CRT Opener Tutorial | Text Animation in After Effects

If you want to follow a video tutorial, use this link. 

Adding 3D and Camera

Create a new composition and call it Text Comp. Create a new text layer and center it.

Make sure you’ve switched the 3D Render engine to Cinema 4D.

Click on the Toggle Switches \ Modes and turn our text layer to 3D.

Go to Geometry Options and set the same settings as we do here.

Next, we need to add the environment map, in our case it would be the footage.

Precompose it and call Map. Right-click on it and select Environment Layer.

Get back to the text and in the Material Options set the values as we do in the example.

Now, create a camera. Make sure you use the same settings as we do.

Create a new Light layer with the settings as in the example.

Great, now we can see that the reflections are displayed the way we need. It’s time to animate our text.

Animating the Text

Make sure you’ve clicked on the Enable Per-character 3D.

Now, click on the All Transform Properties. Go to the Range Selector and create a Start animation - set the first keyframe with 0% on the 0 frame. Set the keyframe with 100% on 200-th frame.

Go to the Advanced settings and check if we have the animation per characters.

In the Position, change the value to -1000 and the Opacity to 0%.

We can already see how our animation works, but we also need to add a synchronized movement of the text layer and symbol emergence. Go to the Transform of our layer and animate the Scale.

The animation’s duration will be 200 frames, starting at 180% and ending at 78%.

Exactly what we needed!

Adding Effects

Now, create the Adjustment Layer and call it Lens.

Add a CC Lens effect to it and change the lens size to 193.

To conveniently move forward with our animation, we should render the composition on the Alpha channel.

Select RGB + Alpha in the render settings and press render.

Drop our render on the new composition - we’ll continue our work solely on this one. Call our footage Text Animation and the composition - Main Comp.

Add a Brightness & Contrast effect and change the contrast to 99.

Then, add Venetian Blinds and change the values as in the video. Duplicate the effect and in the duplicate, change the Direction value to 90 degrees and the Width to 4.

We can temporarily add exposition. You won’t see it on render, but it’s helpful to see what is happening on the screen. We’ll disable the exposition later.

Now, add a Simple Choker effect and set the Choke Matte to 0,40.

Add a Wave Warp effect and set the values as in the video.

Add a Glow effect and change the values as in the video.

We can disable the exposition now.

Add a Levels effect(Individual Controls) and set the values as in the video once again. Input White to 150, Red Input white to 385, Green Input Black - 41, Blue Input Black - 196.

Add a Curves effect and set the curves.  

Add another Glow effect and duplicate it with defective settings.

Add another Curves effect and set the curves as in the example.

Add a Posterize time effect and lower the frame rate.

Create a new Adjustment Layer and call it Noise. Add a Noise effect and set the values as in the video.

Now we can add VHS background to finish the look of our composition. You can find fresh VHS backgrounds in our new Cinematic Titles pack for After Effects.

Also, Cinematic Titles include 350+ animated titles, overlays, icons, details and more.

You can mix and match templates to get a unique, cinematic effect. Find the project here.

Import our comp. It’s shorter than our composition, so we’ll Enable Time Remapping and while holding Alt, click on Time Remap and write down the Loopout expression and drag it to match the size of our comp.  

Our CRT opener is ready!

Finally

Now you can create the same effect and experiment to make it different!

If you've enjoyed this tutorial, don't forget to check more guides - here you can check our recent After Effects guides.

You can also watch full tutorial on Youtube.