How To Make CUSTOM LIVE Animations For Your Twitch Stream!

I am so sick of seeing the exact same thing being tweeted by streamers when they go live on Twitch or YouTube. Do people actually think that tweeting or posting to Discord with the words I'm live followed by their Twitch link is actually going to get people to click through and visit their stream. That might have worked five years ago, but nowadays you've got to put a little bit more effort into grabbing people's attention and bringing them across to your live stream.

So rather than just sitting here and complaining about it, I thought I would teach you guys how to create your own GIFS or GIFS or however you want to say it so that you can share something a little bit more unique and a little bit more creative, next time you go live. And the best part is that this doesn't even have to be just about you posting when you go live, once you follow this tutorial you're going to have the skills to be able to create animations like these for absolutely anything you would like to share such as inviting people to your Discord server or posting when you uploaded a new video to YouTube or anything like that. So go and grab yourself a cup of tea or whatever it is that people outside of England drink and let's get creative.

So for this tutorial we’re going to be using Adobe After Effects. Now, if you don't already own Adobe After Effects, they have a free seven-day trial. I’ll leave a link down the description, or you can just Google After Effects free trial. I think it's seven days, but it's completely free so you can use the software fully. And another thing worth mentioning is in the Gaming Career Discord server we have a channel there called Free Downloads where I will be uploading the finished project file from this video with some really easy control so you can customize your username, which platform you're streaming to, all the colors and even add your own logo or avatar into the start, so that'd be the really easy way to create this. But I'd recommend following through with this tutorial and actually creating it for yourself from scratch’ cause then you're going to have the creative skills needed to make things like this in the future. But the project file will be there in Discord for those that just want to quickly get on with it.

Okay, so in After Effects, we want to start a new composition and here you can name this whatever you want. I’m going to call it Now Live GIF or something along those lines. For the resolution we want to leave this at a 16 by 9 ratio because that's what works really well on Twitter, and in places like Discord where you will be posting this GIF. I am going to set mine to 1920 by 1080. I might, when I'm rendering out lower this resolution, if we need a smaller file size but it's a great starting point especially if you want to include this looping GIF in a video or anything like that. But frame rate, let's leave it set to 60, a nice high frame rate to keep all the animation super smooth. And then for the duration I know because I've previously created this that I want it to be roughly six seconds but if you want something longer with more words feel free to up this 10 or 20 seconds. I'd just recommend that if it's for a looping GIF, you want to keep it quite short. So six seconds for me, and then we can press okay.

Next we'll import our logo or our avatar or whatever image you want to use. I'd recommend using whatever you use on stream basically so come up to the project window here right click, import file, select the file you want to import for me, that's the Gaming Careers logo, and then we want to drag that down into our timeline here, so we can see it appearing in our composition. If you need to make your logo or avatar smaller or bigger, you can just highlight the layer down here, press S on the keyboard to bring up the scale properties and then just drag this a hundred percent to the left if we need to make it smaller or to the right, if you need to make it bigger but a hundred percent seems to work well for me.

The last thing that we need to make sure that we're doing to our logo before we start animating it is to make sure that this anchor point is in the very, very center of our logo because we're going to be applying some rotation to it, we want to make sure it's rotating around the center. So to do that, make sure you have the layer selected and then press control alt and home, and that will move the anchor point to the very center of the image.

Okay the next thing we're going to do is add our background layer. So to do that right click down in the timeline here, go to new solid and it's going to bring up the options for a new solid. Here you can select the color I'm going for this sort of gray blue sort of color. I will leave all the hex codes that I use down in the description below, but anything you want to use really, you can select it here, press okay, and it will add in the background layer. You'll notice that we can't now see our logo, that's just because the layer audit is wrong. So if we drag our background layer below our logo, you can see it now appears properly.

And the last thing to do is this is going to get a little bit complicated, this project. So it's worth just renaming your layers so that you know exactly which has which, so right click going to rename this background. And then right, click on the top one, I’m going to rename this logo. So time to start actually animating this logo to make it appear on our screen. So what we're going to do is play around with the position key frames of our logo. So select the logo layer here and press P on your keyboard, and we're going to change to our position key frames. And a handy little tip when it comes to animating things, especially if you want them to end in the center of the screen, is to actually work backwards.

