Creating and editing text layers

You can add text to a composition using text layers. Text layers are useful for many purposes, including animated titles, lower thirds, credit rolls, and dynamic typography.

For a video tutorial on animating text, go to the Adobe website.

You can animate the properties of entire text layers or the properties of individual characters, such as color, size, and position. You animate text using text animator properties and selectors. 3D text layers can optionally contain 3D sublayers, one for each character. (See Animate text with text animators and Per-character 3D text properties.)

Text layers are synthetic layers, meaning that a text layer does not use a footage item as its source—though you can convert text information from some footage items into text layers. Text layers are also vector layers. As with shape layers and other vector layers, text layers are always continuously rasterized, so when you scale the layer or resize the text, it retains crisp, resolution-independent edges. You cannot open a text layer in its own Layer panel, but you can work with text layers in the Composition panel.

After Effects uses two kinds of text: point text and paragraph text. Point text is useful for entering a single word or a line of characters; paragraph text is useful for entering and formatting the text as one or more paragraphs.

You can copy text from other applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, or any text editor, and paste it into a text layer in After Effects. Because After Effects also supports Unicode characters, you can copy and paste these characters between After Effects and any other application that also supports Unicode (which includes all Adobe applications).

Text formatting is included in the Source Text property. Use the Source Text property to animate formatting and to change the characters themselves (for example, change the letter b to the letter c).

Text that looks good on your computer screen as you are creating it can sometimes look bad when viewed in a final output movie. These differences can arise from the device used to view the movie or from the compression scheme used to encode the movie. The same is true for other vector graphics, such as shapes in shape layers. In fact, the same problems can occur in raster images, but the small and sharp details of vector graphics cause the problems most often.

Keep in mind the following as you create and animate text and vector graphics for video:

• You should always preview your movie on the same kind of device that your audience will use to view it, such as an NTSC video monitor. (See Preview on an external video monitor.)

• Avoid sharp color transitions, especially from one highly saturated color to its complementary color. Sharp color transitions are difficult for many compression schemes—such as the compression schemes in MPEG and JPEG standards—to encode. These compression schemes can cause visual noise near sharp transitions. For analog television, the same sharp transitions can cause spikes outside the allowed range for the signal, also causing noise.

• When text will be over moving images, make sure that the text has a contrasting border (such as a glow or a stroke) so that the text is still readable when something the same color as the fill passes behind the text.

• Avoid thin horizontal elements, which can vanish from the frame if they happen to be on an even scan line during an odd field, or vice versa. The height of the horizontal bar in a capital H, for example, should be three pixels or greater. You can thicken horizontal elements by increasing font size, using a bold (or faux bold) style, or applying a stroke. (See Formatting characters with the Character panel.)

• When animating text to move vertically—for scrolling credits, for example—move the text vertically at a rate in pixels per second that is an even multiple of the field rate for the interlaced video format. Such a rate of movement prevents a kind of twitter that can come from the text movement being out of phase with the scan lines. For NTSC, good values include 0, 119.88, and 239.76 pixels per second; for PAL, good values include 0, 100, and 200 pixels per second.

• To avoid the risk of twitter that comes with vertical motion, thin graphical elements, and fields, consider presenting credits as a sequence of blocks of text separated by transitions, such as opacity fades.
  

Fortunately, many problems with text in video and compressed movie formats can be solved with one simple technique: Apply a blur to the text layer. A slight blur can soften color transitions and cause thin horizontal elements to expand. The Reduce Interlace Flicker effect works best for the purpose of reducing twitter; it applies a vertical directional blur but doesn't blur horizontally, so it degrades the image less than other blurs.

Philip Hodgetts provides tips on the Creative COW website for getting the best results when creating text or vector graphics for video.

Christopher Green provides a script (crg_Text_from_File.jsx) on his website that creates one or multiple text layers based on the contents of a text file. You can either create one text layer from all of the text, or you can create one layer for each line in the text file. The script also provides options for leading and other spacing.

