Tutorial: Using Adobe After Effects CC and Bridge to Add Life to Your Text
While After Effects may be daunting for some Premiere Pro editors, here is an easy-to-follow workflow that can enliven your text and titles with pre-built animations found in Adobe Bridge, applied in a few simple steps in After Effects, and imported directly into your Premiere Pro timeline.
Adjusting the Timing
The next step is to adjust the timing of the animation. In this example, we'll speed it up. To do so, make sure your layer is selected (the name of the layer should be highlighted in the Source Monitor, as shown in Figure 11, below).
Figure 11. The highlighted Source Name text indicates that the "What you will learn" text later is selected. The diamonds in the effect timeline on the right represent the keyframes. Click the image to see it at full size.
Next, press U to reveal any keyframes that you've applied to the selected layer in After Effects. The Range Selector 1 you see in Figure 11 is the Adobe Bridge animation we just applied. The gray diamonds in the effects timeline on the right represent the current position of the animation keyframes. Press the + (plus) key as desired to zoom in.
The keyframes you see in Figure 11 represent the duration of the animation. In this animation, the left keyframe is when the text begins to fade in from the left, and the right keyframe is when it's complete. If we move the right keyframe closer to the left keyframe, that will accelerate the fade in animation. Another way to adjust the keyframe to give it a more natural feel is to right-click on the keyframe and select Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease In from the menu that appears (or press Shift+F9 as shown in Figure 12, below). After Effects applies an algorith to make the effect look smoother.
Figure 12. Use the Keyframe Assistant to ease into the animation.
Applying an Effect to Another Type Layer
Now let's apply another pre-built effect to a second type layer to demonstrate how you can use multiple type layers and animations together in your titles. Figure 13 (below) shows a second text layer with the word "TODAY" in a different color selected with the color block, similar to how you'd select a color in Premiere Pro or Photoshop.
Figure 13. Animating a second text layer. Click the image to see it at full size.
We'll follow the same workflow as before, selecting the layer, choosing an effect in Bridge, adjusting the keyframes, and applying the Easy Ease In algorithm to make the animation start smoothly. You can see the two animations appearing together at the 5:18 mark in the video tutorial at the bottom of this page. Save the composition to your After Effects project folder.
Importing the Animated Text into Premiere Pro
Now that we've animated our text layers in Bridge and After Effects we can import the composition into Premiere Pro just as we would any other file. Click File > Import, navigate to your After Effects projects folder, select the .aep project you just saved, and click Import. In the Import After Effects Composition dialog, Premiere Pro gives you the option to select the composition within your After Effects project that you would like to import into Premiere Pro (Figure 14, below). In this case, we'll choose Comp 1, and click OK.
Figure 14. Importing the After Effects comp into Premiere Pro.
Figure 15 (below) shows Comp 1 imported into my bin of choice, Effects & Graphics.
Figure 15. Comp 1, imported and ready to use in the edit.
Next, drag it down to the timeline, as shown in Figure 16 (below). I'll also add a white Color Matte to make it stand out.
Figure 16. Adding a Color Matte to make the text stand out. Note Comp 1 in the timeline.
In the Program Monitor, Figure 17 (below) shows the text animating in from our imported After Effects comp.
Figure 17. Our animated text flying in.
Roundtripping to After Effects to Adjust the Animation Using Dynamic Link
If you watch the animation around the 6:15 mark of the tutorial video at the bottom of the page, you can see that the fly-in text ("TODAY") is not quite coming from the bottom of the screen, as we would like it to for this project.
One great thing abou the Adobe CC suite is that it allows you to roundtrip between applications using Dynamic Link. If you right-click on the After Effects comp and select Edit Original from the menu that appears (Figure 18, below), you can go back and adjust the animation in After Effects.
Figure 18. Choose Edit Original to go back to After Effects and tweak the animation.
Back in After Effects, we can click the TODAY text layer, twirl down the Text disclosure triangle, then click the Animator 1 disclosure triangle to reveal the Position control (Figure 19, below). There we can adjust the position slightly to make sure that text starts from below the bottom of the screen.
Figure 19. Adjusting the starting position of the TODAY text layer.
After re-rendering the project in After Effects, when you return to Premiere Pro, you'll see the adjustments applied. Any edits you make in After Effects will be automatically applied to your Premiere Pro sequence.
And that's how you use Adobe Bridge with After Effects and Premiere Pro to give a little more life to your text and titles.
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