So what we're going to do is we're going to scroll across on our timeline hereto roughly halfway through the first second, maybe 35 frames through. And we're going to add a key frame by clicking the stopwatch. And that basically means that at this point in time, the logo will be exactly in this position. So moving backwards to the very start when we want our logo to be off screen, if we move our timeline back to the start, and then we drag our logo down, and then if we hold the shift key, it will lock it in place, and we'll just drag it so that it's off screen. And if we play this back we’re going to get the world's most boring animation of it moving up into the middle of the screen, and we're going to play around with that. But there's one more key frame that we want to add first, and that's sort of 20 frames in, we want this to actually be at the very top of our screen. So again, 20 frames in drag our logo hold shift because we want it to stay in place somewhere around there. And again, a super boring animation. You can start to see how it's going to animate on the screen. Just to help make our animation look a little bit more natural, what we're going to do is select these two last key frames highlight them both so that they turn blue and then right click key frame assist, Easy Ease. And this is just going to help with the animation, looking a little bit smoother as they ease into the key frames.

We can actually customize this animation a little bit more. So if we go to the 20 frames in key frame and then click on this button here which is going to open up the graph editor, you'll see a graph that looks like this. If you don't see this graph and instead you see the value graph that looks like this, all you have to do is right click anywhere on the graph and change it to edit speed graph like that, and you should see the animation now the actual speed that the logo is moving. And what we want to do is we want to change this one at the 20 frames in by dragging this right anchor point to the right and what that's basically going to mean is rather than the smooth animation, it’s going to sort of hover at the top point and then slam down.

So if we go back and watch this back again now you can start to see the animation has a little bit more life. One last chance that we'll make this position keyframe is again, if we look at the 20 frames in key frame, we’re just going to drag this top anchor point down a little bit, which will reduce the height that it goes to. If we play this back now you’re going to start to see that we're really nearly there with our animation, for the logo appearing on screen. The last thing we want to add is a little bit of rotation. So to add rotation keyframes, we can just press R on our keyboard to bring up our rotation keyframes but it's useful to see both rotation and position next to each other. So we can click this little down arrow twice and that will show you all the transform keyframes that we have added.

So what we're going to do is go 20 frames in when it's at the top of it's sort of lock-in points. And this is where we want our rotation to be at zero degrees, so in this correct position. And then if we go back to the beginning of the composition where the logo is off screen, we're going to drag this right value to the left, to turn it back, maybe a hundred degrees or so, something like that. And then if we play it back you can see it spins into place, it locks at zero degrees at the top and then slams down into its final position. So the last thing we'll do here just to make it look a little smoother is Easy Ease, this last key frame by right-clicking key frame assist, Easy Ease, and now we have finished our animation for our logo appearing on screen.

I said we were done with the logo animation but there's actually one last change that we need to make. You'll notice that as the logo is moving here it might not look the most realistic, and that's because for human eyes, when we see an object moving quickly we see some blur artifacts in there as well. And you'll actually add that in after effects it's called motion blur. All you have to do is click this button here to enable the motion blur option for all layers, and then make sure you have it enabled for our logo layer by ticking this box here. And you can see instantly as soon as we enable that it goes from a sharp image to a blurry one, and it looks much more natural as it's moving through the composition.

Now, we don't want this logo to stay in the middle of the screen throughout our whole of our looping video. Once the animation has finished roughly at about 50 frames in, we can actually end the logo and stop showing it on screen. So to do that have our logo layer selected and go to about 50 frames in and press control shift D, which will split the layer at that point, and then we can just press the delete key which will get rid of the hop split layer. And then we have our logo appearing on screen and then disappearing about 50 frames in.

So next we're going to add some texts to our video and to do that we need to make sure that we're showing certain windows in After Effects, so come up to the window option here and make sure that you have the align character and paragraph options enabled, and they'll show somewhere on the right-hand side here. To make sure first text layer we can go, right-click here, new text. And then we're going to type out the word, now to play around with the font color and sizing, we’re going to open up our character options here to make sure that we can change our font. I'm going to use Montserrat, and I think black is the biggest one there, and we're going to change the color from this horrible green to that of a Gaming Career is just off brown. I'll leave all of the hex codes that I use down in the description, but obviously feel free to play around with fonts, colors, sizes, whatever you want. It really is your playground to play with. And size-wise, I reckon anything around 200 pixels of the words that we're going to be using, I'll set mine to 190 there. And then you'll notice that's not in the very center of our composition.

