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Adobe After Effects Cs4 Animation Presets

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Stop wasting your time recreating assets in Adobe After Effects. In this video tutorial, we'll cover some tips for working with presets.

Animation presets allow After Effects users to quickly bring an element to life with a simple double-click. They're especially useful when you need to create many similar-looking graphics. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to apply existing animation presets, customize them, and then save out your own. I'll use this method to quickly create custom lower thirds.

Apply Existing Presets

  • Animation presets that you create are saved by default in the Presets folder located in My Documents Adobe After Effects CS4 (Windows) or Documents/Adobe/After Effects CS4 (Mac OS). You can add a single new animation preset or an entire folder of new animation presets to either of the Presets folders.
  • After you apply an animation preset to a layer, all of its properties and keyframes are at your fingertips in the Timeline panel. Select the The Pond text layer in the Timeline panel and choose Animation Reveal Modified Properties, or press UU. After Effects reveals all of the properties that were modified by the Evaporate preset.

Opening up the Window > Effects & Presets panel will reveal a number of tools, with the Animation Presets folder right at the top. After Effects has presets to help you create backgrounds, behaviors, transitions, shapes, sound effects, and a host of other options. As I mentioned before, in this example, I'm going to create a few simple lower third graphics promoting social media handles. Each graphic will consist of a text layer and a logo.

After Effects Animation Presets Free

Animating with animation presets. Animate layers quickly and easily by using animation presets. Drag and drop animation presets onto layers in the Timeline panel and combine them for a unique result.

Adobe After Effects Cs4 Animation Presets

For the first step, I'll position a Twitter logo and a text element in the lower third of the screen. Once it's in position, I'll go to Animation Presets > Text > Animate In and apply the Fade Up Character preset to the text layer. It's important to understand that animations will begin wherever your playhead is when you apply the preset. For the logo, I'll go to Animation Presets > Transitions – Wipes and select the Linear Wipe preset.

Customize the Animations

The animations are now in place, but I'm not entirely happy with how they look. With both layers selected, I'll press the U shortcut key to view all of the properties with a keyframe applied. The text layer is using an animator to bring the transition to life, while the logo is using an effect. To smooth out the transitions I'll add some Easy Ease and then adjust the corresponding speed graph of each layer using the Graph Editor. Finally I'll retime the animations by speeding them up to around one second.

To make both layers animate out just how they animated in, I'll copy the intro keyframes and then paste them at the end. I can quickly flip the keyframes around by grabbing each set and selecting Animation > Keyframe Assistant > Time-Reverse Keyframes. Now each layer will animate out just as it animated in. Once I'm happy with the animations, it's time to create some presets of my own.

Save New Presets

Creating a preset will allow me to save all of the property configurations and animations of a specific layer to reuse it later. For the Twitter logo, I'll select both the Effects and Transform property groups and go to Animation > Save Animation Preset. For the the text, I'll grab both the Text and Transform property groups and then repeat the same step as before. Once saved, both presets will now show up in a new User Presets folder.

Now I can quickly create another lower third using these new presets. I'll create a new comp and bring in a YouTube logo icon. Applying the new preset will automatically resize the logo, situate it in the lower third of the screen, and apply both the fade-in and -out animations. It's important to note that the transform properties are working perfectly on the YouTube logo because it's the exact same size as the Twitter logo. For the text graphic, all I need to do is simply double-click the preset. This will automatically create a new text layer and apply the corresponding attributes, including the font and character properties.

As you can see, animation presets can not only kickstart your creative process, they can also drastically speed up your workflow.

Cover image via guteksk7.

Interested in the tracks we used to make this video?

  • 'Creativity and Innovation' by Ulas Pakkan
  • 'Chillhop Tripping' by Mattijs Muller
  • 'Mellow Mallets' by Origami Pigeon
  • 'Lo Fi Waves' by Origami Pigeon
  • 'Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G (1st Movement)' by Wilfred Symphony Orchestra

Looking for more After Effects tutorials? Check these out.

Adobe After Effects Animation Presets

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Browse and apply animation presets in Adobe After Effects with these simple steps.

Adobe After Effects Cs4 Animation Presets After Effects

Cover image via Shutterstock.

Benchmark

For the first step, I'll position a Twitter logo and a text element in the lower third of the screen. Once it's in position, I'll go to Animation Presets > Text > Animate In and apply the Fade Up Character preset to the text layer. It's important to understand that animations will begin wherever your playhead is when you apply the preset. For the logo, I'll go to Animation Presets > Transitions – Wipes and select the Linear Wipe preset.

