11.4 How To Use Title Templates in the Essential Graphics Panel: Part 1

[MUSIC] In this lesson, you're going to learn how to customize, use, install, and find great-looking motion graphics title templates. So like you've seen in some of the previous lessons, I have a Browse tab here. And in my Browse tab, I have a bunch of third-party and a few motion graphics templates that came with After Effects. But most of these are third-party titles that I found on Envato Elements. And you can get motion graphics templates that do titles, some that do kind of graphic elements, some that do transitions, which I'm gonna show you in the next lesson. But let's look at a few of these titles because I wanna kinda give you the lay of the land. Not all of these motion graphics title templates are created equal. Many of them look really nice, but their usefulness sort of varies. So I'm just gonna pull in this guy right here, maybe I'll move it down the timeline here. And as you can see, this one is really big because it's actually an Ultra HD title. And so if I right-click on that and choose Set to Frame Size, that'll set that to 50% over here, underneath Effects Controls. And then in the Essential Graphics panel, you can see we have a bunch of options that are quite a bit different than what you saw when I built a title from scratch inside Premiere. That's because these are made in After Effects, and that's where some of the issue comes when you're using them. A template like this is really nice because we can change all of these text fields here, so, I'll just put some placeholder text in there. But in addition, we can also change the font, and we can change the font style. We can make all of these all caps if we want, and we can change the size of our font as well. We can change the color, we can toggle between different isometric kind of perspective views here, which is really cool. We can turn off this background or adjust the color or opacity, a ton of options. Other templates for titles don't have very many options at all. And that's where it becomes a little bit hit or miss in terms of their usability. Let me show you another one that I like, this one right here. This is another Ultra HD title, so I'm going to set that to frame size. This is a really cool title that I found on Envato Elements. I'm playing this back at half resolution here because sometimes some of these motion graphics templates do not like to play back at full resolution. If I pull up my Task Manager here, you can see that After Effects is running in the background. Most of these will need After Effects to run in the background. And depending on the complexity of the footage and the other stuff you have going on in your sequence, these may or may not play back smoothly for you. So you can change the text and the font and the font style and the font size and all of these font styling options, so Faux Bold, Faux Italic, All Caps, Small Caps. You can change the text tracking, which is really cool. You can change all of the color for the background color, the text color in each one of these boxes. You can actually just get rid of one of these lines just by deleting the text. And nothing in that element will render, which is really cool, so it doesn't have a little bar that sweeps across. But if I put the text back, you can see that there's the little white bar in the background. But again, if you don't want these in there, maybe you just want the middle bit, right, so you can delete the top line and the bottom line. And now you just have the middle bit there, which is really cool. Down at the bottom, you have options for skewing this. So you can just have it straight, rectangular, or put it askew or give it a slant or give it a skew and a slant, really, really cool stuff there. You could also adjust where this is positioned. They don't have controls in the Edit tab here, sometimes there is a general kind of scale and position that will control the entire title. But you can just do that right over here in the Effects Controls underneath Motion and just adjust the position of this. So you could use this for a nice little lower-third maybe and just kinda put it right here. So you could say, Bob Smithy, Master Skater, there we go, let's check this out. Nice, and then I'd position that, well, probably over on this side because it's right-justified for that bit. But I could also just push this over, whoops, Bottom Alignment. I could push this over to the other side, make it left-justified, put it over on the left side. Really cool stuff for that, I think that's really neat. Now, as you saw at the end there, this does have an ending animation. That's another thing that you wanna make sure that you have sorted with these if the default length doesn't work for you. And I'm just going to hazard a guess that you're going to want to, at some point, make this longer or shorter. Some of these motion graphics templates, when you make it shorter, will just cut off the ending animation. However, this one doesn't do that, which is really cool, but some of them do. Some of them, to make them longer, what you need to do is come into the middle here, Make two cuts, like this, and then just extend this bit here, I just did an Alt+drag. And you have to get a little bit creative with extending them depending on how it's built. You can see right there, after I made that edit where I chopped it in the middle, I no longer have the ending animation. No matter how long I make this, it's still gonna do a hard cut at the end. If I want that ending bit, again, I'm just gonna have to delete that, re-pull it back in, and then make all my changes like I did before. And then I'll get this nice little ending animation there, just something to know about. So how do you install these, that's a great question. You're going to learn about that and where to find great-looking templates on Envato Elements coming up in the next lesson.