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Hi, there. This is Sean Thigpen for filmmakingcentral.com and today, we’re going to be talking about After Effects animation presets. Animation presets are good for repetitive tasks in which you’re going to be applying the same type of effect over and over again throughout your project or through multiple projects. An additional advantage to using presets is that you can share the files with other artist. So if you’re working on a team and need to make sure that you have consistency amongst the look or the style of the animation, just copy the FFX file over to their machine.

So what you see me doing here is just basically, kind of designing a look for some text. It's not that particularly good look, it's just applying some various effects so that you can—we can have something that is very extinctive to look at. I’m going to throw on a drop shadow gradient text and then I’m actually animate the position as well.

Once you’ve applied your effects or sequence of effects, you can have multiple. What you’re going to want to do then is go ahead and select those items that have changed and go to animation, save animation preset. You can create custom folders for your presets so that you can store them for future use. You can either do a single custom folder or do it by either the job or by the client depending on whatever you want to do. I kind of use them, mix of both depending on what I’m doing. For more global stuff, I’ll use it just a custom folder like this.

Once your preset is saved, now you can use it as many times as you want. Here, I’ve got some other text that I’ve just created. I go and apply that animation preset and there you go. They match and they are completely consistent. You can do this over and over. The other nice thing is if you needed to, once the effect is applied and you needed the same thing but say, you wanted to tweak the animation, you can go ahead and individually change other parameters, once it's applied it doesn’t—it's not connected globally. So you’re not locked into this exact look. Here, I can go ahead and turn off the drop shadow and everything else remains and you can do that with any other parameters. Also, you’re not limited to just turning on and off or adjusting the once—the parameters that are there. You can add other things, for example, animation.

Now, it's important to know that this isn’t strictly for text effects. It can be for any kind of effect that you applied to your project. Here, I’m using 3D stroke as another example where I’ve gotten certain parameters setup with the color and the thickness and one or two other things that maybe I want to have a custom look for those project. So I’ll save those as an animation preset and I can use them anywhere else just like I did with the text effects. And also, they are sharable with other artist because it's still just an FFX file. This is going to be a big time saver. I highly recommend trying to get use to using these kind of things. It’s not useful for one off type effects. However, if you’re going to be doing something over and over, you definitely want to look into using FFX files and if you’ve got to share the effects, this is definitely going to make your life easier and that’s what it's all about at the end of the day.


If you’d like to learn more about me, you can find me, you can find me on the web at seanthigpen.com as well as at twitter.com/seanthigpen, all one word. On behalf of filmmakingcentral.com, thank you for watching.