Posts made in January, 2012

After Effects QuickTip- Saving Layer Styles as Animation Presets

Posted by Clay Asbury on Jan 19, 2012 in After Effects | 0 comments

If you have worked with Photoshop a bit, you are probably familiar with Layer Styles.

If not they let you apply drop shadows, bevels, etc. to your text to stylize it and make it more readable.

You can also access them inside of After Effects. They do not live in the Effect Menu like standard effects, but are under the Layer Menu (or you can right click on a layer in the Timeline Panel and apply them there.)

Here is a good primer on using them.

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/cmg_keyframes/story/layer_styles_in_after_effects/

Though they aren’t Effects you can save them as an “Animation Preset”, so you can reuse them. (This is similar to favorites in FCP 7).

Select the Layer Styles and from the Animation Menu select “Save Animation Preset”. You can also apply presets from the Animation Menu or the Effects & Presets Panel.