After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 110 - Introduction to Text Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hello everybody welcome to a 90 another
exciting After Effects cs6 tutorial my
name is buddy Blackford and today I'm
going to go over introduction to text
with you guys I was going to go over
something harder in this tutorial but my
phone rang earlier and I went to go pick
it up and answer it but I picked up a
pack of pop-tarts and try to answer that
instead so I decided to stick with
something up a bit easier today because
I had to wake up really early and I must
not be fully there with it so hopefully
this tutorial doesn't suck and we'll see
so I'm just going to go over this
character panel here with you and we're
gonna just figure out what everything
means on it and then also this paragraph
panel here so to make sure that you have
these open come over to window and make
sure you have character selected and
paragraph I don't know why mine's not
checked but it's over here anyway so
it's there now you can also set your
workspace up here to the text which is
basically what I already had but this is
the the text workspace and I use a lot
of text in in my work so it's good to
know what's how to use your text
properly and later on I'll go over some
cool stuff with you and a rule so you
don't use your text and it looks like
I guess I don't know if I want to
say that but I did so oh so I'm just
gonna grab this character panel and
bring it right into the center and I'll
zoom in on this for you with the screen
recording software and I'll just go over
everything right now we'll see what's
going on so you've got your font family
right here and it just has all the fonts
that you have installed in the fonts
that came with After Effects
if you
select your text here and click on the
font family and press down or up or
whatever it will scroll through the
different family so you can see easily
and that's always something that I'd
like to have on a program I hate when
you gotta click on it and and then font
and then like you can't scroll through
like your different families you would
have to go here and check and it's just
easier to use the up and down buttons
now here we have the font style which
this type of text has or this this type
of font has a bunch of different styles
here so you got your bold and then light
is the opposite of bold so regular is
the normal and then you got your tallix
and everything like that so if you don't
know what bold and italic and all that
stuff is you need to take a computer
class and that's probably like the first
thing you learned we're here we have the
eyedropper tool and you can use that to
select different colors pretty much on
anything so if you roll over whatever
and there's a color to it you can select
that for your font color right here we
have the fill and stroke colors the fill
is on the top here and you just click it
and then you can use the color picker to
pick or you can use this eyedropper to
pick or you can manually or manually
enter in these colors here and here's
here's the color code where you can
enter that in or you can enter in the
RGB values or HSB so I'm gonna hit
cancel cuz I want mine to be black in
the back here is the stroke color if you
click on it it brings it to the front
and then you can click on it to activate
and then I can put a stroke around it
and you can see that around the edge of
the text there is a line and that is
called the stroke and I made it red so
you can see that so I'm going to hit
cancel
and then this little button right here
if you click on it if you put a stroke
on I'm gonna do that real quick and then
you hit this button right here it is no
stroke color so if you click on it it'll
put it back to nothing right here is the
fast way to set things from black and
white so it's basically an eyedropper
tool that you would put on black or
white so use that if you just need to go
to those two colors real quick now right
here is your font size if you click on
it there are some basic font sizes or
you can type your own in or you can
scrub on the timeline or on the panel
here to get different font sizes over
underneath the font size here is the
kearney and what that is is the space
between two characters so you want to
adjust that every once in a while to
make sure that your letters are spaced
correctly and it's one of the rules of
typography that you want to know how to
use your kerning correctly we have the
leading here which is I'll just show you
Kurt the kerning real quick I'll just
scroll through if you click on this drop
down menu you get metrics optical and
then a bunch of presets or you can
manually move back and forth and you can
see there how that works now this
section here is leading and that's the
space between your lines of text so if I
move this that's how leading works so
there we got that there and this section
right here is tracking and you can see
how the tracking works it brings its
it's almost like turning so you can
almost use them
kind of in the same kind of way now the
second section here is for the stroke
now if I put a stroke on some of this
text it's not to read because that's
annoying do purple or something like
that you can see that the stroke is kind
of like barely visible so you increase
it at this section here
oh I gotta have it selected that's why I
wasn't doing it there you go no you can
do that and then this is the stroke
style and there are different kind of
styles going on here so you got to fill
over the top of the stroke the stroke
over the fill and then all fills over
strokes and all strokes overfill the
next section here has to do with like
the size of your text and everything
like that so this is the vertical scale
so if I do that it's gonna make my text
go get taller and this is the horizontal
scale here makes your text wider this
section is the baseline shift so if I
wanted to like put a number of text up
higher I could do that and this section
here is for Asian writing I think it's
called su-mei but I'm not totally sure
but it's I'll show you what it does but
you don't have to worry about it if
you're not using using Asian text but
here's what it does it's kind of like
kerning but I never use Asian text
before so I don't use that section and
then we've got our our fake bold here
select these here's our fake bold and
then our fake italic and most of the
time you want to use the textiles here
instead of using the fake italic that
has because they are made to look that
way on purpose and they look better
because it fits the style of the text
like individually it was made to be like
that now your second or your third one
here is all caps which you almost never
want to use because it's not graphically
pleasing and it feels like you're
yelling at people
we've got the small calves here which
might be okay if you have a like a
regular we go like this and you have a
regular caps but use it sparingly also
we've got the superscript and subscript
here which I'll show you that there you
go
and then subscript is below so that's
everything on the character panel now
let's head over here to the paragraph
panel actually with there's a paragraph
panel in another tutorial because it's
already about 10 minutes in on this one
so let's continue on into another
tutorial and I'll see you guys at that
one thanks for watching have a good one