9.2 Final Touches on the Lower Third

In this lesson I'm gonna pick up right where I left off in the last lesson and we're gonna build out the left side of this lower third. To start I'm gonna jump right here to the project panel, select my lower third right and duplicate it by pressing Ctrl + D. And then with that comp selected, I'll press Enter and then just rename this to Lower Third_Left. Or actually it may be a little bit less confusing if I name this to Name, and then I change this one that's called Lower Third_Right to be Title. I think that will make things a little bit clearer. I'm gonna double click on my Lower Third_Name and let's build the Name side of this Lower Third. To start, I'm going to grab my background rectangle. I'll just solo it for now so we can work on that. I'm gonna press S on the keyboard and I'm just gonna right click on the scale and reset it. I'm also going to take off the Track Matte for now. I'll press Y on the keyboard and then I'll move my anchor point over to the right side and snap it right there. Okay, so that is the background done. Let's come up here to the text layer. I'm gonna take the Track Matte off for now, solo it. I'll double click on my text and I'll put in a name. That looks fantastic. I'm gonna change this to bold. Switch back to my selection tool. I'm gonna come over here to the Paragraph panel and align this to the right. And then I will just modify the anchor point because that's gonna bug me if it's hanging off the end their. Switch back to the selection tool. I'm gonna unsolo this and now I'm just gonna line this up and make sure that it stays snapped to the center here. So I'm gonna put it, Over here, I think that looks pretty good. We can go back and adjust it later. I'll come back to my background rectangle here and adjust the scale, and pull it down so it's just, Making a nice box around my name text. If someone has a really, really long name, I have plenty of room for that. And finally, I'm gonna come up here to my Lil Rec. I'm gonna take the Track Matte off for now. I'm also going to press P on the keyboard, bring up those position Keyframes, and I'm gonna delete them for now by clicking the stopwatch. I'll zoom up on that. Then I'm gonna change where the anchor points is. I'm gonna move it the bottom right, that snapped weirdly, right there, perfect. Switch back to the selection tool and move this up over here. And I wanna snap that. And I think it just did it right then. I wanna snap that to the top of my background rectangle. Then I'll come over to the Align panel and just align that to the right, perfect. So that's gonna be the starting point for this little rectangle. I'll bring the CTI back to the beginning. Drop a position Keyframe here. Go to the end, and then just move it a little ways to the left. I also wanna change my background rectangle's color before I forget. And because I duplicated it, it's currently the same color as the title side. So I'm just gonna brighten this up a little bit, just to give a little contrast. So that's what we have so far, and I think it's looking pretty good. The final thing we need to do for this side, the name side, is adjust all of the mattes. I think the easiest way to do that is to take these two mattes and just delete them for now. I'm gonna save this matte here because all these Keyframes, the speed of the animation currently matches my other comp and I want that. I want these to kind of grow out at the same speed and then shrink at the same speed. So I'm gonna leave the Keyframes where they are for now. I'm gonna turn the layer visibility switch back on and solo this. I'll just move the CTI over here. I'll just grab this and move it to the right a little bit. And I'll press W on the keyboard ,and rotate this around a whole shift and that will snap it. Perfect, that looks great. And then I will align this to the right, because I want my reveal to go from this right side and go out this way. So I'm gonna jump to the Align panel here, align that right, and I'm pretty sure I pulled that down from the center. So I will also align it vertically. All right, let's check out what that looks like by itself. Yeah, that looks good and it goes back in. However, the scale is not quite right, and I don't want that. I want the end of my matte to be about right here. So let me turn that back on. And I'll just adjust my first Keyframe scale. But actually I can adjust both of them at the same time if I select both of these Keyframes because they're both currently set to the same value. And if I put my CTI right over this Keyframe and I make an adjustment with both of these selected, it'll adjust both of them at the same time. So with this layer selected, I'll select both of those Keyframes and I'll just pull it down till it just covers up. I'll zoom in here. It just goes past my background rectangle. Perfect, All right, I'll just reset the Track Matte for this bottom layer, duplicate my matte, press U on the keyboard to bring up those Keyframes. And remember, I need to move these Keyframes down three frames from the beginning to kinda offset that time. So I'll move the CTI back to the beginning. Press Page Down three times. Select these key frames and then pull them over to the right. I like to hold Shift so it'll snap right there. Then I'll come to the ending animation here where it kind of scales back out to zero. Move the CTI three frames to the left and then pull these last set of Keyframes to the left so that they will lead my background rectangle. And I'll move my Matte_02 layer above my text layer and then set the Alpha Matte for my text layer. That is done and it looks great. Finally, I'll jump back down to my Matte_01 layer, duplicate it by pressing Ctrl + D. Hit S on the keyboard, get rid of this scale Keyframes. I'll Alt click the stopwatch, grab this pick-whip here, and pick-whip the scale which is still open on my Matte_01 layer. So I'll move my Matte_03 layer up to the top, select my Lil Rec and change the Track Matte to Alpha. Now let's see if this works. Beautiful, then it should go out, excellent. It looks great. All right, the final thing that I wanna do is put both of these things together. So I'm gonna create another composition. And I'm just gonna name this Placement Comp. I'm gonna click the preset and choose 1080, 29 frames per second. But then I'll just change that to 23.976, and everything else looks good. I'll press OK, grab my selection tool here, and I'm gonna pull in both my Lower Third_Name and Title. Just drop those down here, and then I need to align these. So let me grab my Lower Third_Name here and I'll solo that. I wanna move my anchor point here. So I'll press U on the keyboard, snapping is still enabled so that will be very easy. I'm gonna do the same thing but on my Title, I'm gonna move the anchor point here. Now I'll grab my selection tool. If I select my Title layer. What I wanna do is snap this. So I'm just gonna move it over to the right. And right about there it will snap to my name layer. Both of those are locked right there. And then to make sure that none of these gets misaligned, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna parent my Lower Third_Title to my Lower Third_Name. I'll grab the parent pick-whip right here, click and drag and just drag that to the Lower Third_Name. Then I will lock my Lower Third_Title so that I can't move it, I can't even select it. And now I can grab my Lower Third_Name that side. I can just pull it down here to position it by bringing up the Title Safe area. I'm just gonna move it right here. I like to see what this looks like over footage. So I downloaded a Talking Head video here from Invado Elements. And I'll just fit that to the Comp here which is easy to do. There's a shortcut but I'll show you the other way. You can right click on the layer. Go to Transform and then I want to Fit to Comp Height which is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G on the PC. There we go. I'm gonna change this to a Guide Layer by right-clicking on it and then choose Guide Layer. And what that will do is it will let me see it in this composition but it will not render, which is really handy. If I play this, that's looking great. Super, the final step is to export your Lower Third, and you're gonna learn how to do that coming up in the next lesson.