Title Design Tips - After Effects Tips for Video Editors

hey everyone kyle here for school of motion we're back for the third and final part of this title sequence upgrade make sure to check out the first two segments if you haven't already today we'll be talking about some useful design tips applying those concepts to rework our titles in a more thoughtful way and bringing those titles into after effects to add some more refined and meaningful animation let's finish this thing up [Music] we've been working on upgrading this title sequence from the not so great original up top with the assessments and simple title tweaks we made in the first lesson plus our footage fixes and compositing work from the second lesson we've ended up with something that's definitely an improvement but i think we can go even further and make these titles feel like they really make sense for the concept of our show so raise your hand if you started out as an editor with no real design training always kind of wondered why your lower thirds and titles looked mediocre but never really knew what to do about it yeah that's okay i got by without design training for a long time myself before i really realized how much i was missing out on obviously we can't cover everything in a couple minutes but i'm going to try to quickly run through some tips i wish i'd known a long time ago that should make an immediate difference in your title designs readability should be priority number one if you're putting text on a screen people are going to try to read it and they'll be frustrated if they can't if you're putting that text over moving footage especially if it's only up for a short time you need to make it as easy to read as possible this provides the why for most of the following tips we already talked a little about choosing typefaces and how a sans-serif typeface is usually going to be a safe choice for video they're easier to read and while they can definitely have different styles they're usually cleaner and more neutral we generally want to complement the video content not overpower it right now there certainly are reasons to use something more stylized like if you're branding a new show for example generally speaking though if you can find a good solid sans-serif choice that has multiple weights and styles available it's going to give you a lot of options and opportunities to create some contrast while keeping a consistent feel now contrast can mean many things i would highly recommend checking out this other tutorial by mike frederick that goes far more in depth with these ideas and how you can use them to create interesting and effective title designs but here's the quick version the most obvious kind of contrast for us is probably contrast in value or light versus dark you need to color your text properly and find an area of the frame where it can hold its own against the footage if you don't have an appropriate area with enough open space that's when you start thinking about boxes or those good old drop shadows these additions can call attention to themselves though so you want to use them thoughtfully other kinds of contrast can be a great way to communicate things quickly remember when we rearranged joey's title in the first video here we're using contrast and size to help communicate which line of text is more important we could take that further if we wanted to and use different font weights to contrast these two lines even more this helps establish what's called hierarchy the layout and sizing of this type tells our brain what to pay more attention to speaking of size one of the easiest ways a novice designer can make their stuff look better is often just by making it smaller doesn't that already look more professional of course you do need to keep your viewers context in mind are they probably going to be watching this on a phone if so then bigger type is probably okay are they going to be watching this on a movie screen okay well that same type might be 10 feet tall and super overwhelming remember that rule of thirds i mentioned in the first video you can call up rulers in any of adobe's design apps by pressing control or command r and create guides for yourself by dragging them from the ruler bar grids and guides like this are very helpful for placement and overall composition but can also help you keep tabs on how big your titles are getting if you find yourself going too far beyond the size of one of these sections maybe stop for a second and ask yourself if there's a reason for it to be so big bonus type design tip in case you've never noticed it before kerning this is the spacing between individual letter pairs once you start seeing it bad kerning is kind of a dead giveaway for an inexperienced or inattentive designer you'll notice this most between letters like a and v but you should keep an eye out for it anytime you're working with type and make a point of doing at least a quick check for it adobe's design apps including after effects have a hotkey to quickly adjust kerning alt or option and the left and right arrow keys unfortunately that's not the case in premiere for some reason and adjusting kerning with these little controls in here is not fun but hey do you want a bonus tip inside your bonus tip come up here to edit keyboard shortcuts you can find any open hotkey combinations and add your own shortcuts for anything that's accessible and you can search for those functions right here like kerning how about that they're here just not assigned i'll click on this five units adjustment hit the hotkey i want to use which is alt and an arrow key and ta-da easily adjustable kerning directly in premiere coming from an editing background myself i was always curious about design in my own career but never felt like i was as strong as i could be until i took our design bootcamp course this course equipped me to make intentional design choices instead of just trying things until they kind of worked well enough the quality of my work not to mention the confidence boost that it gave me was a huge step up if this little crash course and design piqued your interest i highly recommend it alright let's put some of these ideas into practice i do still want to keep these titles fairly simple mostly just text but let's pick a nice typeface that makes sense for this project and see if we can apply some of those design fundamentals to make them a little more visually interesting i started by looking at some rugby references but those felt way too sportsy definitely not what i'm looking for i had mentioned this project to another of our designers and he found a few references from other title sequences you can see the type is usually sitting over a pretty open area makes sense these probably would have been shot specifically for this purpose unlike my stock footage clips the type is also pretty small in most of these if it's bigger like in this one you can tell it was done very intentionally okay cool i think we can take some cues from some of these that designer also sent me a couple layout ideas and i liked this one this typeface has just a little bit of a sportsy flavor but not too much and i think the italics give it some energy and movement rugby is kind of a rough chaotic game so i like the texture and i think that makes sense too i'd love to be able to animate the texture though so