Your first animation

Create the composition

From the dashboard, New project. Give it a name, then pick:

• Size — 1920 × 1080 from the preset list is a safe start.
• Frame rate — 30.
• Duration — 5 seconds.

The editor opens with an empty stage.

Add a text layer

Press Ctrl/⌘ + T to pick the Text tool, click on the canvas, and type a word or two.

Editing happens on the canvas, not in a dialog. Enter commits, Esc cancels, clicking away commits.

Press V to go back to the Selection tool when you are done.

Style it

With the layer selected, open the Style tab in the right inspector.

• Set the font family from the FontPicker — it enumerates the fonts actually installed on your machine, and every option previews in its own family.
• Set the size, weight, letter-spacing and colour.

Drag the layer to position it. Arrow keys nudge; Shift + arrow nudges further.

Set your first keyframes

Switch to the Transform tab. Every row has a stopwatch to its left — that is the keyframe toggle.

1. Put the playhead at frame 0 (press Home).
2. Click the stopwatch next to Opacity. A keyframe appears at frame 0.
3. Set Opacity to 0 by dragging on the value field.
4. Move the playhead to about 20 frames in.
5. Set Opacity to 100. A second keyframe is written automatically.

Do the same for Position Y: keyframe it at frame 0 about 60 px lower than its resting place, then at frame 20 at its final position.

Look at what you made

Press U with the layer selected. The timeline expands to show only the properties that have keyframes — Opacity and Position — one sub-row each, with draggable diamonds.

Press Space to play. Press it again to stop.

Shape the motion

Linear motion looks mechanical. Select the two keyframes at frame 20 and press F9 for Easy Ease.

For real control, press Shift + G to open the graph editor. In Value mode you see each property’s curve as a Bézier path; drag the handles to reshape how the value moves between keyframes. Speed mode shows the derivative — useful for spotting the moment a move actually feels fast.

The Graph inspector panel gives you the same curve in a larger, more direct editor, with numeric entry — and the ease clipboard, for copying one curve onto everything else in the scene.

Or skip all of that

Select the layer and open the Animate menu in the top bar. Rise Up does what you just built by hand, in one click. There are 15 animation presets, 18 text presets and 6 behaviours. They resolve in composition-relative units, so a preset authored at 1080p behaves correctly at any size.

Everything a preset creates is ordinary keyframes. Press U and retime them however you like.

Export

File → Export…

Pick a format:

• WebM — deterministic, has a real alpha channel, plays on the web.
• MP4 — the default for sharing. Needs ffmpeg.
• GIF — fully local, encoded in a worker.
• PNG sequence — the archival option.

Set resolution scale (Full / Half / Quarter), the frame rate and the time range. The dialog renders real export frames and lets you scrub the whole range before anything is written — if a frame is empty, it tells you now rather than after the encode.

Hit Export. The render runs off-screen; the editor stays usable.