Text animation

Reveal by letter, word, or line

Every text-in preset animates in a unit — letter, word, or line— with its own duration and a stagger delay between one unit and the next, so “pop in each letter, 40ms apart” and “fade up each word, 120ms apart” are the same system with different numbers. Built-in presets: typewriter, fade-up, blur-in, slide-down, pop-in, bounce-in, wave, flip-up, fade, slide-left, slide-right, zoom-out, spin-in, whip, and drift. Each keys in through the same keyframe engine as everything else, with its own easing curve.

This per-unit reveal is separate from Layer in/out — a whole-layer entrance and exit any visual clip can have, which moves the layer as one and plays on top of the per-letter animation. Set both on the same text layer and they compose: the letters pop in while the layer itself slides on.

Rhythm you can see, and humanize

Duration and stagger describe a pattern in time; the Animate tab draws it. One tick per unit at the instant it starts moving — dots for letters, bars for words — with a tail for how long it runs and rows that follow the lines of the text. Scrub it to move the playhead.

Two knobs sit beside it. Jitter gives each unit up to a few extra milliseconds of hesitation, which is the difference between a typewriter and a person at one; Scatter nudges each unit off its path while it is in motion and fades that nudge to nothing as it settles, so the resting layout stays exact. Both work with every preset, in either direction.

Text that animates through its own edits

Keyframe a text layer's content and the change becomes a cut. The letters the edit removes play the out-animation and finish exactly on the keyframe; the letters it adds play the in-animation from it; the letters it leaves alone are never touched. Turn A B C D into A E F G and you get three words leaving, three arriving, and one sitting perfectly still — with the sound on every one of them.

A sound for every letter or word

Turn on typing sound for a text layer and every revealed unit gets an audible hit, scheduled against the audio clock rather than the frame rate — so it stays sample-accurate at any playback speed. Pick a synthesized pack — mechanical, soft, vintage, thock, digital, or pop — or bring your own.

Sound comes in two voices, In and Out, mirroring the two animations they ride — so text can be heard leaving as well as arriving, and can leave with a completely different character than it came in with. A light click typing on; a low thud wiping off.

To use your own sound: drop in a file, see its real decoded waveform, and drag the hit-point marker onto the transient you want to land on each letter or word's appearance — AtomCut suggests the loudest peak automatically. Save it to the current project or to every project, so it's ready next time. Volume, pitch and a randomness amount are all adjustable, so repeated hits don't sound identical.

Select just a run of letters or words and give that span its own animation or sound, independent of the rest of the layer — a highlighted word can pop in louder, or in a different preset, without splitting it into a separate text layer.

Glyph effects vs. layer effects

Text also supports a lighter, glyph-level shadow, glow, stroke and blur that styles individual characters as they type in. That's a separate, smaller system from the full per-layer effect stack every layer carries — use the layer effect stack for shadow/blur/color work on the text layer as a whole, and glyph effects for per-character styling during the reveal itself.