How to create easy animated titles in Premiere - Walkthrough #1

The quickest way to make a video look clean and professional is by adding add on-screen text, or titles. It also helps to get your message across without your viewer needing to turn the sound on.

It's not hard to create a title in Adobe Premiere. Here is a 12 step walkthrough so you can create a basic title you can copy+paste anywhere in your video.

How to create a basic title animation in Premiere’s Essential Graphics:

1. Create new sequence. Open Essential Graphics window and click the “New Layer”, and select “Text Layer” from the dropdown.

2. Hit “T” on the keyboard and edit your text. Then position the text by moving it in the Align & Transform panel, or use the Selection tool to click and drag the text layer in the Program window.

3. Create a background shape by clicking the New Layer button and selecting “Rectangle”. Use the selection tool to size and position the shape on top of the Text Layer.

4. In the Essential Graphics panel, drag the layer below the Text Layer to put it behind the layer.

5. In the Effects Controls panel, uncheck 'Uniform Scale' (so you can only animate the Horizontal Scale) and set Anchor Point to 0.0, 0.0. This way the shape animates from the bottom left corner. (Move the shape back into position if the anchor point change shifts out of place).

6. Animate the shape by adding keyframes under 'Horizontal Scale'. With the time marker at 15 frames (00;00;15), click the stopwatch next to Horizontal Scale.

Then move the time marker to the beginning at 0 frames (00;00;00) and click the stop watch again. Select this new keyframe (it should turn blue) and change the Horizontal Scale to '0'.

7. Select both keyframes, right-click on the highlighted keyframes and select “Bezier”. This makes the keyframe ease in and out of the animation and eliminates a harsh and un-subtle start and stop to your animation. Trust me, you're going to want to do this

8. Now add a mask for the text to make it animate on. In the same Effect Controls panel, select the “Create 4-point Polygon mask” tool under your Text layer.

9. Anything inside the mask will be visible and anything outside the mask will be hidden. To animate the layer on, move the time marker to the end of your animation (in this case 10 frames after the last keyframe of the rectangle shape, so frame 25 or 00;00;25).

10. Click the stopwatch on “Mask Path” to add the last keyframe.

11. Move the time marker to 10 frames after the Rectangle’s first keyframe (which in this case is 00:00:10, or 10 frames).

12. Select the mask in the Program window and slide the mask to the left. This adds a keyframe at (10 frames after the Rectangle’s first keyframe). If you hold the Shift key, the mask slides along the X axis. Unfortunately, you can’t add a Bezier interpolation to masks in Premiere for some reason. Go figure.

Now you can take the text layer and drop it on top of any video or photo you want. If you end up changing the text, all you’ll need to update is the size of the rectangle and the mask of the text layer. You can also customize it by changing the color of the shape, the speed/time of the keyframes, or even the shape. 

Now the world’s your oyster and you’ll be animating text layers to everything.