Intro
In today's video, I'm gonna show you how to create your very own animated lower third, or any title for that matter, from start to finish in Premiere Pro. Let's get started.
For us, you might be asking why are we using Premiere Pro to animate titles and not after effects.
Why is it efficient to create titles in Premiere?
The keyword here is efficiency. One we're going to be using the built in type and shape tools and the effect controls to animate in Premiere Pro. And two, you don't have to render these effects. Everything is native in Premiere Pro and it runs super fast, so it's not going to slow down the program. And better yet, you can actually save the titles that you design as its own motion graphics template, which you can then use farther down the line and save it in your central graphics panel. And even better, I'm going to show you how to use the new graphics tab from the text panel to quickly search for titles, update them and use spell check. Let's go ahead and get started here.
Setting up the workspace
The first thing we need to do here in Premiere Pro is make sure you're in the captions and graphics workspace. If you don't see these workspace tabs here, you can click on little icon here and go to show workspace tabs. If you want to edit these, you can always go down to edit workspaces to choose which workspace tabs you want visible. Now we need to go to the project panel to create our sequence, which is where we're going to create the titles in. So control click or right click on the negative space in the project panel and go to new item and select sequence. I'm going to use my default DSLR 1080p 24 frames per second preset and I will just call this demo. Then we're going to go to the toolbar and select the type tool. I heard something.
Once you have the type tool selected, click anywhere on the program monitor to type out your text. So I'm just going to type out insert name here and you will notice immediately on the right from the essential graphics panel.
Creating Text & Formatting
We're given a bunch of other parameters. From here we can customize the font. The text typeface that I'm using is Proxima Nova and this is actually an Adobe font. If you want to go to Adobe fonts.com, you can log into your creative cloud account and you can sync this font so you can use it for free with your creative cloud account. From here I'm going to lower the font size down to around 65 and because this is going to be a right aligned lower third instead of it being left aligned, I'm going to change it to right align and then I can use the align and transform tools here to position it over on the right and maybe lower it down a little bit. If you're worried about title safe, you can always go down to the wrench tool here and put on the safe margins so you can make sure that it will be title safe for different screens. Now let's create a subtitle. So I'm going to type out subtitle goes here. Now for this, it's going to also be right aligned and I'm going to make it not a bold font but a regular and I'm going to make this italic and I'm going to make this smaller to around 45.
Adding background fill
One more thing that I can do is add a background behind it. So I'm going to click on background and I'm going to change the background to kind of a bright orange color, but it's pretty flat. What if we want to add rounded corners and make it a little bit thicker? So here I'm going to move this slider to increase the width around the text. Then I'm going to use the curve to create a curved edge around the edges of the background. I want it to be a hundred percent opaque. So I'm just going to increase this up. So it looks more vibrant. If I ever want to change the font size, if I just want it to be a little bit smaller, I'm just going to select the text and lower it down to 40. I'm going to move this subtitle underneath the insert name and next let's create a shape.
Creating Shapes
So I'm going to go over here to the rectangle tool and I'm just going to click and create a little side shape on the side. This is going to be the shape that the title is going to pop out from on the right. So this is just going to be an element that just kind of makes the lower third look a little bit more modern and chic. All three elements that we have here are inside of our central graphics panel. And if I ever want to change the fill of this shape, you can certainly click on fill here and you can also make it a gradient fill. That doesn't have to be solid. And I'm just going to use these controls here just to line it up. So it looks best here. And one more thing you can do is you can always rename your elements here. So from shape one, I can change this to line. For example, one more tip here is if you want to have a closer view of your design, you can always zoom in on the program monitor to like 150% and use these bars here to bring it back into place. That way you have a more close up view of the design that you're making.
And if you don't want to add any animation and you just want this to be a static text and you're good to go and you want to save it as a template, the graphics layer that's inside of your timeline right now, the one that contains all three of these layers, you can just control click on this and export as motion graphics template. And you can save it as static lower third and save it to your local templates folder and hit OK. And then from our browse tab, if I search for static lower third, you will see that it's right here.
That's how you can save it as a motion graphics template. And the next step is animation. But first, I'm Kelsey and welcome back to Gal. If this video is helping you out so far, be sure to give it a thumbs up as well as subscribe. Also a special thanks to Adobe for sponsoring today's video. Wow, that sounds pretty cool to say. If you want to learn how to create a variety of different animations from transitions to pop ups to side cards wiping in, you can sign up for my live workshop class that I'm hosting next month, and you can also check out the full fall schedule because I do monthly live workshops that you can sign up for.
