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 siblings.

In After Effects CS4, you can create a text layer by typing directly in a Comp panel using a Type tool. 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 layer you can edit in After Effects. And as in Illustrator, you can convert text into outlines you can manipulate as mask or shape paths.

You can animate text ...

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