This little text animation preset will fade in text, word-by-word, then fade it out again. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t use keyframes – it’s based on the in-point and out-points of the layer itself.
Throw it into your Presets folder next to the After Effects application so it’s easy to find, create a text layer, and choose Apply Animation Preset from the Animation menu. It adds a “text fade duration” slider to the layer as an effect. It’s handy when you’ve got a lot of text and you’re feeling allergic to keyframes.
There’s a lot of power hidden in the text animation Expression Selector … I’ll endeavour to upload a couple more examples down the track.