So to make sure that we're centering it make sure that the paragraph is centered, so it's not left aligned or right aligned it’s center aligned and then go to the align tab and click this button to align it horizontally in the center and then this button to align it vertically in the center. The word Now isn't actually going to show on screen on its own, it’s going to show Now Live, so let's duplicate this layer by highlighting it and pressing control D and then we can double click on the layer and actually type up the word Live and you can see them laid on top of each other, so you can't really read the words different. But if we change the color of the word Live by opening part character options, clicking this button, and then entering in any hex code, I'm going to use Gaming Career's red, you can see that there's two different words here Now and Live and we need to play around with the position keyframes.

Let's start by doing the Live layer and positioning that properly. So highlight it, press P on your keyboard to bring up the position keyframes, and just like we did with the logo, we’re going to work backwards. So let's go to a roundabout 110, 130 and you can see the time over here, so that means one second and 13 frames in somewhere around here is where we want Now Live to be in their final positions. So let's add a position keyframe by clicking the stopwatch and then you can just use the right and left arrows on your keyboard to position these properly. So I'm going to hold down the right arrow until roughly we think it's in the final position that it's going to be in for it to read. So I know that now it's going to move to the left, so somewhere around about there is the final position that I'm going to keep, and that key frame has now been added. If we move back a little bit in time, maybe 10 frames or so we are going to position this completely off the screen. So again, we can hold down the right arrow on our keyboard to move this. If you want to move it quicker, you can hold shift and right, and I think it sort of moves at 10 pixels at a time, something like that. But now we have this really bad animation of Live coming in from the right-hand side.

For the Now text layer, we once again press P on our keyboard to bring up the position key frames. And we want this to start in the center of the screen where it is currently so let's add a key frame there. And then at this end point at 113, where we have the Live coming in and ending and its real position, we want to move this to the left, just so that it reads properly. So let's leave a normal space gaps something along the lines of that I think looks great.

Now, if we play this back, there's a couple of changes that I want to make. I want it to sort of appear like the word Live is pushing the word Now out of the way. So to do that we're just going to move this person keyframe on the Now layer, to the right a little bit, some things around there. And now if we play it back, you can see that Now doesn't start moving until Live gets much closer to it.

Last things that we're going to do is obviously enable the motion blur for both layers, so tick that for both layers and you can see it adds the motion blur and then we're just going to Easy Ease all of these key frames. So highlight them all, right click, key frame assistant, Easy Ease. And now if we play it back, you can see it's much more animated and we get that nice pushing the word Now out of the way. Just like with the logo, we don't want these to stay on screen throughout the whole video, so about one second and 35 frames in somewhere around here we’re going to end both these layers. So make sure you have them both selected by holding down shift and clicking on both of them and then control shift D, to split the layers and the delete key to delete the split. And then we can see that it now pops in Now Live and it's ready to move on to our next word.

Next word is super simple, it's just no animation, so let's do as we have done before. Right click new text, type out the word on we're going to highlight it, change the color back to white or whatever color it is that you want to use. And then we're going to use the paragraph to make sure it's center aligned and then align it in the center horizontally and vertically to make sure it's in the very center of a composition. Again, we don't want this to start at the very start of our composition, so come to where we want it to begin drag this across to the right so that it appears once Now Life has disappeared. And then we want to end this layer at about 155, so that's been on screen for a short amount of time. So control shift D to split the layer, delete to delete the split, and now we have the next word added.

So we should be getting pretty used to adding new text layers now, but this next one we're going to add is the platform, so Twitch.tv in our case but Youtube.com or Facebook or whatever platform you're streaming to. Again, we come down here, right click new text, and then we're going to type out Twitch.tv forward slash so it's going to be the full URL. And we can see it's appearing on top of our current layer but don't worry about that, we'll fix that in a second.

So let's do exactly what we've done before, let’s start by changing the color. Actually, we need to highlight all of the text here before we change the color. So I'm going to use Twitch purple here. Again, I will leave all the hex codes that I've used down in the description below if you do want to copy them, or you can just find the Twitch hex code with a Google search. So Twitch in purple, we're going to make sure it's center aligned in a paragraph and then align it horizontally and vertically in the very center. And then we want this to appear when On disappears from screen. So drag this across to the right to make sure that it's not overlapping at all, and then we have Twitch.tv. But we're going to add another different effect onto this, where it actually looks like it's typing out the dot tv forward slash parts. So it's going to say Twitch and then dot tv is going to be typed out and to do that, we're going to be using an effect.

