QUICKLY Create FUN KARAOKE SUBTITLES in After Effects! | Adobe After Effects Tutorial

In this tutorial, I'm going to show you 6 super easy ways to create karaoke style subtitles for YouTube shorts, Instagram, and TikTok. We'll save animation presets so you can bring them back in with the click of a button and quickly apply them to future videos. Along the way, you'll learn some really cool tips, tricks, and shortcuts that can be used in other videos, so be sure to stick around. Check out the description for links to the project file, animation presets, templates, core courses, co

aching, merch, and special deals from my affiliates - Envato Elements and AE juice. Okay, there's a lot to get through, so let's dive right in. One of the things I always like to do with my karaoke subtitles is I want to lock my text in place. So that way it's always perfectly centered. So select our text layer, go up to effects and presets and type in lock anchor After Effects 2023 comes with this lock anchor point preset. Double click on that and it defaults to middle center. Press P for posit

ion, alt-click onto our position and just type: value, [540, 960]. Take a look at our comp settings. We are in a 1080 x 1920 comp, which is 9 x 16. The midpoint on both of those is 540, 960. Now if you want this to be a little bit further down, you can just change the 960 to something like 1100 and see how it kind of moves down here. I have this TikTok overlay to kind of give me a guide to know about how far I can go down. Now, whatever changes I make to my text, I know that my text will stay ce

ntered and it will stay in the same spot every time. Just because it can be a little bit difficult to see the text sometimes right click on our text layer, go to layer styles and then add in a drop shadow. And I like to set mine to a distance of zero, increase the size a little bit, make my opacity 100, and just kind of play around this until you get the look that you want. I don't like it too big, but just enough so that way if I toggle this off and on, I can see a definite difference. The firs

t two ways actually include using Text Animators. Let's go to our animate button and we just want to choose this fill color RGB this one to always default to red changes to a highlight color, maybe something like a yellow. Open up our range selector advanced we want to change our smoothness down to 0. Base our animation on words, not characters. Put our end percentage down to 0. Put a keyframe for end percentage. And I'm going to right click. And we're going to toggle that to a hold keyframe. No

w, once you create a hold keyframe, every keyframe thereafter will automatically become a hold keyframe. So we just want to highlight each one of these words until all of our animation comes in. So when I kind of go up a little bit at 13%, our first word "6" comes in. Then go forward a little bit further and just increase your percentage until the next word comes in. Obviously this animation will be timed to your audio, but this is the basic idea. If you watch that playback, we can see each word

comes on one at a time. So that's the first method. The second method is related to this. Instead of animating each word on one at a time in the highlight staying, this is how you can make each word highlight individually. Let's go back to our first keyframe here. And now we're going to be making changes to this start percentage. Put a keyframe at 0%. Right click, toggle to a hold keyframe. Now if you press K, it will jump to your next keyframe. J goes to a previous one. So this second keyframe

here, it highlights our six. We don't need to do anything with our start percentage, but now hit K again. And now we just want ways to be highlighted. So now we can increase our start percentage to get rid of "6", just like that. So now we hit K again and increase our start percentage to get rid of ways K again to go forward. Adjust your start percentage until you get to the very end. And now if we watch that playback, we have one word highlighted at a time. So those are the first two ways that

we can create karaoke style subtitles. Now let's save this as an animation preset. Every time you create karaoke subtitles, you're obviously going to use different text. So let's go ahead and get rid of all the keyframes except for our first set. So that way we can animate future text in its own unique way. So to create the animation preset, we just need to select everything that creates this effect. So it's going to be our Animator 1. And actually I'm going to change this to "Color Highlight."

So holding down CMD, we want to select that. Also our Effects, that's going to be our lock anchor point. Let's open up Transform. Our anchor point and position were affected. And then also our drop shadow was a layer style. You don't want to select your text folder, because that will also bring in your source text, and you don't want that. We just want our color highlight, effects, anchor point position, and layer styles go to Animation / Save Animation Preset. Now you're going to be in Documen

ts Adobe, the version you're using, User Presets, and I'm going to put mine in my seven minute ae folder. "Karaoke Text by Word Highlight." We're going to save that. Okay, and now if we open up our color highlight, we can actually get rid of this start percentage now and we can save this as a second preset. So select color highlight, effects, anchor point, position, layer styles. Go to Animation / Save Animation Preset. It's going to bring you back to the folder we just created the preset in pre

