Neon Text In After Effects

I want to use neon in film title scenes mainly, however i do intend to use it just to add gravitas to posters or anything else that I could use it in. I originally intended to use it in the one minute film challenge, however I could not figure out that i was missing a black solid behind the pre-comp, which was stopping the glow colour to change.

The first step is to insert some text, for simplicity's sake I used NEON. It is best to choose a large & bold font, as a thinner font will suffer from some blur and will not look as crisp.

To get started create a mask from the text. This will create a white text outline.

Now you should pre-comp the mask. Be sure to move all the attributes to the new composition just to make it easier.

From here you should create a new solid and place it in the background. It can be any colour but black means you can create a visible glow in most colours. This is where I got held up, because the background is black anyway it is easy to forget about adding the solid. Without it the glow will not change colour later in process.

Add a "fast blur" effect.

Now copy the outline as many times as you feel you need. I normally make 4 copies.

Do not add a blur to the first outline, skip straight to the second. I start with 5 so it doesn't make it extremely blurry.

For the second, third and fourth I choose 20, 100 and 150 respectively.

End result of the fast blur.

Now return to the original composition, I change the mode of the pre-comp to add. Then add a "colour balance" effect.

Now you can edit the colour of the glow.

To colour the text move the text layer on top, then use the "Change Colour To" tool to match the colours.