So to add an effect, we need to make sure that After Effects is showing the effect window. So come up to a window make sure that we have this one Effects and Presets enabled. And then over here maybe on the right-hand side or wherever you have it set up, you can type in the word typewriter, and there's going to be a text effect called typewriter that we can drag and place onto our Twitch.tv layer.

Now you'll notice that the word Twitch has disappeared. If we drag our mouse across the timeline here, or just play it back, you'll see that it is actually typing it out, but we want to play around with this animation and make it much quicker. And we also want to make sure that we're starting with the word Twitch. So to do that we're going to pop open the Twitch.tv properties here then go to text and then animator one, and you can see that we already have, if we open up range selector, we already have these two key frames which is where the animation starts and the animation is complete, so 0% and 100% on our typewriter. So the first thing we can do is actually increase the speed of this animation by bringing the 100% keyframe to the right to end somewhere around about here I would say, and then we're going to have a much quicker typing animation.

But like we said before we don't want it to start with nothing typed, we want it to start with the word Twitch typed. So if we bring our timeline across to this first keyframe, make sure it's highlighted and then we can drag the start percentage from zero to the right until we have the word Twitch typed out, we don't want the full stop, so somewhere around about their 63% with the font that I've used. And now it's going to start with the word Twitch, and then add on the dot tv as we need it to.

Now if we watch this back, it's still looking a little bit naff, and that is mainly I think, because the word Twitch when it's on its own is to the left. You can see that something else needs to come to the right, so this would look a lot cooler if Twitch word was in the middle and then as dot tv was typed out and moved across to always be centered.

So to do that, it's really, really simple. We’re going to play around with the position keyframes again, let's drag our timeline to the finished key frame here where the full word is typed out, open up our transform property so that we can see position and add a keyframe here because this is the position we want it to be in at this point. But if we move back in time to when just the word Twitch is typed, here in this key frame, we want to center this. So again we can use the right and left keys to center this word and I'm just going to eyeball this.

You can probably get super technical with rulers and things like that to make sure it's completely centered. There’s something rough around their looks about, right, and if we play this back, you can see the word Twitch is in the middle and then as dot tv gets typed out, it moves to the left to make sure that it's always centered. Now because we've added a little bit of motion to this layer, it's worth adding the motion blur by again, ticking this box here, just as it's moving, it's going to add a little bit of blur and look much smoother. We can now close all the properties for that and watch it back. So Twitch.tv, that's looking really nice, Now Live on Twitch.tv.

We just want to end this layer when the full word is typed out. So somewhere around about just before three seconds, 250 is what I've got it set to. Control shift D, delete the top layer and then let's have a look at what we've got so far. Nice. Okay, so making really good progress. The last thing that we have to do in terms of text animation is that username stack that I've shown in the beginning, probably the most complicated effect that we're covering today, but certainly not impossible. If you follow along, you can have it done in no time.

So it does apply a couple of new techniques but the reason I wanted to use this effect is because it teaches you about masks, which is a super important feature in Photoshop and After Effects and Premiere Pro and all these kind of editing programs where you can make sure you hide certain things behind a mask. So let's do as we have done so many times before: right click, new text layer, and we're going to type out the word Username, obviously here, write out your real username. And if it takes up too much room on your screen, you can play around with the size and do whatever you need to do. Use a custom font, however you want to do it. I'm going to just write the word username and I'm going to change it back to the Gaming Careers’ off-white and Oh, I need to highlight the whole layer to be able to do that. Gamin Careers off-white.

And again as always, we're going to make sure it’s center aligned and then aligned vertically and horizontally in the center as well. As always, we want to make sure that this starts when the Twitch.tv layer has finished, let's drag this to the right to make sure it doesn't appear before then, and then we can see that it's showing at the right time. Okay, so this is our sort of placeholder username that is always going to show in the very center of our screen.

So what we're going to do is come across to our lay here, right click and go to pre-composed, and here we can just type in username, and we want to make sure that we're moving all attributes into the new composition. This is just because we're going to be duplicating this layer and adding those stacks above and below and adding different masks to each of those. But we still want to always be able to come back and change this word if we need to, and it will update for all of the stacks, so that's why we've got to pre-compose it.