we'll have to see if there's a way we can do that okay so this typeface is authority from retro supply company and fortunately there's also a rounded italic version that has the same feeling but without the texture perfect it's still nice and simple just a typeface and this one little element so we've got some nice contrast in size here and i like the way the top of this bar aligns to this part of the s it all fits together nicely and i think we can pretty easily expand on this idea to create a nice look for our actors names you may have noticed that we were in photoshop for a minute there if you're already comfortable working in photoshop or illustrator do it design is what those apps are made for and they both have ways to import your work into after effects but you should probably make your titles wherever you're comfortable doing it now let's bring them into after effects and animate these things i'll start out by importing my photoshop file i get a choice about how i'd like to bring that in and i'll choose composition retain layer sizes you'll see it creates a composition which will be our composed layout from photoshop in a folder with the layers inside it we're going to be making more titles after this so let's keep things organized i'll select my sequence folder click this little folder icon to create a new folder and name it titles and just drop this right in there let's bring this down into our timeline i'll place this just above that last shot i'd like to align this with the beginning of that shot so if i start dragging this and then hold shift it'll snap into place here i'll position that over his chest here maybe scale it down just a bit and let's use that other trick from before when we were nesting our shots i'll come down here to this marker that tells us where we will have faded to black double-click our title to look inside press asterisk to drop a marker just to keep track of how long this needs to be and hit n to trim our work area now we know just how much of this will be visible in the main edit and that's all we're going to work with if we're confident we don't need to be any longer than this which i am i can right click here in the work area and choose trim comp to work area now you can see this is all layered out for us because of the way we imported it but these are just photoshop layers right now i'd like to try that same tracking move we used in our previous video but this text isn't actually editable right now we can change that though i just need to select that layer come up to the layer menu create convert to editable text see how the icon changed now it's editable awesome i'll come over to my effects and presets panel search for tracking and grab that increased tracking preset we used back in the first video i can just double click to apply it oops i just realized my cursor wasn't at the beginning of the composition that's one thing about presets they get applied at the time your cursor is currently at so let's undo that hit home to move to the first frame then double click the preset all right let's reveal those keyframes by pressing u as you probably remember this is going to be way too much so let's go up to the second keyframe and change that to four i think that'll be a good amount i'll drag the second keyframe out to our marker holding shift again to snap and let's preview that i'm noticing that the key frames from our preset are actually eased which i would normally like but i think in this case i would rather have them be linear so they just move at a constant speed if i just draw a box around both of them and then i can control or command click either of them great those diamond shapes tell us that these are linear keyframes now yeah that feels better i would also like to see if we can do something with this bar for starters i'm going to change this to another color just so it stands out more i'm actually going to make a copy of this thing by hitting ctrl or command d to duplicate and we'll twirl open the second copy because we're going to be moving that one let's scale that up to 102 i just wanted a teensy bit bigger then i'll right click on position and choose separate dimensions we're only going to be moving this on x horizontally and i'd like a little more control let's come up here to about one second and make a keyframe on the x position hit home to jump back to the first frame and then scoot this off until it's just past the other one so i'm going to use the second copy of the bar which i'm going to rename to matt well now i bet you know what i'm going to use that for if you don't see these drop downs right now you can click this down here to toggle between your switches and modes and then i'll click this little drop down menu here which lets me use the layer above it as an alpha matte so now as this moves into place it'll reveal our bar i'll select the second keyframe hit f9 to ease that value i want that this time but i think this one will also need just a bit more attention so i'll click this little graph icon to open up our graph editor and i'm going to grab this little handle pull that out more so it really eases into place here okay nice let's zoom back out yeah that's feeling good i'd like to create that texture we saw back in the original design but i'm going to create it directly in here so it's animated and i can make it look just the way i want i'll choose layer new solid this normally creates a solid at the size of this composition which usually is great but thinking ahead i want it to be a little bit bigger i'm going to be reusing this for the name titles which are mostly wider than this i'll go ahead and change this to 2000 by 600. everything else looks fine let's go ahead and rename this layer texture i'll come over to effects and presets and search for fractal and then i'll grab this fractal noise effect and apply that to my layer this effect is great for generating all kinds of textures we just need to dial in the settings i'll crank up the contrast to about 300 set the brightness to 120 yeah there we go now i just need to open up transform and turn the scale way down to let's say 12. yeah see where i'm going with this now i want this to move and fortunately that's also built right in let's come down to evolution create a keyframe at the first frame and then hop to the end and set this to 50. okay great that's obviously very fast but i'll fix that in a second i'm actually going to make a second copy of this noise by using that same controller command d to duplicate set the scale just a little bit smaller maybe nine and this effect actually has a blending mode built right into it so i can tell this to multiply itself over the other instance of the fractal noise effect and you can see how we just made that more complex lastly i'll open up the evolution options change this random seed property to any other number just so it doesn't look too similar to the first version of the effect cool let's fix that speed i'll come back over to effects and presets look for posterize time drop that on my layer this basically lets you change the frame rate for just this layer which is perfect here i'll set that to 2 and now it's a much slower kind of stuttery texture if i look at the blending modes for this layer and set this to stencil luma it's going to use the white and black values of this layer to determine