Text Animation Presets for After Effects That Stay Editable

The fastest way to animate text in After Effects without keyframing it by hand is a preset you can still edit afterwards. EXpress is our panel of text animation presets, motion presets, and expressions: select a text layer, right-click a card, and the animation lands on it by character, word, or line. Every value stays in Effect Controls, retiming is two keyframes, and free presets are included, so you can try it without a subscription.

Everything about it lives on the EXpress product page, and it installs through Filmit Studio, our free desktop app. Here is the workflow from the demo, what is free, and where the limits are.

What is EXpress for After Effects?

A preset library for motion and text animation, in one panel with four tabs.

• Text. 47 text presets across 17 families, from Fade and Slide to Typewriter, Decode, per-character 3D, Depth of Field, and Fly from Camera.
• Motion. 45+ motion presets for logos, images, shapes, and clips, including 3D moves like Flip 3D and Dolly In.
• Expressions. A library of 100+ expressions across 17 categories.
• Favorites. The presets and expressions you save as you go, kept one click away.

Every card plays its real animation on loop before you pick it, so you are never guessing from a name. A search box covers every tab, and a category rail down the side narrows the results.

How do you open EXpress in After Effects?

How do you apply a text animation preset?

Pick a unit, select your layer, and right-click a card.

On the Text tab, choose whether the animation runs by character, word, or line. In the demo, a Scale applied by word animates the line one word at a time. Then select the text layer in your comp. This step is easy to skip: the demo forgets it once and has to go back and select the layer before the right-click applies.

With the layer selected, right-click a card and the In animation is applied straight away. In the video that card is Fly from Camera, and one right-click is all it takes to have the title animating on screen. Left-click a card instead to open its options first, where you can set the direction, the order (forward, reverse, or random), the timing style, and the duration, anywhere from a quarter second to four seconds.

How do you animate text in and out with different animations?

Left-click a card to open its options and choose In, Out, or Both, then click Apply with your layer selected. Both gives you the entrance and the exit in one go.

To use two different animations, apply them separately. Open one card, set it to In, and apply. Then open a different card, set it to Out, and apply that to the same layer. The In starts at the layer's in point and the Out lands on its out point, so the animation fits the layer however long it is. An In also starts from nothing on its first frame, and an Out ends on an empty frame, so cuts land clean.

Can you change what right-click does?

Yes. Open Settings and find the quick apply options. Click, right-click, Shift, Ctrl or Cmd, and Alt or Option clicks can each be set to open the options, apply In, apply Out, or apply both. If you mostly build full title cards, map right-click to both and every card becomes a one-click entrance and exit. It is a small setting, but it is what lets you move quickly while you animate.

How do you retime a preset after applying it?

Select the layer and press U on your keyboard. That reveals the two keyframes the preset set up for its In and Out timing. Drag them on the timeline to make the animation faster or slower. There is no graph editor and no expression to open.

Everything else is in Effect Controls with names you can read. A motion preset, for example, shows controls like these, so you can dial the distance, the scale, or the ease without opening the panel again:

• EX Motion In and EX Motion Out
• EX In Position and EX In Scale
• EX In Ease In and EX In Ease Out

Because nothing is baked in, you can also move a layer after a motion preset is applied and the animation follows it, with slides still starting fully off screen. And because the setup is native to After Effects, the project opens and renders the same on a machine that does not have EXpress installed.

What is in the expression library?

More than 100 expressions across 17 categories, including Loop, Motion, Physics, Link, Time, and Random. Like the presets, every card previews the expression moving, and the detail view follows your settings as you change them.

Set each parameter with a slider, choose the property or let EXpress detect it, and apply to your selected layers. You can remove an expression again from the same place, and heart the ones you use every day so they sit in Favorites. If you want the background on why expressions save so much time, our older post 38 Expressions at Your Fingertips, No Coding Required is good further reading.

What is free, and what needs a subscription?

EXpress works without a subscription. Locked cards still play their preview, so you can see exactly what a subscription adds before you decide.

Does EXpress work in Premiere Pro?

Yes, with one honest limit: text presets and expressions are After Effects only. Premiere Pro gets the motion presets, with the same cards and timing styles, landing as ordinary keyframes on Position, Scale, Rotation, and Opacity, or through a Transform effect when motion blur is on. The same install covers both apps. Our guide to motion presets in Premiere Pro walks through that side.

A few other things to know. Favorites for text and motion presets, saved with their direction, style, order, and duration, are an After Effects feature. The 3D motion presets are After Effects only as well. And the library is still growing: the team is adding more presets as we go.

How do you get EXpress?

Head to the EXpress page, install Filmit Studio (free), and open EXpress from the Filmit Studio panel. The free presets are ready straight away. When you want the full library, start the 7-day trial. Tell us on Discord which animation you keep rebuilding by hand, because that is how the next cards get made.

Key takeaways