Hands-On Motion Graphics with Adobe After Effects CC: Develop your skills as a visual effects and motion graphics artist

After Effects requires a minimum of 8 GB of RAM.

Your workspace is where all your panels and tools are located. This is the heart of the program. Your workspace can be configured in different ways; let's make sure it's set to the default state.

Go to Window | Workspace | Reset "Standard" to Saved Layout. This is the standard workspace:

Resetting the workspace

This way, everything is where it's supposed to be in our interface; nothing is out of place.

Saving a project is always a good practice. Let's start our project by creating a new file by saving it:

We have started saving our first project. It's important to start saving things right away.

The project panel is where you bring in all your assets. After Effects is often used in post-production. You are usually working from many different asset types. Your project can get very disorganized quickly. This is where you keep all your assets tidy. You will be very happy when your project gets more difficult and you have taken the time to keep things organized. It is easier to find things when you have a tidy project. It also helps you to work faster. The project panel has icons at the bottom of the panel. Choose the one called folder:

Creating a new folder

Let's learn how to create folders in our project panel by following these steps to create one:

When you bring media into After Effects, be sure to organize all your media into the appropriate folders.

You can create the following folders:

You should have five folders. Right-click on the folder to rename them.

The projects in this book will use these five folders. We have created them to organize everything properly.

Let's import a large image (at least 1,920 x 1,080) by double-clicking the open area. This brings up your media folders. You can click anywhere in the area where I'm standing in the next screenshot:

Project panel

Drag and move this image into the Images folder. You can rename your images by right-clicking on the layer.

After Effect references material. It doesn't actually keep anything in the project; it references things. You should never rename a file outside After Effects. When you import images into a Photoshop document, it saves a copy with the document. However, After Effects links to the assets you import into your project. You should always leave the name unchanged because After Effects will not be able to find the new name for its referencing, and you will receive an error message.

Rather than renaming or removing your files from After Effects, it's better to create a copy or not to move it. If you need to replace a file, you have to right-click on the layer and choose to replace or reload the footage:

Replace footage

Practice renaming and relinking your files a couple times, just to make sure you understand that concept.

If you need to delete anything, drag it into the trashcan; this is highlighted in the following screenshot:

Trashcan

Now we will turn our attention to setting Auto-Save... for your projects. It's important to get that set up so your project will automatically save, even if you forget to do this. The following steps will show you how to set up autosave:

Setting up autosave can save your life. If your project crashes, you will be happy that you have a back-up copy saved in the autosave folder. This is located wherever you save your project.

After Effects uses compositions to place and arrange your elements. Remember to consider design principles that help create a strong composition when you arrange your elements. In After Effects, these compositions are referred to as comps. I am going to create a comp by hitting the new composition icon. If you look closely at the icon, you will see that it looks like a composition symbol with shapes:

New composition

Leave all these settings as they are, but make the comp size 1,920 x 1,080, and make the time duration 0;04;00;00. Name the comp MAIN:

Composition settings

Drag the main comp into the MAIN comp folder:

Organizing a project

Look at the lower-third of the screen. This is called the timeline panel. The timeline is the works space where you create key frames. This is where you make your layers animate across time. You also organize your layer-stacking order. This stacking order is similar to Photoshop. Layers at the top will appear on top of other layers:

Timeline panel

After briefly learning about the timeline panel, let's discuss how to bring layers into your composition.

Bringing layers into your composition is easy. Layers are the basic building blocks for creating a movie. A layer can be an image, video footage, or an audio file.

Follow these steps:

Bringing an image into the timeline

Preview panel

Let's go over the preview panel. This is located in the upper-right corner of your screen:

Preview panel

This preview panel gives you options such as moving through your movie. A project is made up of frames, just like in real video footage. In After Effects, moving within a project is referred to as moving down the timeline. This timeline is represented in units, such as frames, seconds, and minutes. This preview panel allows you to move forward or backward frame by frame. Pressing the play button lets you preview your project. You can also use the ram review, which gives you the ability to watch the project at a faster speed. You can also hit the space bar to preview your animation.

Composition window

At the bottom of the composition window, there are a few options. Let's go over some of them.

The icon in the lower right-hand corner of the composition is where you will find your guide options. These guide options are used to arrange your layers and to create compositionally strong images. However, these guides are not rendered; they are only for preview purposes:

• Guides: These are used for aligning and arranging layers. To remove guides, choose View | Clear guides.

• Title/Action Safe: These are video-safe zones, for standard video monitors.

• Rulers: This is used to drag guides to the composition to align and arrange layers to.

• Grid: This is a modular grid that helps you organize your layers and create strong compositions:

Guides

A little further over to the right is the resolution button. You can reduce the quality down to Quarter. This gives you the ability to look at it and play it back even faster, but at a lower quality:

Resolution

Next, we will go over our Effects & Presets panel. The effects panel is a major toolbox full of effects to make your video look amazing! This panel gives you access to hundreds of effects that can help you create animation, correct the color, or fix any number of problems with video or images.

Effects panel

The effects panel is located to the far-right, below the preview panel. A lot of these effects are the same as those used in Photoshop. You may be familiar with Brightness, Contrast, Curves, and so on. Make sure your layer is selected in the timeline, before clicking on an effect.

