably going to use this so you can again at any point change this around you can say let me undo all this in fact to remove it if you want to remove stopwatch you just click on this and it removes it and if you don't have any text layer selected like i'm going to delete this one and if you don't have anything selected that's no problem you can just run it and it creates a new one like this and again you can select this you can say hey i don't want hours and minutes i just want seconds and milliseconds and just update it and it will update it for you you can get rid of milliseconds and there you go and make sure you select it run it boom so that simple it creates everything for you and it does give you a lot of different options to work with smart scroll is an after effects tool and it does exactly what it says it does and it scrolls things and it does it in a smart way let me show you what i'm talking about so something like this would be perfect for like credits or anything like that for example we have this first example just bunch of credits we have text right here and i can tell it to move downwards or up by using this smart scroll right here this script right here so we can select this you can select multiple layers and you can say hey go up and now it's going to start it does it basically based on in and out points so it's going to start at the beginning of this at the bottom of your composition and it's going to scroll up all the way to the very end here and it's going to go to the very end doesn't matter the size of your composition it knows what the size is and it will always go from this to that if you wanted to go slower you would stretch it out more because it goes from in to out so that's probably good the cool thing about it you can actually size it down it will always know the beginning and the end it will always do that now it is locked in on up and down because it's moving up but you can move it side to side with this animation you can put it right here and it's going to move it you can even size it differently let me see it's better if you do it from this there you go so something like that you can even bring in images maybe you can create a composition that's very long with all the credits so you can kind of design it and have video animating just bring it in as a composition and then do the same thing here so right now it's going from the bottom up but we can reverse it we can select this and say hey let's go downwards so now it's going to go downwards again you can position it anywhere so that's for like up and down for something like side to side you probably would use something like this text it's very long and the same you can say this you can select this and say let's go from the right side to the left like this and it's going to start animating from one side to the other and it's going to go all the way to the very end so you can type it you can keep adding stuff it will always know the beginning and the end you can even right here you can even size it down and it'll still go from one side to the other and you can control the speed by bringing it closer together or further away that's how it knows how slow it needs to go so you get the concept here again you can tell to go the opposite way by clicking here and then it's going to go from one side to the other now it is locked in on left to right but you can move it up and down put it anywhere you want to and it'll go from one side to the other so this one can be very handy and if you don't want any of that you can just select both of them and just say get rid of this effect and then we'll get rid of it and now it doesn't do any scrolling smart text is an after effects tool that gives you a lot of different options when you work with text let me show you what i'm talking about so for example we have this text layer in our composition and we can access the size the tracking all that stuff by going to character and this panel we can change the size tracking make it bold you name it right let me undo all of this well what if i want to access all of these in my timeline so i can set keyframes before i would have to do this i would select this text layer i would go to the effect controls panel right click go to expression controls bring in a slider call this one size for the size and you can create you know a bunch of different sliders check boxes for all of these so let's do one more maybe tracking so we'll do spacing that's what i'm going to call it spacing and uh let's link it up now we're going to have to go to the text layer here go to the source text property create an expression and then we would tap into style and then in here we would set font font size to and then we would pick whip to this size we want the value of that and let's keep going we're going to set also what is a tracking spacing whatever you want to call so set tracking and we're going to link it up to slider right here spacing and now make sure i spell this right value there you go so now when i click away these two will control the size and tracking so now you can set keyframes create expressions and drag them into something like mogates well that's awesome but i get so tired of doing this over and over because i do a lot of mogurts i i rig you know different compositions and stuff and a lot of times i need these controls and it wears you out mentally when you constantly have to create this so that's why i created this smart text it does the same thing what i just did but much quicker let me show you so i'm going to get rid of the expression here and let's get rid of all of these pseudo effects or the sliders and so now i'm going to do the same thing so the same stuff you can access in here like the font size the boldness all that stuff you can actually go over here and activate all of them so whatever you activate that's what's going to take over right i highlighted all of them even the fill color and the stroke color so now i select the text you can select one or multiple it's going to do it instantly once you make your selection you hit apply and then it creates this pseudo effect with everything you need when you work with text so right away you can see each option right here so we have bold we have text size you can see that it has a checkbox to where when you have it checked then now it takes over so we have take over basically the font size and font size now is controlled with this slider it doesn't matter if you select this and go to character you can't really access it in here because now you're taking control right let me do this so that's what happens when you select these when you apply it whatever you selected that's what it's going to be controlling and you can now you can set keyframe you can activate these maybe set an expression all kinds of stuff even colors so you can change the fill color right here you can swap them right even for the stroke you can maybe say something like that adjust the boldness of the stroke and then you can swap the colors so it gives you a lot of options that you can again either keyframe or apply expression zone or even i like to use them for mogarts i would move all of these into more so i have more control and that's super handy so that's what smart