Gal Workshops
So there's a link just down below.
Gradients
And if you update to the latest version of Premiere Pro, you'll now see that you'll be able to add gradient fills to the text fill to your stroke and to the shadows. And you can add multiple shadows as well. Here's a little trendy title part of my motion graphics template pack. Click on title, go to fill and instead of solid, we can do linear gradient and update the colors. Now we have a gradient fill.
We can also update the stroke fill here now, add linear gradient and add in some gradient fills to the stroke and the shadow can have a gradient as well and reduce the opacity there. You can add another shadow by clicking here, clicking plus, and then, for example, we can add a bright yellow. shadow and reduce the opacity. There we go. If you don't have time to design your own titles, you can go to the essential graphics panel. You can go to browse Adobe stock and there you can search for free or premium motion graphics templates that you can try out in your edit. And I put together a bunch of essential titles that I've designed in Premiere Pro and it's on sale in my store called the essential title pack and it's designed in Premiere Pro for Premiere Pro editors.
And the best part is, is that it responds to different aspect ratios. So vertical or square and it responds to duration changes. So you can just buy it once and you can keep it forever. So go check it out below. And I'm giving away three free title packs. Leave a funny comment below and you can click the link in the description to enter in the contact form for a chance to win. All right. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get started animating this lower third. Before I show you how to do the custom animation here in the lower third.
If you're wondering how to do a credit roll, for example, click off of this title and then click back on it again, you'll see that there's some new responsive design time controls here and there's actually a little checkbox for roll. So if you check this, this will actually create an automated role on this lower third. Now, obviously, we don't want to put the role on this lower third.
Rolling Animations
So I'm just going to undo that. If you check out my story, you can see that I actually have a credit roll that I created so you can see here it's a full template. So if you drag and drop this into my timeline, you'll be able to go in and add in your own text here and change the time duration and kind of scrub through and add in your own credits here. So that's just a little side note. If you want to learn more about that, you can click right up here. Let's start animating. We're going to be using the effect controls here to do the animation. The first thing that we're going to animate is the line layer. So from the effect controls, we're going to go to the shape line and animate this first and what we're going to animate is the position and the opacity. And we're going to use our play head here to go to the moment that we want the shapes to be fully on screen.
Custom In and Out Animations
And we can always adjust this later. Click on the toggle animation stopwatch. And this is our end key frame. And then we're going to go back and we're going to use our horizontal controls here to move it to the right off the frame. So now between these two points, it animates in and it looks pretty good.
But what we can do is we can actually make this animation smoother by control clicking or right clicking on the last key frame, going to temporal interpolation and selecting ease in. So this will make it an hourglass icon instead of just the standard diamond key frame as it animates. And I want the opacity to come up as well. So it starts transparent right around here. I'm going to set toggle animation at 100% opacity. And then back here, I'm going to change it down to zero. So as it animates in, you didn't really see much because we actually need to shift over these key frames and you can actually last one select these key frames and move them over. So that way, between these points here, we can see that the opacity animates in and we may want to shift it over slightly as well. So let's see how this looks. There we go. We have our first animation. And again, if you need to make it faster, you can bring them closer together. If you need to make it slower, you can move apart the key frames to make it a slower speed.
So after the shape is on, I want to make it look like the text is coming out of the shape layer. This is going to require creating a mask. If you're wondering how to create a mask with text, you can watch my video right up here to learn how to place video inside of a mask of text. It's a really cool effect. And I just wanted to call attention to that because it's a whole different tutorial. So how do we do a mask around the shape so the text will come out? This is where we're actually going to go to the text subtitle layer first.
And we're going to create a four point polygon mask. Click on this. And to scale up the mask, we're going to hover over a corner and press shift and then scale it up. And then we can click with the hand tool here and just move it over. So it's directly where the line is and we can remove the feathering. It's not necessary. So just make that zero. Now, this is the cool part. Notice how the mask doesn't affect the shape layer. That's because the mask is just on the subtitle layer.
So we're going to animate the position of the subtitle layer. I'm going to move my play head forward a bit, select toggle animation, and then I'm going to go backwards and I'm going to use the horizontal position controls to pull the subtitle into the mask so it disappears. And it looks like it's just animating out from the shape layer. We can make it a little bit smoother. Once again, control click temporal interpolation ease in. And then we can lasso and select and shift over the point. So that way it kind of animates out at the same time. Now I'm going to repeat the same process, but for insert name. So to save time here, I'm going to actually select mask one command C or control C on a PC to copy it. Then I'm going to go down to the text insert name layer and I'm going to command V to paste it. Now we have the same mask on this layer as well, and we didn't have to repeat that process. And then we can have the insert name come out. So here I will set a key frame on position by hitting toggle animation and then going backwards and pulling the horizontal position into the mask and selecting ease in. This is what it looks like. Not bad, right? And you can want this if you want.