So let's create that first stack, which is going to move from the middle and move up just once. So let's duplicate the username layer by control D, press P to open up the position keyframes, make sure our timelines at the beginning add a position key frameworks in the center and then move forward, roughly 20 frames or so, and we're going to move it up just by using the up and down arrow. So we're going to move up, so there's still a little bit of overlap which we'll get rid of when we start to use a mask something around about there. Next we'll play around with the actual animation of these key frames, so highlight them both, right click and Easy Ease. And then we're going to go back into the graph editor, highlight both of the key frames and drag these anchor points as far right and left as they go. So they go all the way to a hundred percent. So this animation is really going to go slow, pick up a lot of speed and then a lot of speed back down to slow again.

So if we watch back this animation just for the top username, we can see that it's looking exactly as we want it to do. We just want to add that mask in. Before we add the mask for the top stack, let's make sure that we've got the bottom stack done as well. So let's take this top stack that we've duplicated and drag it down to the bottom, just so we keep a nice border and open up the position keyframes for that. And then if we highlight the second position keyframe for the bottom stack we just want to change this to be down. So we can now hold down the down arrow. We want it to roughly match up with the same position as the up one was so I'm looking at this A gap here to be able to do it. So there's a little gap between the A, I’m just going to sort of match that gap here as well. And if we play that back we've got the exact same animation of it going up and down.

So before we add our masks we need to pre compose both of these layers again. So take the top one, which is our top stack right click pre compose, and do this as top text. We want to make sure that we're doing this option to move all attributes into the new composition. And then we do the exact same for the bottom one right clicks, pre compose, going to call this bottom text make sure we have this option enabled and okay. And now we have our placeholder in the middle and our first stack above and our first stack below.

So to add a mask, let's start with the top stack. So highlight the top stack, and we're going to add a mask while going up to layer, mask, new mask, and then you can see it's added a rectangle mask for us. All we have to do is use the up and down arrows, so up arrow for the top one, going to keep dragging this up until we've deleted a little bit of this top username. So you can see as we're moving up now it's deleting it and we want to leave a small gap, something like that. And you can see there it's masked out the bottom of this top stack which is exactly what we want. We want to repeat that for the bottom text, so highlight the bottom text layer, layer, mask, new mask, and then instead of using the up arrow, we're going to use the down arrow on this one and just delete the top bit of the, or not delete but mask out the top of the text with a similar sort of gap.

As you can see now we have the top and bottom stack, the first stack done. And now really all we're going to do is duplicate this a couple more times to add a couple more stacks. So let's create our next stack, that's really easy to do. All we need to do is duplicate our top text layer by control D, and then we're going to actually move the position of this full layer just by using the up and down arrows until we're roughly in place.

What I'd recommend doing here is to make sure that you're making the same gap again to create the same gap again, but we want this to be a smaller mask don't we? So what I would actually do is update the mask first and then update the position. So with the layer enabled like this, press M on your keyboard to bring up the mask, click to highlight the mask and then use the up and down arrows to actually change the mask position.

So we're going to make this a smaller mask, something around here, and then we can go back to the layer without the mask highlighted and use the up and down arrows again, to move this back into place. So we want to leave a similar sort of gap that we left before and end up with something like this. Maybe move that up just one more pixel and a gap like that looks perfect. To repeat this whole process for the bottom, I’ll try and explain it again in case we didn't get that, duplicate the bottom text layer we're going to move the position of it first using the up and down arrows and just to put it into place. And before we create the mask, we want to put it into a position where there's a small gap. Obviously we want this layer to be masked off even more.

So highlight that layer, press M on your keyboard to bring up the mask, highlight the mask, again use up and down in your keyboard to delete a little bit more. And we're going to match this up with the top one, so about there will be right, and then deselect the masker, select the layer and then use up and down in the keyboards again, to position this in the correct place with a gap, something similar to that. If you want one more stack, repeat the process once more, I'll do that quickly now.

So we now have three stacks above and three stacks below our username placeholder layer. And if we play this back, you can see it doesn't look great just because they all animate at the exact same time. So we're going to offset some of the animations, which is super easy to do. So here is our placeholder username, the one in the center. We want that to start right away at two seconds and 50 frames in, then we forward roughly 15 frames or so. We want the next stack to start here.