Customize the Animations

The animations are now in place, but I'm not entirely happy with how they look. With both layers selected, I'll press the U shortcut key to view all of the properties with a keyframe applied. The text layer is using an animator to bring the transition to life, while the logo is using an effect. To smooth out the transitions I'll add some Easy Ease and then adjust the corresponding speed graph of each layer using the Graph Editor. Finally I'll retime the animations by speeding them up to around one second.

To make both layers animate out just how they animated in, I'll copy the intro keyframes and then paste them at the end. I can quickly flip the keyframes around by grabbing each set and selecting Animation > Keyframe Assistant > Time-Reverse Keyframes. Now each layer will animate out just as it animated in. Once I'm happy with the animations, it's time to create some presets of my own.

Save New Presets

Creating a preset will allow me to save all of the property configurations and animations of a specific layer to reuse it later. For the Twitter logo, I'll select both the Effects and Transform property groups and go to Animation > Save Animation Preset. For the the text, I'll grab both the Text and Transform property groups and then repeat the same step as before. Once saved, both presets will now show up in a new User Presets folder.

Now I can quickly create another lower third using these new presets. I'll create a new comp and bring in a YouTube logo icon. Applying the new preset will automatically resize the logo, situate it in the lower third of the screen, and apply both the fade-in and -out animations. It's important to note that the transform properties are working perfectly on the YouTube logo because it's the exact same size as the Twitter logo. For the text graphic, all I need to do is simply double-click the preset. This will automatically create a new text layer and apply the corresponding attributes, including the font and character properties.

As you can see, animation presets can not only kickstart your creative process, they can also drastically speed up your workflow.

Cover image via guteksk7.

Interested in the tracks we used to make this video?

  • 'Creativity and Innovation' by Ulas Pakkan
  • 'Chillhop Tripping' by Mattijs Muller
  • 'Mellow Mallets' by Origami Pigeon
  • 'Lo Fi Waves' by Origami Pigeon
  • 'Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G (1st Movement)' by Wilfred Symphony Orchestra

Looking for more After Effects tutorials? Check these out.

Adobe After Effects Animation Presets

Cover image via

Browse and apply animation presets in Adobe After Effects with these simple steps.

Adobe After Effects Cs4 Animation Presets After Effects

Cover image via Shutterstock.

Animation presets can come in handy in a variety of different scenarios. Newbies can use them to learn their way around Adobe After Effects and introduce themselves to the wonderful world of animation. Seasoned motion graphics artists can use presets to brainstormideas and kickstart an animation project. Whatever the situation, let's check out what Adobe After Effects has to offer.

Step 1 — Select the Layer

To apply a preset, I first need to select a layer on which to addmy animation. I can use animation presets on a variety of assets, including text, video, images, and solid layers. For this example, I am creatinga quick photo slideshow. I want to find a quick way to transition between a few image layers. In order to do this, let's have a look at the presets we can use.

Step 2 — Browse Animation Preset

To browse through a few animation presets, choose Animation > Browse Presets. This command will launch the Adobe Bridge program. Once inside Bridge, I'll see a library of animation presets from which to select. Click on a preset to watch a previewof the animation. There are many animation options, including transitions, texteffects, transformoptions and behaviors. I can even create synthetic shapes and backgrounds. To find a suitable animation for my slideshow, I'll navigate to one of the Transitionssubfolders. Next, I'll apply one of the presets to our selected layer.

Step 3 — Apply Animation Preset

Adobe After Effects Cs4 Templates

To apply the animation, I simply need to double-click the preset in Adobe Bridge. Once I double-click the preset, After Effects will become active again, and the animation will applyto the layer I had selected. I'll press the U key to quickly bring up all of the keyframesin my sequence. Furthermore, I can get a closer look at the preset options in the Effect Controls panel. For the last step let's do some fine tuning.

Step 4 — Fine Tuning

Adobe After Effects Cs6 Free

To apply the animation preset to all of my image layers, I will select all of the layers and click Animation > Recent Animation Presets > Slide-drop. With all of the layers still selected in the sequence, I'll press the U key again to bring up all of my keyframes. Finally, I can complete my slideshow by timing my keyframes.

About Adobe After Effects Cs4

Do you have experience with animation presets in After Effects? Let us know in the comments.





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