viously. So I'm going to select that and just take out by word. So that way we have karaoke, text highlight. So now this is going to be the animation where it's going to highlight each word, but they're all going to stay on. Select save, put in our lock anchor point. So I'm going to type in lock anchor, double click that and then p for position option, click on position, and we're going to put in our: value,[540,1100]. Or whatever value you want, wherever you want this right click and go to laye

r styles. Drop shadow again, make our distance 0. Our size we'll say 50, and our opacity 100. So that way it just kind of pops against that. And actually I may make this a little bit smaller, we'll say 20. Okay, so now we're going to use a preset that comes native with After Effects. Go up to our effects and presets, type in "typewriter." Just double click typewriter. Now press U to bring up your keyframes and we can close the range selector, then open it back up. Now go down to Advanced. We're

going to change our "based on" to words. And see your smoothness is already set to 0, so we don't to affect that. Click on the stopwatch for start to get rid of those keyframes and kind of scrub forward until our first word pops up. It's right there. Put a keyframe there, right click. Toggle that to a hold keyframe. And just like we did with our other text animator, scrub through and just increase your start percentage until all of these come in one at a time like that. And it's that simple. So

you can actually use the typewriter preset in order to create these. So that's the third way I won't go through the process of creating animation presets every time, but I will put these presets in the project file that comes with this tutorial. I just want to take a minute to tell you about some of the templates I've been creating to make your life a lot easier. Create lower thirds in the blink of an eye with my Luminatrix Lower Thirds templates, all you have to do is change text colors and mak

e a few decisions about how you want things to animate. All the hard work has been done for you. Get professional looking lower thirds that are powered by Essential Graphics so you can use these templates in both After Effects and Premiere. You also want to check out my Text Animator Toolkit. It's also powered by Essential Graphics so you can easily animate text in both After Effects and Premiere. I take away all the guesswork and time that it would normally take you to get professionally animat

ed text layers. With this toolkit, you'll be animating text in a matter of seconds. Check out the link in the Description below for access to presets for virtually everything you could possibly want or need, including presets for text to shape layers, film looks, snow effects, text boxes, text animators, shape layer accents like burst and animated circles, and so much more. With these presets you save a ton of time and this channel continues to stay alive. Check out courses, templates, project f

iles, and ways to get personalized coaching from my new school of AE. Okay, so this was our third way using the typewriter effect. And one of the things I want to do is show you how to also include a text box because sometimes that's kind of a cool look with your karaoke style text. We're going to leave this layer selected right here and go back up to our effects and presets and we're going to look for a few effects. First, let's type in "simple choker." We want to double click to add that. We a

lso want to add in a "minimax," double click that. And finally want to add a "tint." Double click that. So for a simple choker, we're going to change it from final output to matte. And then for our minimax, change our color to alpha. And now you can increase the edges by increasing this radius right here. So now since we're on this background, we don't really need our layer style drop shadow. So now if we watch this playback, we can see that we have our background and each word comes in one at a

time. Now, this box will change with your text too. So see if I change this, our box will change in size depending on what your text is. So that's going to be our 4th method. For number 5, add in our lock anchor point, double click that. Want to kind of push in here. P for position option, click: value, [540, 1100]. And again we're going to right click layer styles, drop shadow: 0, 25, 100. So that way we have our drop shadow. Okay, so now our fifth way is going to be to actually change our sou

rce text. And in this way you can actually have a box that grows. In our fourth method, we had a box around our text, but it was just there as our text populated it. So first we're going to create our fifth method, which is using our source text. And the sixth method is using that with a box. This way is a little bit more tedious, but this is one way that you can create these subtitles. Click our source text. It's going to make a hold keyframe and we can just move this out, come back a little bi

t before it and just delete subtitles. That's going to create another keyframe for us. We want to just keep moving back and deleting a word each time that we move. So now if we watch this play forward, we can see that this is going to populate and it still stays in the center of our comp. You can just kind of spread these out timed with your audio. So since it's animating in one word at a time, it's going to actually move as well, which could be a look that you're going for. But now say what if

we want a box around this one as well? We're going to go up here and type in "simple choker." We're going to look for a "minimax" and we're going to look for "tint". Simple choker, final output gets changed to matte. Minimax, color gets changed to alpha and then we can increase our radius maybe to up to 20. Then I'm going to uncheck my layer style here. We can see that our box is going to grow with our text. So if you want your box to move with your text and to resize itself and you kind of like

this style, more like where you think it's more eye catching to have the text move, you may want to use this method. So now I've saved all of these presets and I put them in the project file. A link to that is in the description below. Leave me a message in the comments below and let me know if this helped you out. Or if there's maybe another method that you use that you think is more effective, or if this made your life a lot easier. As always, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you nex

t time.