So highlight the first top tech stack and control click the bottom tech stack as well to select them both. and then drag these both to the right. Then move forward, maybe 10 frames or so we’re going to do the same with the next stack. So select this layer control click the bottom layer to move them across. And then finally, 10 frames further, we want the top and the very top and the very, very bottom stack to start as well. And if we now show this, you can see that they sort of fan out animating one at the time, which is great. Last thing to do is enable motion blur for all of these layers because there is some movement on them all except for the center one, I guess. And then we have a really nice-looking animation.

The final thing we're going to do with this stack is actually play around with the colors. And this is something that's super simple to do, we don't have to go back into loads of animation presets. We're just going to drag an effect onto any layers that we want to change the color for. So up to you, if you want to, you can play around and use any colors you want. I'm just going to actually make them slightly grayer but play around with the opacity to do that.

So to do that, we come back up to our effects and presets panel here, where we typed in typewriter earlier, and we're going to type in fill. We want to make sure that we're taking the generated fill effect, dragging that onto our username layer. You can see that that's changed the middle username layer completely red which we obviously don't want.

So we come up here to the effect control panel and we want to change the color red back to our original color or whatever color you want the center layer to be, so for me, that's white. But actually this is really useful because we're now going to copy and paste this effect into all of the other layers.

So to do that, just highlight the full effect up here control C like you would on any computer program, and then we'll take the top first stack and paste it in here, and it's going to paste the effect properties. Or you could change the color to whatever you would like if you want the first tank to be a different color. But what I'm actually going to do is play around with the opacity, which is going to make it look like a different color but really it's just getting more and more opaque. So I'm going to change it from 100% opacity to 70% and you can see that it makes it look a little bit gray. We’re going to copy and paste this effect to the first bottom layer to give it the exact same color. You can probably see where this is going, we’re going to go up to the second stack, paste the effect in and change it to 50%, which is going to give it a slightly darker gray, copy that and paste it to the bottom to give it the same color.

And then finally for the top effect, we're going to change it to 30% copy and paste that down to the bottom stack. And now you can see we have this really nice stacking effect where the shades of white get slightly greyer.

Now, the reason we put so much effort in pre composing all of those layers is because if you ever want to change this username if you want to maybe render out a graphic for one of your friends or something like that it’s really simple to do now, all we have to do is go into our placeholder layer this one in the center, double click to open it and then change whatever we write in here. So it can change from username to whatever you want it to, and if we go back to our now life GIF composition you can see the animation is updated and the text is all updated as well.

Now our composition is starting to look a little bit messy, so I'm just going to grab all of these by clicking the bottom one shift and clicking the top one and pre-composing all of these into a composition just going to call this Stacked Username. And again, move all attributes into the new composition, and you can see now we just have one layer which controls all of the static usernames. So if we watch back this full animation now you can see that we have all of our text in place and it's looking really good, but what I want to happen is for the stack of usernames to open and then actually close as well.

So right now they're just open and stay on screen until the GIF reloops again. So to be able to do that, don't worry, we don't have to go about creating that whole animation again in reverse. We can actually just duplicate this layer and play it backwards. So go to roughly on your timeline somewhere where the animation has finished somewhere around four seconds. We're going to do control shift D make sure we have our layer selected, control shift D, delete the top layer, and then we just have this stack opening and then disappearing off screen.

So what we're going to do is duplicate this stack with control D and then move this across so that the animation is playing twice. So right now it's going to play open and then open again. So what we want to do is reverse this second layer, so it starts to open and then closes. So highlight it here, right click, go to time, and then time reverse layer, and now if we play that back, you can see it opens the stack and then plays in reverse, which is looking perfect.

One thing that I noticed that we forgot to do is just make sure that we have enabled the motion blur for both of these layers as well, since they're now pre compositions, and then the last thing that I want to do here is just I'm not happy with how this username disappears off screen like that. Just looks a little bit plain for it to be purely curt.

So what we're going to do is add a white transition just to wipe across the word username, to make it a little bit cleaner at the end of our animation. So to do that, it's really simple, there's an effect for its come across to your effects and presets panel again, type in wipe, or wipe's not going to give us enough options, so linear, there we are, linear wipe, and make sure you're not taking the presets one, we’re actually taking the transition linear wipe here, drag it down onto our second duplicated layer there. And you can see it's probably not done anything so far because there are no presets.

