Chapter 12. Creating and Animating Text

With all its strengths in animation and compositing motion footage, you might expect After Effects to possess more limited text-creation tools, leaving serious typesetting to Photoshop or Illustrator. Not so. After Effects lets you create text with the same ease and flexibility as its software siblings.

True, in older versions of After Effects, creating text meant applying the Basic Text or Path Text effect to a layer. Those effects still exist; but since After Effects 6, you can create a text layer by typing with a type tool directly in a Comp panel. Moreover, you can adjust the text using full-featured Character and Paragraph panels. You can even convert a text layer imported from Photoshop into a text ...

Get After Effects 7 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual Quickpro Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.