(Page 1 of 6 pages for this article  1 2 3 >  Last »)

Filed under: Motion Graphics •

Animating Text in Apple’s Motion

If you’re familiar with animating text in After Effects, you might glance at Apple’s Motion and think that it offers many of the same features for flying text around. While that is true, if you look a little closer you’ll find that Motion can create some really great looks that you just can’t get with After Effects. In this article, I’ll review the text capabilites of both programs, and lead you through in detail how to typeset and animate text in Motion. At the end, I’ll discuss some additional details that separate the two programs. (Note: This article compares Motion 3 and After Effects CS4. Motion 4 has added some new text capabilities.)

Everyone will have different requirements for what they are looking for in an animated text engine, and these may change from one job to the next. My basic wishlist includes the following:

• type on text one character at a time
• animate in a “cascade” of characters (rather than one at a time)
• animate characters on in a random order (rather than from left to right)
• wiggle or randomize the transformation values
• fill text with a gradient and have it accurately track animated text
• apply effects such as glows and blurs to individual characters
• per-character drop shadow (so a shadow can fall from one character to another as they cross over each other during an animation)
• motion blur for fast moving characters
• animate the characters in 3D space (i.e., rotate on Y, animate Position in Z)
• save your custom animations as presets

Both programs offer unique animation opportunities, but the above is what I consider a solid list of text animation features to build on. So let’s compare how both programs would go about these jobs (quickly in After Effects, and then in some detail in Motion), and check out their strengths and weaknesses:

Text Animators in After Effects CS4

Most of the above wish list can be accomplished fairly easily in After Effects using text animators to animate properties. These include transformations, fill and stroke color, tracking, and so on. You can start from scratch or use an animation preset as a starting point. (Note that you can only view animated previews of Adobe presets in Bridge, whereas Motion has built-in previews.)


In After Effects, you can type on one character at a time by animating the Start parameter in the Text Animator’s Range Selector. To animate a cascade of characters is less obvious: First set Start and End to set the number of characters in the cascade, set the Range Selector’s Shape popup to Ramp Up, and then animate Offset.

To animate on in a random order, simply toggle on Randomize Order in the Range Selector. Adding a Wiggly Selector will randomize the property values.

After Effects does not have a per-character gradient fill. You can apply a gradient to the text using the Ramp effect or the Gradient Overlay Layer Style. But they are both applied to the text’s overall bounding box, and not to each character individually - so as the text animates, the gradient will look wrong. These gradients are also applied after the fill and stroke are rendered, so they replace the stroke.

Although After Effects has Gradient Overlay Layer Style, the gradient stretches as the text animates, and also obliterates the stroke color.

You can add a per-character Blur to a text animator, but no glow or drop shadow per character. Motion Blur is a simple toggle per layer (though it would be nice if this switch could be saved as part of a text animation preset).

To apply a drop shadow to text in After Effects, you apply the Drop Shadow effect or layer style. Unfortunately, this applies the shadow to the layer’s alpha channel, not to each character individually.

In After Effects, drop shadow effects can only be applied to the entire layer, not to individual characters.

To get individual drop shadows per character, you need to enable the Per-character 3D option for the text animator, and add a light to create shadows falling from one character to another. 3D layers in the background can also receive shadows with this method. While this is obviously the way to go for a 3D design, it’s not worth the extra setup time for 2D.

For realistic shadows in After Effects, create your text animation in 3D space.

By the way, to animate characters in 3D, you’ll need After Effects CS3 or later. Toggle on the Enable Per-character 3D option for the animator, and now you can move and rotate individual characters in X, Y, and Z. (We’ll look at text animation in 3D in more detail in a future article.)

After Effects does offer some unique properties, such as Character Offset and Character Value, which are handy in those rare cases when you need to randomize characters (as in “spy code” animations).

So with that overview of the After Effects’ text engine, let’s compare similar features in Apple’s Motion 3…

continued///

(Page 1 of 6 pages for this article  1 2 3 >  Last »)

Great article, Trish - very thorough!

One thing that may be helpful for After Effects users: if you double-click on the Record button, you’ll see a dialog where you can enable a checkbox to record keyframes on animated parameters only - just like After Effects. I call this the AE checkbox.

Looking forward to the next one!

Posted by Mark Spencer  on  03/30  at  08:42 PM

---

One important thing to note is that anything you do in Motion can be saved as a Template. Then, you can access that file within Final Cut Pro as a Master Template from the Generator menu. You can change the text, size and tracking, preview it and include it in a sequence without any rendering. Obviously, this simplifies many workflows.

Thanks for the thorough write-up.

Posted by funwithstuff  on  07/08  at  10:50 PM

---

Thank you very much for this very interesting article.

I just bought FCS few days ago, and I am learning it…

Could you please tell me how you did the wate drop in the first video of your article (“I’m falling down”) ?

Did you use a video footage ? Is it an animation generated by a 3D software ? Is it a Motion application feature/stuff ?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/13  at  05:36 PM

---

Hi Tanaka,

The background for the “falling down” opening animation consists of three layers.

1. Particles by Motion: I started with the Embryo particle generator, and rotated it to be vertical. I also changed the gradient color to Atlantic Blue in the Inspector > Emitter > Color Mode section. I probably tweaked other stuff too.

2. Another layer of Particles by Motion, this one based on the Shell particle emitter. I reduced the Spin amount and increased the Speed.

I did this a long time ago, so can’t be sure excactly how I tweaked the particles! But remember that the presets are just starting points, and they are easily edited.

3. The water footage is the background is Clip UW103 from the Ultra Water collection from Artbeats. This is a single water drop that ripples outward.

hope that helps, and glad you found it the article useful. - Trish

Posted by Crish  on  08/14  at  10:58 AM

---

Forgot to post the link to the Ultra Water clip, so you can see it solo

http://www.artbeats.com/clips/8048/12141

Posted by Crish  on  08/14  at  10:59 AM

---

Animating emitters problem,

When I try to put a simple motion path or a match move on the “clockwork” emitter, a stock emitter in the Library I believe, I can’t get it to move the actual emitter! It just applies the motion to the control handle. It there something I’m missing? Sorry if this is a bit off subject, but I can’t find an answer elsewhere

Thanks,
Eli

Posted by grinline.com  on  06/05  at  01:25 PM

---

Eli, just clone the emitter, turn off the original, and put your motion path behavior on the clone.

Posted by Mark Spencer  on  06/07  at  11:15 AM

---

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below: