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Ok so I have this presentation thing for next week, and I have to make a explainer video. I'm super torn between whiteboard animation (I can do this) and kinetic typographic video. I really want to try out the latter, but have no experience with AE. My school has almost any imaginable A/V tool.

Am I being ambitious? What are some good resources to learn to generate the video (like a 3-minute video) using AE? Are there any "shortcuts"?

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Hi Karan - I think 'am I too ambitious' is not an easily answered question, but you could edit your question to ask about what techniques/experience would be required. – Dr Mayhem Feb 14 at 9:56
Just wondering -- how'd that go for you? – Nile Mar 3 at 19:05

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This is pretty funny, literally the first thing I ever did in After Effects...Was this

I was able to achieve it pretty easily and if I remember correctly I did it after watching a few of the VideoCoPilot.net beginner tutorials from Andrew Kramer. And as you get more advanced do some of his harder tutorials, I found it probably to be the number one source in terms of learning the basis to After Effects

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So do you think I can make like a 3 minutes video like this with no AE experience in under 12 hours? (I do have experience with PS) – None Feb 14 at 19:04
Absolutely...with enough will power anything can happen – Chris James Champeau Feb 18 at 23:06
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What do you mean by kinetic typographic video? Do you simply mean that you want moving text? It is quite easy to setup and animate the movement of layers in After Effects, so I don't think it sounds too ambitious if you have a passing familiarity with other layer based systems (like Photoshop). You simply need to place what you want on a layer and then manipulate the layer using the Transform options.

As long as you click the diamond for key frame tracking you simply go to the desired keyframe, adjust it to where it should be on that keyframe and AE will interpolate the motion in between.

Alternately, if you want to be a bit more complex, you could use path text, setup a path for the text to follow and then use key framing to adjust the start position along the path.

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Like this: youtube.com/watch?v=jwrGvlwOCcg – None Feb 14 at 16:33
Yeah, that is mostly layer transformations and some color changes. A few motion blur effects added in, but it's pretty easily doable with AE using transformation key frames like I described. – AJ Henderson Feb 14 at 18:14
So do you think I can make like a 3 minutes video like this with no AE experience in under 12 hours? (I do have experience with PS) – None Feb 14 at 18:59
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In the shown quality? Depends on your design skills and how much actual animation you want to be happen. The video is quite playfull, it would require a ton of keyframes to do such a video. I'd say if you stick with more basic animation, yes its possible but try not to be overly fancy and get a rough animation going first and improve details later on. – Paul Green Feb 17 at 15:37
@KaranGoel - I concur with Paul Green. It depends on how skilled you are with keyframe animation in general and how high quality of a result you are looking for. I'm not really sure I could give a good estimate of how much progress you could make in 12 hours. Your best bet is to probably give it a try and see where you can get. I also concur that the best bet is to get a rough concept done first and then worry about refining. You can always select and drag groups of keyframes to adjust timings. – AJ Henderson Feb 18 at 18:10

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