video2brain - Kinetic Typography Techniques with After Effects

Working with Audio
In this chapter you’ll put together the background for the animation. In doing so you’ll learn lots of useful techniques, such as how to work with markers in the After Effects Timeline, preview audio, create loops, add effects that animate in time with audio, and use expressions to link values together.

Preparing Source Files
You can use either Illustrator or Photoshop to create source text files for import into After Effects. Illustrator offers better tools and controls, but Photoshop has the advantage of creating text that remains editable in After Effects. In this chapter you’ll learn how to use both.

Structuring Your After Effects Project
When working on large projects it’s good to set up your project and composition structure early on to avoid confusion. However, it can be difficult to know what that structure should be without experience working on large-scale projects. In this chapter you’ll learn about several options for setting up a comp structure for kinetic typography animations.

Working with Shapes
Not only can you can create vector-based shape layers directly in After Effects, but they can also be resized to any dimension without losing resolution, making them perfect for creating truly flexible shapes and patterns. In this chapter you’ll learn how to create complex shapes, add operators, and animate them over time.

Optimizing Performance
In this chapter you’ll see how to make the most of the After Effects preferences and learn other ways of speeding up your After Effects workflow, including proxies and some hidden features.

Animating Text
There are scores of techniques for animating text in After Effects, but this chapter will focus on the use of text animators. You’ll see how using free animation presets can save you lots of time and how to build up your own library of presets. We’ll also take a look at the Brainstorm tool, a fantastically creative feature of After Effects.

Creating 3D Animation
Everyone wants to do 3D animation these days, but After Effects’ 3D is a bit of a strange beast, more like 2.5D! In this chapter you’ll learn about the idiosyncrasies of working in the After Effects 3D environment and gain confidence as you go.

Using Expressions to Create Motion
Expressions enable you to control the animation of properties via commands as opposed to keyframes. They open up a whole new way of working and are a whole lot of fun, as you’ll see in this chapter.

Rendering Your Final Movie
There are a few things you need to be aware of when rendering your movies from After Effects. In this chapter you’ll get some helpful tips to assist you when rendering movies from After Effects.

Project Files are not included!