What It Does
Text At Marker triggers custom text animations at layer markers in After Effects. Instead of relying on range selectors, you place markers on your timeline and the plugin animates specific groups of words, characters, or lines at each marker. This makes it practical for syncing text to voiceover, music, or any timed event.
The plugin handles kinetic typography work where you need precise control over when and how text appears. You define animation timing with markers, set how many elements animate per marker, and customize the keyframes like any other After Effects property.
Key Features
Marker-based triggering. Place markers on your text layer and the plugin animates text at each marker. Add a number to a marker (like “3”) to animate three words or characters at once. This replaces manual range selector setup.
Text directions. Choose how text animates: default (left to right), reversed, outwards from center, inwards to center, random, or user-defined order. For user-defined, name your layer with the sequence (“2,3,1,4,5”) to control exactly which elements animate in what order.
Marker filtering. Ignore specific markers, react only to markers starting with a certain letter, or offset animation timing to match audio. Useful when you have composition markers for other purposes but only want text to respond to specific ones.
Keyframe-based animation. Animate using standard After Effects keyframes rather than range selector properties. Apply custom easing, expressions like overshoot or bounce, and stack multiple effects on the same text layer to build complex animations.
Live Update architecture. The plugin updates efficiently when you make changes, handling precomps and multiple effect instances without slowdown. When you toggle an effect’s visibility, the linked text animators toggle accordingly.
Marker Utilities. Batch tools for creating, renaming, moving, removing, and spreading markers across layers or compositions. Select layers to work with layer markers; leave nothing selected to work with comp markers. Only markers within the work area are affected.
Text options. Base animations on words, characters, or lines. Control anchor point grouping per word, character, line, or all text. Adjust scale, offset, and rotation per element.
Who It’s For
Motion designers working on kinetic typography, title sequences, or any project where text needs to sync to audio. If you’re animating text to voiceover or music and want more control than preset text animators provide, this plugin addresses that workflow directly.
Also useful for anyone building complex text reveal animations that need precise timing control. The marker-based approach lets you visualize and adjust animation timing in the timeline rather than digging through text animator properties.
Pricing
Text At Marker uses pay-what-you-want pricing. The suggested price is $24.99, but you choose what to pay. A 10-day free trial is available with one limitation: only one effect instance per layer. Install the trial through the aescripts + aeplugins manager app.
Requires After Effects CC 2020 or newer with the Expressions Engine set to JavaScript.