Introduction to Adobe After Effects Amateur Level

After Effects is the leading professional motion graphics and visual effects software. Never used it before? Interested in getting started? With this class, you'll learn your way around the program and the core functionality that matters to your work–now or in the future.

We'll cover the fundamental building blocks of After Effects in a way that's useful to every student and enthusiast, whether you're interested in become full-time motion graphics designer, starting a new hobby, or even giving creative direction to someone else operating the program.

Whether you use Adobe After Effects to animate a simple title, create complex motion graphics, or composite realistic visual effects, you generally follow the same basic workflow, though you may repeat or skip some steps. For example, you may repeat the cycle of modifying layer properties, animating, and previewing until everything looks right. You may skip the step of importing footage if you intend to create graphical elements entirely in After Effects.

1. Import and organize footage

After you create a project, import your footage into the project in the Project panel. After Effects automatically interprets many common media formats, but you can also specify how you want After Effects to interpret attributes such as frame rate and pixel aspect ratio. You can view each item in a Footage panel and set its start and end times to fit your composition.

2. Create, arrange, and composite layers in a composition

Create one or more compositions. Any footage item can be the source for one or more layers in a composition. You can arrange the layers spatially in the Composition panel or arrange them in time using the Timeline panel. You can stack layers in two dimensions or arrange them in three dimensions. You can use masks, blending modes, and keying tools to composite (combine), the images of multiple layers. You can even use shape layers, text layers, and paint tools to create your own visual elements.

3. Modify and animate layer properties

You can modify any property of a layer, such as size, position, and opacity. You can make any combination of layer properties change over time, using keyframes and expressions. Use motion tracking to stabilize motion or to animate one layer so that it follows the motion in another layer.

4. Add effects and modify effect properties

You can add any combination of effects to alter the appearance or sound of a layer, and even generate visual elements from scratch. You can apply any of the hundreds of effects, animation presets, and layer styles. You can even create and save your own animation presets. You can animate effect properties, too, which are simply layer properties within an effect property group. For more information,

5. Preview

Previewing compositions on your computer monitor or an external video monitor is fast and convenient, even for complex projects. You can change the speed and quality of previews by specifying their resolution and frame rate, and by limiting the area and duration of the composition that you preview. You can use color management features to preview how your movie will look on another output device.

6. Render and export

Add one or more compositions to the render queue to render them at the quality settings you choose and to create movies in the formats that you specify. You can use File > Export or Composition > Add to Render Queue.

Explain Workplace Panels - I will teach you how to explain workplace panels in after effects. Adobe video and audio applications provide a consistent, customizable user interface. Although each application has its own set of panels, you move and group panels in the same way in each application. The main window of a program is the application window. Panels are organized in this window in an arrangement called a work space. Each application includes several predefined work spaces that optimize the layout of panels for specific tasks. You can also create and customize your own work spaces by arranging panels in the layout that best suits your working style for specific tasks. You can drag panels to new locations, move panels into or out of a group, place panels alongside each other, and un-dock a panel so that it floats in a new window above the application window. As you rearrange panels, the other panels resize automatically to fit the window.

How To Use The Timeline - I will teach you how to use the timeline in after effects. The Timeline panel is one of the main panels used for creating animations. Each composition has its own independent Timeline panel, where you can animate layer and effects properties, position layers in time, and change the layer blending modes. When working with two-dimensional layers, the stacking order of the layers controls which layers appear farthest back, or behind, the other layers. The Current Time Indicator, also called the play head, is the red vertical line that runs perpendicular to the Time Ruler. It indicates the current frame that is being displayed, moving as the animation or composition is played. The default display of the Timeline panel is the layer bar mode. It displays the composition time as a Time Ruler across the top of the panel, while layer names and properties are displayed to the left. The layer bar mode can also be switched so that the panel displays the Graph Editor, an advanced tool for animation that allows for more precise control of animated properties. Here, you will work with the Timeline. You will reveal a composition in the Timeline and Composition panels, and change the stacking order of its layers to change the entire appearance of the composition.

How To Use Effects An Control - I will teach you how to use effects an controls in after effects. Browse and apply effects and animation presets with the Effects & Presets panel. An icon identifies each item in the panel by type. Numbers within the icons for effects indicate whether the effect works on a maximum of 8 bits, 16 bits, or 32 bits per channel. You can scroll through the list of effects and animation presets, or you can search for effects and animation presets by typing any part of the name in the search box at the top of the panel. The options that you choose in the Effects & Presets panel menu determine which items are shown. Show Effects For All Color Depths, Shows effects that work with any color depth, not only the effects that work with the depth of the current project.

