Information about text layers
You can add text to your composition using text layers. Text layers are useful for many purposes, including creating animated titles, tickers, titles in the bottom third of the screen, and dynamic printing.
You can animate properties of entire text layers or properties of individual characters, such as color, size, and position. Text is animated using text animation properties and selection tools. 3D text layers can also contain 3D layers, one for each character.
Text layers are synthetic layers, i.e., a text layer does not use a video element as a source, although text information from some types of video can be converted to text layers. Text layers are also vector layers. Like shape layers and other vector layers, text layers are always continuously rasterized, so when you scale a layer or resize text, it retains clear, resolution-independent edges. You can’t open a text layer in its own separate Layer panel, but you can work with text layers in the Composition panel.
After Effects uses two types of text: line text and paragraph text. Line text is useful for entering a single word or string of characters; paragraph text is useful for entering and formatting text as one or more paragraphs.
You can copy text from other applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, or Adobe InDesign, or from any text editor and paste it into the After Effects text layer. Since After Effects supports Unicode encoding, characters in this encoding can be copied between After Effects and any other Unicode-enabled application (including all Adobe applications).
Text formatting is included in the Source Text properties. The Source Text properties can be used for formatting animations and character changes (for example, changing the letter b to c).
After Effects automatically synchronizes missing fonts using existing fonts. The Allow Fonts dialog box is displayed when you open a project that uses uninstalled fonts. If fonts are available in Adobe, you can choose to have them automatically sync with your Creative Cloud account and install them. After Effects replaces fonts that are not available online with the default font.
Tips for creating text and vector graphics for videos
Text that looks good on the computer screen while being created can sometimes look bad when viewed in the final movie. These differences can arise because of the device used to view the film, or because of the compression scheme used to encode the film. The same applies to other elements of vector graphics, such as shapes in shape layers. In fact, these problems can occur in raster images as well, but most often these distortions are caused by the fine and sharp details of vector graphics.
When creating and animating text and vector graphics for video, keep in mind the following.
Always preview your movie using the video devices on which you intend to show it later, such as an NTSC video monitor.
Avoid abrupt color transitions, especially from highly saturated color to its complementary color. Many compression schemes, such as MPEG and JPEG, have difficulty encoding sharp color transitions. These compression schemes can result in visual noise at sharp transitions. In analog television, the same sharp transitions can cause impulse bursts outside the acceptable signal range, which also results in noise.
If text is to be placed on top of a moving image, it should have contrasting edges (this effect is achieved by glowing or stroking), in which case it will remain distinguishable when a background of the same color appears.
Thin horizontal elements should be avoided, because they can disappear from the frame when on an even scanning line with an odd field or vice versa. For example, the thickness of the horizontal bar in the uppercase letter H should be at least three pixels. You can increase the thickness of horizontal elements by increasing the font size, bold (or pseudo-bold) style, or stroke.
When moving text vertically (such as when scrolling titles), ensure that the scrolling speed, in pixels per second, is an even multiple of the interlaced video format’s margin shift speed. Selecting such a movement speed prevents distortion as a result of the unphasing of text movement with sweep lines. The optimal values for NTSC are 0, 119.88 and 239.76 pixels per second; for PAL, 0, 100 and 200 pixels per second.