Todd Kopriva provides an example script on the Adobe website that demonstrates the text formatting features available through the scripting interface.

Salahuddin Taha provides a script on the After Effects Scripts website that enables entry of Arabic text (which flows from right to left).

Michael Cardeiro provides a script on the After Effects Scripts website that makes multiple versions of your compositions using information from a spreadsheet or database. The script goes through your spreadsheet line by line, making a new version of your composition with text layers in the composition receiving text from the spreadsheet automatically.

The After Effects Scripts website provides many scripts for working with text. Paul Tuersley provides a script on the After Effects Scripts website that allows you to search for and edit text layers throughout your After Effects project, create your own text style presets, and apply them to multiple layers.

Paul Tuersley provides a script on the AE Enhancers forum for importing Substation Alpha (SSA) karaoke files and automatically creating animated text layers from them.

Jeff Almasol provides a script on his redefinery website for editing the source text of text layers.

Jeff Almasol provides a script on his redefinery website that converts various plain text punctuation into their “smart” typographical representations (for example, (c) is converted to the copyright symbol, ©).

Jeff Almasol provides a script on his redefinery website that sets keyframes for the Source Text property of a text layer and sets the values to text from a text file; the keyframes are placed at times specified by layer markers on the text layer.

For examples of expressions for the Source Text property, see Writing expressions for source text and MarkerKey attributes (expression reference).

When you enter point text, each line of text is independent—the length of a line increases or decreases as you edit the text, but it doesn’t wrap to the next line.

The small line through the type tool pointer marks the position of the text baseline. For horizontal text, the baseline marks the line on which the text rests; for vertical text, the baseline marks the center axis of the characters.

When you enter point text, it is created using the properties currently set in the Character panel. You can change these properties later by selecting the text and modifying settings in the Character panel.

When you enter paragraph text, the lines of text wrap to fit the dimensions of the bounding box. You can enter multiple paragraphs and apply paragraph formatting.

You can resize the bounding box at any time, which causes the text to reflow within the adjusted rectangle.

When you enter paragraph text, it has the properties set in the Character and Paragraph panels. You can change these properties later by selecting the text and modifying settings in the Character and Paragraph panels.

You can edit text in text layers at any time. If you set the text to follow a path, designate it as a 3D layer, transform it, or animate it, you can still continue to edit it. Before you can edit text, you must select it.

The pointer for a type tool changes, depending on whether it is over a text layer in the Composition panel. When the pointer for a type tool is directly over a text layer, it appears as the edit text pointer ; click to place the insertion point in the existing text.

Jeff Almasol provides a script on his redefinery website for editing the source text of text layers.

Jeff Almasol provides a script on his redefinery website that converts various plain text punctuation into their “smart” typographical representations (for example, (c) is converted to the copyright symbol, ©).

Jeff Almasol provides a script on his redefinery website that sets keyframes for the Source Text property of a text layer and sets the values to text from a text file; the keyframes are placed at times specified by layer markers on the text layer.

You can drag with the move pointer in the Composition panel to move a text layer. To activate the move pointer without leaving text editing mode, move the type tool away from the text in the Composition panel; when you see the move pointer , drag to move the text. You can also hold down the Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac OS) key to momentarily activate the move pointer.

Horizontal text flows from left to right; multiple lines of horizontal text lie from top to bottom. Vertical text flows from top to bottom; multiple lines of text lie from right to left.

Text layers from Photoshop retain their style and remain editable in After Effects.

If you imported the Photoshop document as merged layers, then you must first select the layer and choose Layer > Convert To Layered Comp to decompose the imported Photoshop document into its layers.

The layer becomes an After Effects text layer and no longer uses the Photoshop text layer as its source footage item.

If the layer contains layer styles, the layer styles are converted to editable layer styles as if the Layer > Layer Styles > Convert To Editable Styles command had been used on the layer before converting the text to editable text.