size it does at any time you can use this this visual script to disable some of these maybe you don't want color anymore so you just deselect them and then select the text and then boom and now it's going to go back to the beginning maybe you don't want to control the size of it and now it's no longer going to be controlling by that so it's very handy like this you can enable disable but if for some reason you don't want all of those anymore you can completely get rid of it so now as you can see we have an expression applied here but when you select this and hit this remove smart text it will get rid of the pseudo effect and the expression smart cursor is an after effects preset and it seems like a simple thing right just a it's a mouse cursor that's all that is but i can't think of so many projects where i had to create a mouse cursor it's such a simple thing but it takes time to create it or you have to maybe purchase a vector graphic or maybe you have one somewhere you have to find it it always takes time then you have to rig it maybe maybe you go from an arrow to a hand and you always have to like think of ways to do this it just again it's mental exhaustion well i got annoyed by it so that's why i created this smart cursor and it's a very simple thing you just install into your presets folder of after effects and just click and drag and move it into your composition and here you go you have a cursor but it's not just a cursor it's a smart cursor so you have this pseudo effect you can adjust the size of it you can make it really big as you can see we get an arrow but you can switch between an arrow or a hand and you can set keyframes if you want maybe not even a keyframe but you can also set it like an expression to where when it hovers over some object it switches to the hand but when you leave that it switches back to an arrow i'll have to do some tutorials on this it's very handy i use this all the time anytime i need a cursor i just pull it in and it saves me so much time so you can animate the cursor itself you can adjust the size again you can switch between hand arrow you can also change the colors you can swap the colors you can adjust the thickness the width of the stroke so you can make it very thick very thin and it's consistent with the hand as well so whatever you set it to the arrow will copy that as well so again it's a very simple tool but i mean it will save your life so many times smart highlighter is an after effects tool but at the moment it is a preset eventually i will turn it into a script and basically what it does it gives you more color options when you work with text and it comes in very handy when you create mogates for premiere pro so for example in after effects it's so easy to change a color of like one character right you just highlight it like this go to a character panel and here you can change it to just about any color you like it's very easy to do not a problem well it's really not that easy to do in mogrits in premiere pro it's you can't really do that so for example i took this right here and i converted into a mogat in the essential graphics panel and essentially this right here that's how it's going to look like in premiere as a moguard so i can go over here and change the text it will adjust however i can't really change the color of just one character or one word in the line of text here i can change the color of the entire thing easily but i can't really do one word or one character and that's where smart highlighter comes in very handy it is a preset and i took the expression that dan edwards wrote years ago in fact i was working on a project for fox sports and we needed something to to be able to highlight things within the mogart and we came across this expression by dan edberg and then edwards is just an unbelievably smart guy i mean if you if you've done any kind of expressions or scripting if you've been searching on the web you came across dan den is just all over the web helping everybody he's he's the legend and he's super knowledgeable so he wrote this years ago i've been using it and i love it so much that i convert into a preset so let me show you what it does by the way if you want to check out den's work you should go to motionscript.com i'll include the link at the bottom of this video and yeah check it out so here's how it works it's a preset so you just go to effects and presets in here and we have smart highlighter now if you have your text selected then you can just double click but if you don't you can just click and drag and drop it like this not much is happening here but we do have a new pseudo effect here and here's how it works you just go to highlighter and in here you pick which one of these you want to use i want to use square brackets so i'm going to select this and then that's it that's all you do and then after that you just go to your text and i guess this would be inside of a premiere this is what your marker would look like and then you can highlight let's say we're going to highlight just the e right here so you just go before that e insert open square bracket go behind it and close square bracket and whatever you have inside of the square brackets that's what's going to change the color to this blue because it's a fill color we don't have any stroke color but if you did it would also change the stroke color to yellow so when i click away you can see now that e that i highlighted with square brackets has this blue color so i can change this to any color i want i can actually you know go over here press e to reveal the effect and then i can you know bring the fill highlighter and stroke and also this color swap and anything that i drag into the essential graphics panel all of these things i can change in premiere so now i can change the color of my highlighted areas i can change it to yellow and then boom now it's yellow but the cool thing about this you can do it multiple times you can't just do it once you can do it multiple so maybe i want to change the entire word ghost right open and close square bracket and now the entire thing is in yellow maybe just the first letter of title so let's do closed square bracket open and there you go it's that easy smart patterns are after effects presets that i created years ago and i can't remember what they were called at the time but a bunch of you have downloaded it but i took it in and i rebranded it basically i just changed the name of it and now we get smart patterns they're the same patterns that you guys enjoyed for so many years and i still use them today they're very useful so let me show you how they work you just go to effects and presets panel and in here we have smart patterns folder and inside of it we have a bunch of different patterns and it's very easy to use make sure nothing is selected double click on the first one checkers and you can put it in between the image and maybe the background color maybe we can change the blending mode to something like uh let's do self light so that's an interesting pattern you can select this and once you have it selected you can shuffle through all of them really quick just to see what you what you like here so you can go to cube you can see it's a bunch of different