Call out important information and captivate your audience with lower-third graphics in your videos.
Keep it legible and interesting
The purpose of a lower third is to convey important information to the viewer. Adding visual interest helps draw the viewer’s eye to that information as quickly as possible.
Tips for building effective lower-third graphics
- Make sure the font is big enough that anyone can read the text in 3 seconds or less.
- Design a simple background for the type so it doesn’t compete with the information.
- Use the motion of the animation into and out of the scene to draw attention.
A popular attention-grabbing technique: duplicate and repeat
Animate the shape layer that will be your background element into and out of the scene. Duplicate the layer, change its color, and slide it a few frames down the timeline. Repeat the process 3 or 4 times. Then animate the type over the bar to appear after the background element has finished animating the scene.
Work faster with Motion Graphics templates
You can dramatically speed up the process of creating lower thirds by taking advantage of Motion Graphics templates (MOGRTs). As the name suggests, MOGRTs are reusable templates that incorporate graphics, text, and preset animation and are perfect for video projects. So, instead of creating three separate lower thirds, you can simply create a single lower-third MOGRT in After Effects and specify exactly what can be edited in Premiere Pro. Then, once it’s loaded into Premiere Pro, you can reuse it in multiple places. Change text, appearance, and the properties you specified directly in Premiere Pro — no need to return to After Effects to make changes.
