Create Motion Graphics templates

Create templates in After Effects

We'll be starting our project in After Effects CC, and we'll use the Essential Graphics panel to control exactly what elements will be editable in Premiere Pro CC.

Now, I have a designer I've been working with who send me this After Effects CC project.

And I need to figure out exactly how to make changes to it.

We'll be able to customize this title to whatever we want inside of After Effects CC or Premiere Pro CC.

So, I'm going to press the Spacebar to stop playback and just move my Current Time Indicator back to frame 00114, just so we're all on the exact same frame.

Now, I'll select Layer 1 and press Shift + Command + T or Shift + CTRL + T to open the Effect Controls panel for that layer.

I clicked on this layer because it was called Expression Controls.

And Expression Controls actually happen to be very special, because these are custom controls that you can apply to any layer in your After Effects CC project, and link those controls to any parameter on any layer in your project, so that you have all of the important controls in one panel.

That makes it very easy to access and update changes.

So, I want you to go to the Graphic Style slider here and click on the slider and drag it all the way to the right to change its value up to 6.00.

And you'll notice the title has a completely different title design now.

The Graphic Style controls how the title appears.

Now if you're an experienced After Effects CC user you might be very familiar with Expression Controls.

But what happens if you need to send this project off to another less experienced designer?

Or what if you want to send it to an editor and give them the ability to make version changes and key element adjustments without having them repeatedly come back to you for each little change?

Well, that's where the Essential Graphics panel comes into play.

Let's open the Essential Graphics panel by changing our workspace.

I'll go up under the Window menu and go to Workspace and go down and choose Essential Graphics.

I can also use the shortcuts here in the upper right corner of the interface.

You'll notice I've already added a bunch of different sliders in the Essential Graphics panel.

So, let me show you how I did that.

Now, the first time you open the Essential Graphics panel it'll usually be empty.

So, what you want to do is name the template you're about to create.

I called mine Claim Jumper Show Title.

Then you want to come to the next drop-down menu and click on it.

Here you'll see a list of all the different compositions available in your project.

You want to choose the one composition you want to use as your master composition.

This is where you'll set up all the controls.

So, I chose the Claim Jumper_Title comp.

Next, you'll want to click the next button down: Solo Supported Properties.

When you do that any property that you could possibly add into the Essential Graphics panel is now revealed in your Timeline.

And it's not just one layer, it's any layer.

I'm going to scroll down to the bottom to my Text layer here.

And I want to add source text as something that I'd like to be able to change, because in Premiere Pro CC I want to change this from episode title into the words Claim Jumper.

So, instead of clicking on Text here I'm going to click on the word Source Text.

And then I'll click and drag that right up into my Essential Graphics panel.

And notice I get a blue line wherever I'm going to go ahead and drop this.

So, I can drop this anywhere in the hierarchy.

I'm going to drop it all the way to the top.

And notice once it's added here I can title what the parameter is going to be.

So, I'm going to go ahead and change it from Source Text to Title text.

And then just click on the next parameter down.

And you'll notice that's gone ahead and set that.

If you want to delete something out of the Essential Graphics panel just click on it and press Delete on your keyboard.

You can also add comments.

So, I'll go ahead and add a comment.

I'll add the comment: Use each background only once.

And notice this is Background Tint Color.

But this comment pertains to the background image.

So, I'm going to click on this parameter and drag it up directly underneath the BG Image.

And now my Comment is directly below the BG Image.

Now that we've added our comment, we're ready to export our Motion Graphics template.

To do that I'll just click the Export Motion Graphics Template... button.

And it's going to tell me I need to save my project first.

I'll go ahead and click Save.

And then it's going to go ahead and package all the different graphic elements that this project references.

And it's going to ask me where I'd like to save this.

Now, if I click on the drop-down menu under Destination, it's important to note that I could save this to a Local Drive or I could save it out to my Creative Cloud.

In this case, I'm going to save it to Creative Cloud in My Library.

And so, when I click OK it's going to take a second to copy everything up to the cloud.

Then we can jump over into Premiere Pro CC.

Use templates in Premiere Pro

Now, if we look at our project under Sequence 01 you'll notice I'll already have a placeholder where I'd like to place my title.

So, I'll click over to the Graphics workspace to reveal the Essential Graphics panel where I can browse to the Motion Graphics template, that I just saved to my library.

You can also get to the Graphics workspace by selecting it from the Window menu.

Now, let's take a second to check out the Essential Graphics panel.

Notice it's divided up into Browse and Edit.

We'll start on the Browse section.

And if I click on the next drop-down menu you notice I have Essential Graphics and Libraries.

Essential Graphics contain a bunch of pre-built templates that you can use in any of your upcoming projects.

I'm going to go to the Libraries section, because I want to navigate in my Libraries, which are on my Creative Cloud to My Library, where I actually saved our template.

To add this to my project all I need to do is just drag it and drop it.

And I can place it directly over top of my placeholder.

When I let go it's going to take a second to download a copy of this file into my project.

Once it's been added into the sequence I can browse the animation by scrubbing my Play head down the Timeline.

I'll scrub to 00:00:07:08.

Now let's look at how we can edit this title in the Essential Graphics panel.

Go ahead and click once on the graphic that we just added into the sequence.

And now I can see the sliders in the Essential Graphics panel.

Let's rename our title from Episode Title to Claim Jumper.

Click anywhere outside of the text box to set the type.

If we take a closer look at the subtitle you'll notice it's kind of hard to read.

Let's see if we can fix that by changing the background image.

In the Essential Graphics panel, I'll go to the BG Image slider and change its value from 3 to 1.

It's still kind of hard to read.

So, I'll scrub on the Title Position Y.

Notice if I drag to the right the title moves down, and if I drag to the left the title moves up.

Let's drag it up until we can see the type just above the wagon.

That way the black will pop against the nice light blue background.

Now, once we stylize this it's important to understand how to create an alternate version.

Whenever you add a template to the Timeline all you have to do is create a duplicate of the sequence or a duplicate of the graphic on the Timeline itself.

Then when you make changes to the graphic in the Essential Graphics panel, it'll update just for that duplicate copy giving you multiple versions.

To show you what I mean I'll go to the Project panel and I'll select Sequence 01 and right-click and choose Duplicate.

I'll rename this Sequence 02 and double click to open Sequence 02.

I can click once on my Claim Jumper Show Title, and in the Essential Graphics panel notice everything opens up.

For this version, I'll choose a slightly different background color for the tint.

So, click once in the Color Wheel, next to Background Tint to open up our Color Picker.

And this time I'll choose kind of a dark burnt orangey brown color.

And if I go back to Sequence 01 I have my nice blue tint.

So, as you can see Motion Graphics templates can help designers cut down on revisions and versioning work while still maintaining creative control over their projects.

And editors can continue to work quickly without having to break focus by switching apps or having to send revisions back to a designer to make changes.