EffectCraft Tutorial: Make Your First Animated Title

Start a new project, then create a composition. Name it First Title and set its width to 1920 pixels, its height to 1080 pixels, its frame rate to 30 fps, and its duration to four seconds. A short duration keeps the whole movement easy to check frame by frame.

Three panels carry the rest of this EffectCraft tutorial:

• The Project panel holds the composition as an item.
• The Composition panel (the viewer) shows the frame at the current time.
• The Timeline places layers against time and lists their properties.

Those names follow After Effects, and so do the shortcuts used below. If a panel is not where you expect it, find it by name rather than by position — docking, workspaces and multi-monitor layouts are still being finished (UI parity).

Add a text layer to First Title and type your title. Then select that layer and look at the Properties panel — for a selected text layer it shows the layer’s transform along with its font and paragraph settings.

Move the time indicator to one second, then put the title in the centre of the frame. You can drag it with the viewer handles or set values on Position. Numeric fields are scrubbable: drag across a value to change it, type a number to set it exactly, press Tab to move to the next field, and Escape to cancel an edit. The rest of this EffectCraft tutorial uses that centred position as the end of the animation.

Press P with the layer selected to reveal Position in the Timeline; press P twice (PP) to show Position alone and hide every other property. If you add more layers later, rename them with Enter or a double-click so you always know which one you are selecting.

With the text layer selected, move the time indicator to the start of the composition and press Alt+Shift+P (Option+Shift+P on macOS) to set a Position keyframe at the current time. The same modifier pattern works with A, S, R and T, exactly as in After Effects.

Now push the title off the left edge: press the left arrow key to nudge one pixel, or Shift + left arrow for ten pixels. You need no exact coordinate here — the only requirement is that the whole title sits outside the frame at zero seconds. Judge it in the viewer rather than copying a number from this guide.

Move the time indicator to one second and put the title back in the centre. That creates the second keyframe, and the Timeline shows an animated Position property between the two.

Why the path may curve. Between two Position keyframes the spatial tangent defaults to auto Bezier — the same behaviour as After Effects — so the title travels along a slight arc instead of a straight line. If you want a straight path, set the spatial interpolation to Linear in the Keyframe Interpolation dialog.

Read the values, don’t judge by scrubbing. Slow scrubbing is a known rough edge (#329) and is not evidence that your keyframes are wrong. Check the Position numbers at 0s and 1s instead, or press Spacebar / Numpad 0 to play the preview.

Select both Position keyframes and press F9 for Easy Ease. The entrance should now accelerate away from the first keyframe and decelerate into the centre instead of moving at a constant rate.

To change how long the entrance takes, drag the second keyframe later to lengthen it or earlier to shorten it. The interpolation set matches After Effects — linear, Bezier, hold, auto and continuous Bezier, roving keys — with Keyframe Velocity and Interpolation dialogs for finer control.

The Graph Editor shows the same motion as value and speed curves with draggable handles, and its button bar carries hold, linear, auto Bezier and Easy Ease buttons. It is the better place to shape a curve by hand; F9 is simply the fast route.

A preview caveat worth knowing before you judge the easing. The project estimates preview feel at 55% (UI parity). Users report stutter on cached frames (#595, #304), lagging scrubbing (#329) and audio that arrives late or crackles (#554, #504, #335). Choppy playback is the known behaviour, not a sign that your easing failed. Use Spacebar or Numpad 0 for RAM preview, and lower the preview resolution if it helps.

Save the project into your practice folder as first-title.ecproj. EffectCraft projects are versioned JSON, so they diff cleanly in version control — a project file you can open in a text editor, which a binary .aep is not.

Reopen the file once as a confidence check: the composition, the text layer and both Position keyframes should all still be there. Saving and exporting are two separate steps: the project is what you edit later, the MP4 is what you play or send. Rebuilding a four-second animation is cheap; rebuilding a client’s three-minute one is not, which is why the save comes first.

Because the project is plain text, its properties can also be edited through the command-line interface.

Send First Title to the Render Queue, choose an H.264 MP4 output option, and set the destination to first-title.mp4 inside the practice folder. Before you start the render, check three things: the composition queued is First Title, the output path is the folder you meant, and the duration matches what you animated.

A render that finishes is not automatically the render you meant to make, so open the MP4 in an ordinary video player once the queue reports completion, and check three things: the first frame does not show the centred title, the title travels into view, and it is still visible on the last frame. Check the dimensions and length if your player shows them.

H.264 MP4 is the default answer for sharing; the queue does more than that. If your next project needs a different output, this is what is available today (README):

Two things worth knowing about the queue, according to the README. Every encoder in it is pure Rust — FilmCraft’s H.264, ProRes and AAC, plus EffectCraft’s own VP9, AV1, HEVC and Opus — and there is no FFmpeg inside. And the same queue runs from a command line, so effectcraft-cli render --comp "First Title" --out first-title.mp4 can render from the command line once the project is saved.