cubes so that's very interesting much more exciting than just a simple solid solid color so you can kind of shuffle through all of these just to see which one you might want to go with and again let me kind of show you all of them might as well so you can see that's a cool pattern as well i remember creating these years ago it took me some time to create these but hey even today i still use them in areas where i don't have the time you know to create a new background i just drop it in real quick adjust the opacity that's a cool one and uh there you go so and again the list goes on and on and this thing is very smart because it's tiled it's actually using shape layers so you can alter them all day long i'll show you here in a second so let's go through all of them real quick and you can keep going and just pick whichever one you like and almost there so what's this one okay cool all right good and last one right here so i'm gonna click on that one and just to show you that you can alter them so here they are and you can find it at the top here but you can actually go through it over here we have group one we have group here and rectangle so you can actually adjust this rectangle path you can see you can size it down you can make it into something smaller you can move it around smart wipe is primarily a motion graphic template to use in premiere pro but you will have the after effects project as well so you'll have both the after effects project and the motion graphic template now it's super easy to install literally here it is it's just a simple file you can drag it into the essential graphics panel like this and it takes a second or two to install just click into the timeline and wait for it and it will pop up here in a second there it is it's that simple so now we have smart wipe and to use it is very easy so right now i have this timeline i just have one shot it kind of goes into the next one and i'm going to use this as a transition so it's very simple just click and drag and drop it right about here we want to kind of position it to where it's in full so let's do this something like that is close enough so it's going to rotate like that and transition us into the next shot so something like this very awesome now let me show you what kind of options you have here so you can select this go back to the essential graphics panel and in here under edit we have a lot of options to work with so we have right here wipe type so we can click on it and we have different options in here even though it's one more but it has different sliders so for example we have linear wipe you can click side to side like this and so now it's going to go from one side to another so as you can see wait for it a little bit just to load and for the most part it's it's pretty fast as you can see i'm on full here and i'm recording and preview is pretty fast so it's go it's going from one side to another but you can select this and you can customize the angle so maybe you want to come in from a different angle from this i mean you can position it anywhere you want to so this essentially can turn into multiple transitions and so something like this might work as you can see it just goes from that you can reverse the colors so maybe if you don't like these colors you can reverse them you can change them to whatever you want but in this case i'm not going to so you get the idea it's super handy to use and again you can position it you know maybe it can be just from the bottom up so it can be just a simple wipe like this that might be helpful so let's preview this yeah that's good and you can also switch up yeah you can go maybe side to side let's go something like 45 no 90 degrees and now it's gonna go side to side so again it's just one simple wipe that you can basically version different different kinds of wipes and we're only talking about this one right here now we have linear wipe inward so let's see this one so when you click on it and let's position a different angle maybe like 45. so it's the same concept but this time it's going inward so it's going to push in like this and again the same kind of concept let's see this and then it transitions into your shot you can do the angle control here you can move it around however you want to and it will do the exact same animation very awesome so then we have let's say a linear wipe outward so it's the same concept but it's going outward this time and let's preview this well actually let's position it to where it's more interesting like 45 degree angle and so now we are in this shot and then boom next thing you know we're at this shot so it's very simple let's preview this again again i'm impressed how quickly it previews so you can select this we're going to go over here to radio wipe so this one is clockwise and it's different so now you have something like this it kind of spins into a new shot so let's preview that real quick so again we're in this shot and then it goes into that shot so you can also control the angle you can select it and you can control different angle now this one is a bit more heavy because it has more layers involved but for the most part i mean it it previews somewhat fast so let's preview this again you get the idea so that's clockwise you can do the same thing counterclockwise and now it will do the same thing but the opposite direction so let's see this and you're in a different shot and then the last one right here we have radial wipe inward so let's see what that looks like and let's preview this so as you can see it's kind of like a pac-man right it closes on itself but you can also adjust the angle as well so let's make it more interesting 45 degree angle and let's preview this nice so yeah these wipes will come in very handy for that one time that you really need it and it's amazing that it's just a one simple mogurt but it gives you different options but not only that you have some control to make it look different each time all right well that's the end of this very long video i want to thank you for watching it if you want to get these tools right here you can either go to ukrainemedia.com or just click on the link in the description of this video it'll take you to the same place and there you can either get them individually or as a bundle so again thank you for your support if you're not a part of our free mentoring group you should definitely join it's a free facebook private group that you can join today by going to euchremedia.com community the link to that is also included in the description of this video but in the meantime my name is sergey praknevsky and this is euchremedia.com you

Channel: ukramedia

Views: 31,974

Keywords: Adobe, After Effects, Motion Graphics, Scripts, Ae Scripts, After Effects Scripts, Tools, After Effects Tools, Presets, Ae Presets, After Effects Presets, Text animation, motion design, ukramedia, sergei prokhnevskiy, Masking, mask, mogrts, Smart Animator, Smart Rekt, Smart Anchor, Smart Sizer, Smart Size, Smart Highlighter, Smart, Smart Scroll, Smart Controls, Smart Mask, Smart Bounce, Smart Text, Smart Stopwatch, Smart Patterns, Smart L3drd, Mogrts Tools

Id: 5-mq274n_fI

Length: 81min 18sec (4878 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021