the visibility of everything that sits below it within this composition which is going to be exactly what i want here nice looks pretty organic but we could come back and tweak this some more if we needed to let's see how this feels out in the main timeline great i'm noticing that he tosses the ball right across where our title sits it might be interesting to use that to wipe this away i mean i have already rotoscoped that ball in the previous lesson so nice yeah i like that it never hurts to try out an idea especially if you already did most of the work okay i'd like to use these same ideas to make our actors name titles i'll come back to my project panel select that title and duplicate it let's go ahead and name it pill baxton since that's one of my actors and double click to open that i can delete this stuff because i just need the texture and the one word i'll double click the text to edit baxton then i'll duplicate that double-click to edit type in his first name pill come over to the paragraph panel and choose right aligned i'm realizing this isn't the longest of my actors names i probably should have started with that one but let's go ahead and make this composition a bit wider to be safe i'll hit control or command k to open up my composition settings let's set this width to 2000 that should be plenty of space one thing i'm noticing is that my kerning needs a little help i'll select both of these text layers go to my character panel let's see what metrics does for us maybe a few individual adjustments in here remember that hotkey alt or option and the left right arrows yeah that's better we obviously need some separation between the names but i don't want to just use the space let's see if we can take advantage of some size contrast to make this a little more interesting so i'll click on the first name you can see the anchor point is still over here from before that's okay i'll hit y to grab my anchor point tool and if i grab and hold controller command it'll snap right to this upper corner i'll hit s to reveal just the scale okay uh the scale is at kind of a weird value which can happen sometimes when you import from photoshop but that's okay i'm going to try using the golden ratio which is sort of a magic cool number that makes stuff look good so if i just click right here in one of my scale fields i can actually let after effects do the math for me i'll use this existing value in here then type slash that's divide and the golden ratio is roughly 1.62 that feels okay but we can just use that as a starting point and adjust it in a way that makes sense here i think this file has some guides from photoshop let's turn those on i think the bottom of this first name should maybe line up with this little crossover from the a i'll just scrub that scale up just a little bit yeah i think that looks good press ctrl semicolon to turn those guides back off and if i hit u you can see all the keyframes that we made before in the other composition carried into here just fine looking at this over the footage i've added just that little bit of position drift and don't laugh but i think these titles are actually going to benefit from just a little bit of drop shadow effects and presets drop shadow let's use the eyedropper to grab the black from his shoe we can bring the distance down to zero and crank the softness way up to about 200 if we toggle this on and off we don't really notice there's a shadow here but it does help to stand off from the footage a little better okay now we just need to version this out to make the other names here's that introducing name title you can see i hung on to the acumen type face we were using before but again i was looking to add some contrast so it's much smaller with really extreme tracking here i think we can also hold on to acumen for the opening school of motion production title let's see if taking school of motion to a heavier weight uh skipping one is usually good so let's try bold yeah that makes school of motion really stand out i already added some simple opacity keyframes here and those are okay but i'd like to see if i can kind of give the idea that this flare is causing the text to reveal with that layer selected i'll grab my rectangle tool and draw a simple mask let's open that up disconnect the linking for the feathering here and crank the x feathering up to about i like how that kind of knocks back the edges of the text just a little bit okay let's line this up with a second opacity keyframe and create a keyframe for our mask shape go back just a few frames so we can still see this thing and then bring in the edges of our mask so they kind of line up with the flare more or less in the middle of the text anyway move that to line up with the first keyframe maybe easy ease that second one and yeah let's do the same thing at the end i'll just copy these two keyframes move up to the fade out and paste they'll be backwards though so if i right click keyframe assistant time reverse keyframes cool i might nudge this first one over a little bit so it's kind of halfway between the opacity keys yeah that looks nice i think we can call it a wrap on this thing there's obviously one big step left time to export we could go straight to a delivery format by using media encoder but i usually like exporting intermediate working formats from after effects and then finishing the project off back in premiere it's a much better place to handle any final audio adjustments you might have and this workflow can be much more efficient for dealing with any changes that might pop up let's come up to composition add to render queue i really like image sequences for projects like this one you can choose your formats here and even save your own presets i'm partial to the open exr format so i've made myself a preset for that okay let's export this thing and then bring it back into premiere working with image sequences can be a huge time saver on a project like this exporting the entire project from after effects can sometimes take a while and for a piece like this where maybe you notice a typo or some other small tweak that only affects one shot being able to render and replace just that one small portion and turn these changes around really quickly can sometimes mean the difference between whether you hit your deadline or not after all that work i'm excited for us to take a look at our final title sequence we made some pretty major changes and a lot of subtle ones too [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's definitely come a long way from where we started and hopefully you picked up several useful techniques that you can use to start improving your own work right away thanks so much for coming along with me on this epic length tutorial series it was great having you here to flip these titles oops guess we never got around to fixing those uh well maybe you can help me out if you have some time since you know you're an expert title designer now right to make sure you don't miss any of our helpful tutorials for after effects cinema 4d and more make sure to subscribe to this channel and click the bell icon so you'll be notified when they come out thanks so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 5,837

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: 3ScinV9bwUg

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021