Your first animation

Create the composition

New project — on the recent-projects screen in the local edition, or on the dashboard in the hosted one. Give it a name, then pick:

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

What happens: the editor opens with an empty stage, the timeline showing your five seconds, and nothing selected. Every number you just picked is changeable later from Composition ▸ Composition Settings (Ctrl/⌘ + K) — none of these choices is a commitment.

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.

What happens: it writes ordinary keyframes onto your layer. Press U and you will see the same two or three diamonds you would have placed yourself — retime them, re-ease them, delete half of them.

There are five catalogues to draw on:

They resolve in composition-relative units, so a preset authored at 1080p behaves correctly at 4K, square and vertical.

For a bounce, use the Bounce section in the Graph panel rather than hunting for an easing preset — a bounce is several overshoots and no single curve can express one. See Keyframe assistants.

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.

What happens when you hit Export: frames stream to a temporary directory one at a time and ffmpeg encodes them in a separate process, so peak memory is one frame no matter how long the render is, and the editor stays usable throughout. Frame time is the frame’s index divided by the frame rate — never wall-clock — so exporting the same project twice gives you byte-identical frames.

If something is wrong, it refuses rather than writing a broken file: a zero-frame encode is an error, not a silently successful black video.