So what we want to do is pop open the panel here, go to effects, linear wipe and you can see we have three different controls here: transition completion, wipe angle, and feather. Wipe angle is fine at 90 degrees, because we want this to wipe from left to right, so what we want to do is position our timeline roughly when it's just the single username on its own we're going to add a transition completion key frame here at 0% and then move forward in time to the end and then up this from 0% all the way to 100%.And now if we watch this back you can see we wipe across the username. It just looks a little bit harsh, this line here, so what I'm going to do is add a feather, something around about 20, and you can see that adds a little bit of feather there, and you can see now it looks super clean. If we watched back the full animation we should have a really nice looping GIF.

Okay, so animation has been finished now, we’re very, very happy with the project that we've got. The last step is actually to export it as a GIF so that we can include it in Tweets and Discord messages and things like that. And that sounds like it should be very easy to do but actually it's kind of complicated. So I'm going to go with the easiest method, which I think is to export as an MP4 and then use an online converter to convert it into GIF format. That means we don't have to mess around with PNG sequences and importing into Photoshop and loads of other complications. It's just a nice, simple way to do it. And then you'll also have an MP4 version of this, if you want to include it in any videos. So to explore it as an MP4, all we have to do is come up to file export, add to Adobe Media Encoder queue, which means it's going to open up Adobe Media Encoder which it comes included with After Effects, and we're going to be able to customize some of the options there. Once that opens up, we're going to get some different options here.

You might not have H.264 selected as your format to start, but don't worry. Just click whatever word is here, and we can actually change it to H.264 very easily. So you should get a window like this, and you want to change the format to H.264.This is going to make an MP4 file that's really readable by a lot of the online converters. In terms of export video and audio, we obviously don't have audio, so we just have video and here you can choose exactly where you want to save the video, so I'm going to save this one to my desktop.

Now in the video settings, you can customize things like the width and height and the frame rate. So if you do want to try a lower resolution GIF you can do so here or you can customize those things in the online converter. I'm going to export my now 1920 by 1080 and 60 frames per second, exactly as we set up in the project. I don't think any of the options need to be changed here. A bit rate of 10 megabits per second is absolutely plenty. So you can just hit, okay, and then this little start arrow here to start the render. So since it's such a small animation it should only take a few seconds to render out, and the last thing we need to do is convert the MP4 to a GIF.

So I've included a link down in the description below to my favorite MP4 to GIF converter. It's very, very simple, you simply select the MP4 file that we've just rented out. Our target format is a GIF, and then we have some options if we want to change the video size bitrate, frame rate or aspect ratio. One thing I will mention it's worth here changing the frame rate from 60 like we rented it out down to 30, if you're going to be using this GIF on places like Twitter and Discord, just because Twitter and Discord, they don't actually playback 60 FPS GIFS very well, they sort of playback at half speed. And so you need to change the frame right here to 30 if you're wanting to use the GIF on those platforms. But it was useful to render our video in 60 FPS, because then we can use that video project in any other videos that we make if you want an N card for YouTube or anything like that, but we're going to change the frame rate here to 30. And you can of course change the video size down here to something like 720 P if you wish to, but 1920 by 1080 should be fine. This shouldn't be too big of a file size.

So once we've set that up, we can simply click convert now, let it do a thing, it'll only take a couple of minutes really, and then we can save it and send it off to Twitter and Discord. Okay, so the conversion has finished, all we have to do now is come over here to the output file name, where we have our GIF, right click, save link as, save this wherever we want, I’m going to save it to my desktop, and you can see now we have a two-megabyte GIF which is absolutely fine for places like Twitter and Discord. And if you need to lower the file size I would recommend firstly starting with the resolution and lowering that from 1080 P, you can see a really high quality lovely looking motion GIF that we can include in our Now Live Tweets or our Discord messages or anywhere like that.

Hopefully this video has been helpful, and you've learned a few new things in After Effects, and you can now take those on and be as creative as you can. Please feel free to play around with this. I want to see different words, different colors, different logos, whole different animations, playing around with where things are appearing and disappearing from. But I would love it if you could share those with me on Twitter, I love seeing what you guys create when I teach something new in a video.

So I hope this wasn't too complicated to follow, I’ve tried my best to keep it simple but still create something that you guys want to use at the end of the day. Obviously the project file, like I mentioned at the beginning, is in the Gaming Careers Discord, if you want to have a look at the finished project, and to compare anything, but I'll catch you guys in the next video, peace.