About text animation

Animating text layers is useful for many purposes, including animated titles, lower thirds, credit rolls, and dynamic typography.

As with other layers in After Effects, you can animate entire text layers. However, text layers offer additional animation features with which you can animate the text within the layers. You can animate text layers by using any of the following methods:

• Animate the Transform properties, as you would any other layer, to change the entire layer, not its text contents.

• Apply text animation presets. (See Text animation presets.)

• Animate the source text of the layer, so that the characters themselves change to different characters or use different character or paragraph formats over time. (See Select and edit text in text layers and Writing expressions for source text.)

• Use text animators and selectors to animate many properties of individual characters or a range of characters. (See Animate text with text animators.)

To smooth the edges and movement of animated text, enable motion blur for the text layer. See Motion blur for more information.

For a video tutorial on animating text, go to the Adobe website at www.adobe.com/go/vid0226.