Everything that we just did right now is the in animation and Premiere Pro comes with these in and out animation handles now.
Responsive Time Handles
So notice this little blue thing going on up here. If I click on this and pull it out, this actually will encompass and hold our in animation in place. So if we ever change the duration in the timeline, those key frames stay frozen in time and you don't have to worry about having to fix them again. Now we're going to do the same thing but to the outro animation. What we can do here is actually pull the effects panel and make it bigger and then you can kind of shrink this by pulling this out. And one cool tip that I have is if you select the graphics layer and then go to responsive design time, you can see how long your intro animation is.
It's about one second with three frames. So we can do the same thing here, type in one and three frames and this will auto create that frozen out animation. And if we make our graphics layer bigger in our timeline and zoom in, you can see that these one second handles that we just created are visible here. They're just kind of like a shaded gray handle that you see. So let's go ahead and repeat the same process for the outro animation. Now because we set these intro and outro animation handles, if we ever decide we want to make this longer or shorter, these handles remain the same. And actually Premiere Pro and the Adobe team when they were creating this, they called this taffy time because it's like you're stretching a piece of taffy. And the endings remain the same. This is the lower third that we made. And as a final touch, if we want to reuse this and be able to use the same lower third in our future projects, what we can do is just control click on this and go to export as motion graphics template and this time we can call it animated lower third and save it to our local templates folder and press OK.
Create a mogrt
And now when we go to the browse tab of the central graphics and search for animated lower third, you will see that here it is. And it includes the animated preview before it was just static. That's one other benefit of using Premiere Pro mogrts and better yet, if you ever want to go and reuse this again, you can save it as a new mogrts. So if we drag and drop this into our timeline to use again, and we're like, you know what, I actually am changing my branding. I want this line to be a different color. I want it to be kind of a bright yellow color. And then you don't want to have to change that every single time. You can control click and save it as a new mogrt and we'll just call this animated lower third and yellow. And here it is with a little yellow shape instead of the turquoise shape. So using the masking and animation tools just built inside of Premiere Pro, you can create these really fast and dynamic titles. As you see here, I created a left oriented lower third. I created a pop up all sorts of different types of titles.
Using the Graphics Tab
As you build up your timeline and you start to get a lot of different titles in your timeline like I have here, which is pretty common. And you want to spell check and just quickly make updates to those titles. It can take a lot of time to go through your timeline and then go up to the essential graphics panel to edit it. Instead, you can use the new graphics tab, which is a part of the text panel. So you can go to the text panel and go to graphics.
And this will show you all of the text fields for all the designs that are currently active in your sequence. And what's really cool is you can go to search and you can search for the word design, for example, and it will highlight and go to that exact graphic in the timeline. So for example, here it says design and here it says design. And you can also quickly navigate up and down to these different words. And it will take you directly to that time code in the timeline. So if I wanted to update this to say welcome, I can easily update it right here using these text fields. You can also go up here and you can filter by track. So if you have specific titles on video layer one, two or three that you just want visible, you can filter by that track. And from the ellipses here, you notice that I have check spelling turned on. And this will tell you if anything is spelled wrong, but you can always turn that off. And from the language drop down, if you want British, UK English instead of American English, you can select that here.
And you can have it learn certain words or forget certain words, which is useful. And the last thing from this ellipsis button here is you can export to a text file or CSV file if you want to send all of the text to somebody else to review. For example, if there are any typos in the spellings of people's names. So overall, this new text panel just makes it more efficient for you to work inside of your timeline when you have multiple text files that you're working with. And all of these are a part of my essential titles pack, which you can purchase from my store link below. And you can just drag and drop them into the browse section of your essential graphics panel.
Final Thoughts
And if you search for Premiere Gal, all of the titles are here. And if you want to leave a funny comment, you'll get a chance to win one of them. I'm giving away three different packs and let me know if you have any feedback and I'd be happy to add more to the pack. So that's all for today's video. If you want to sign up for my monthly live workshop classes, you can click right over here. And if you want to learn more about the essential graphics panel or creating titles in Premiere Pro, you can click right over here. That's all for today's video. And as always, keep creating better video with Gal. See you next time.