How To Use Effects An Control - I will teach you how to use effects an controls in after effects. Browse and apply effects and animation presets with the Effects & Presets panel. An icon identifies each item in the panel by type. Numbers within the icons for effects indicate whether the effect works on a maximum of 8 bits, 16 bits, or 32 bits per channel. You can scroll through the list of effects and animation presets, or you can search for effects and animation presets by typing any part of the name in the search box at the top of the panel. The options that you choose in the Effects & Presets panel menu determine which items are shown. Show Effects For All Color Depths, Shows effects that work with any color depth, not only the effects that work with the depth of the current project.

How To Use The Preview Setting - I will teach you how to use the preview setting in after effects. Though it is common to speak of rendering as if this term only applies to final output, the processes of creating previews for the Footage, Layer, and Composition panels are also kinds of rendering. You can preview all or part of your composition as you work, without rendering to final output. Many of the controls for previewing are in the Preview panel. After Effects allocates RAM to play video and audio in the Timeline, Layer, or Footage panel at real-time speed. The number of frames that can be stored for real-time playback depends on the amount of RAM available and the settings in the Preview panel. The default preview behavior is configured to produce a preview that represents a real-time playback. When you press space bar (the default keyboard shortcut), After Effects starts a preview with audio, and caches frames until the available RAM is filled.

How To Use The Character Setting Font - I will teach you how to use the character setting font in after effects. the formatting for a character specifies a font that is unavailable on your computer system, another font will be substituted, and the missing font name will appear in brackets. Font substitution sometimes occurs when you open a project on Mac OS that was created on Windows, because the set of default fonts differs between the two operating systems. When you select a font, you can select the font family and its font style independently. The font family (or typeface) is a collection of fonts sharing an overall design; for example, Times. A font style is a variant version of an individual font in the font family; for example, regular, bold, or italic. The range of available font styles varies with each font. If a font doesn’t include the style you want, you can apply faux styles—simulated versions of bold, italic, superscript, subscript, all caps, and small caps styles. If more than one copy of a font is installed on your computer, an abbreviation follows the font name: (T1) for Type 1 fonts, (TT) for TrueType fonts, or (OT) for OpenType fonts. The font size determines how large the type appears in the layer. In After Effects, the unit of measurement for fonts is pixels. When a text layer is at 100% scale value, the pixel values match composition pixels one-to-one. So if you scale the text layer to 200%, the font size appears to double; for example, a font size of 10 pixels in the layer looks like 20 pixels in the composition. Because After Effects continuously rasterizes text, the resolution remains high when you increase the scale values.

How To Create Your Own Sound Level - I will teach you how to create your own sound levels.To preview audio in After Effects from the beginning of your work area, simply use the above keyboard shortcut. This can be incredibly helpful if you’re trying to get your key frames to match up just right with the audio but don’t want the video files to bog down your computer. If you want to preview your final composition’s audio and video together, you’ll need to use RAM Preview. A RAM Preview will create physical video on your computer’s scratch disks which After Effects will playback. The only downside to a RAM Preview is that it typically takes a lot of time — but it all depends on the size of your project.

How To Start New Composition For New Project - I will teach you how to start a new composition for new project in after effect. A composition is the framework for a movie. Each composition has its own timeline. A typical composition includes multiple layers that represent components such as video and audio footage items, animated text and vector graphics, still images, and lights. You add a footage item to a composition by creating a layer for which the footage item is the source. You then arrange layers within a composition in space and time, and composite using transparency features to determine which parts of underlying layers show through the layers stacked on top of them.

How To Organize Sections Of Your Projects - I will teach you how to organize sections of your projects in after effects. An After Effects project is a single file that stores compositions and references to all the source files used by footage items in that project. Compositions are collections of layers. Many layers use footage items (such as movies or still images) as a source, though some layers—such as shape layers and text layers—contain graphics that you create within After Effects.A project file has the filename extension .aep or .aepx. A project file with the .aep filename extension is a binary project file. A project file with the .aepx filename extension is a text-based XML project file.

How To Create Your Own Render Setting - I will teach you how to create your own render setting in after effects. Rendering is the creation of the frames of a movie from a composition. The rendering of a frame is the creation of a composited two-dimensional image from all the layers, settings, and other information in a composition that makes up the model for that image. The rendering of a movie is the frame-by-frame rendering of each of the frames that make up the movie. For more information on how each frame is rendered. It is common to speak of rendering as if this term only applies to final output. However, the processes of creating previews for the Footage, Layer, and Composition panels are also kinds of rendering. In fact, it is possible to save a preview as a movie and use that as your final output. After a composition is rendered for final output, it is processed by one or more output modules that encode the rendered frames into one or more output files. This process of encoding rendered frames into files for output is one kind of exporting.