You can add an effect to a layer by doing the following:

1. Twirl the category name dow

2. Click on the effect with the layer selected, or you can type in the name of the effect

3. Double-click on the effect, while your layer is selected

Let's type the effect (auto levels) into the search bar. Double-click the effect to add to our layer:

Effects & Presets

You can adjust this effects in the effects control panel. This panel is nested right next to your main project panel:

Auto levels

The main difference between these effects and Photoshop is that you can animate them across the timeline, which we will get into in the next sections. You can also add multiple effects to a layer, to create complex visual images.

Now I will talk to you about our layers and our timeline. It's very important to know your way around this part of the interface. This layer panel is how you control the way your images move. This is where you can see, at a glance, what's going on in your movie. This panel is similar to Photoshop's layer panel. Each one of these icons to the right of the layer has an important function. If you hover your selection arrow over any of these icons, a description will appear on the screen:

Layer panel

Let's take a closer look some of the buttons and switches of the layer panel:

Looking at all these buttons and switches can be overwhelming. Let's look at handful of switches that you will find helpful for organizing your layers:

The footage panel is used for previewing your footage. There are also some tools that work only in the footage panel.

To access the footage panel, double-click on the layer. However, this panel is often accessed by accident. It's accessed when double-clicking on a layer. You can tell you're in this panel when you see the white bar at the bottom. There are specific things you can do in this layer, but we usually don't need to be in this panel. Here is a screenshot of the footage panel:

Footage panel

You will find this is a mistake that happens frequently. To get out of this panel, go to the top of that panel and choose the name of your main comp. Or you can reset the workspace area back to the saved layout:

Resetting layout

Resetting this will not change anything in your project. It simply restores your workspace area to the default standard layout.

Let's talk about time. The timeline panel is one of the main things that differentiates After Effects from Photoshop. Unlike Photoshop, After Effects has the ability to make things happen across time. Another big difference between After Effects and Photoshop is 3D space. You can create compositions with 3D depth. After Effect movies are comprised of frames, just like real films.

Zooming into the timeline

You can zoom into any point of the timeline with the button at the lower-center of the timeline. Or you can zoom into your timeline by moving the slider. If you look closely, you can you can see (F), which stands for frames:

Zooming into the slider

The timeline is measured with time codes. The F next to the numbers on the timeline stands for frames.

The timeline is always moving from left to right:

The f on the timeline stands for frames; the numbers represent the number of frames:

Frames

Go to the beginning of the timeline. The shortcut is for this is pressing the home button on the numeric keypad.

This guitar pick-shaped object highlighted in the following screenshot is called the current time indicator icon. Moving this time indicator is another way to navigate through the timeline:

Current time indicator

The timeline is the entire length of your composition. Your workspace area is the length of your movie. This is also called the rendering area. When I hit the play button for previewing my movie, it happens within that space. This can be trimmed and edited. To trim your workspace area, perform the following steps:

There is usually more than one way to do something in After Effects. To manually trim your workspace, perform the following steps:

You can drag either the start or the end or the workspace area. Trimming this shortens the duration of the comp. This is useful for previewing your movie or previewing a small section of your movie. Remember when you export or render your movie, this workspace needs to be trimmed, to reflect exactly what you want exported. The duration of the workspace is the only thing that will be exported or rendered:

Trimming the workspace area

You can edit the duration of your layers by trimming them. Trimming your layers will give you control when your layers appear in your movie:

Trimming layers

To trim your layer, perform the following steps:

To manually trim your layer, perform the following steps:

You can trim any type of layer using the preceding methods. This layer will be trimmed exactly where the time indicator is. Move your time indicator back and forth in the timeline across this trimmed layer. See how the layer appears where the image is trimmed to? This is how layers can appear across time.

You can further organize your timeline by adding information to the timeline. You can also create markers, notes, and metadata on your timeline. These markers can also be used to align layers to a point in the timeline. The following are the steps for creating a composition marker:

Composition markers

These markers and notes can be particularly helpful when organizing your project and writing notes from clients and team members.

Animating a property is essentially marking a parameter in time and adjusting that property further down the timeline. We create animation by creating at least two key frames. The steps to animate a property are simple. But you need to be sure you follow these steps each time. When you want to animate any property, you need to perform the following steps:

After you have created key frames, you're free to move and adjust those key frames. Later, I will get into a lot more detail regarding adjusting key frames.

You can animate your scale parameter to make your layer change in scale over time. Follow these steps to begin your animation journey:

Let's preview that. If I want to give my layer a little bit of blur, I'll hit the blur icon. Look in the timeline:

Motion blur

This is an effect that has to be turned on in two places. It has to be turned on in the timeline, just above the timeline. If you hit the preview button, you will see how it gives it a nice blur. That's how things move in real life. There is always some sort of blur when things move fast.

In After Effects, duplicating your layers will create an exact copy of your layers and any key frames and effects you have on them. To duplicate your layer, perform the following steps:

Keyboard shortcuts

If you find anything you're doing a lot, find the shortcut for it. Learning these shortcuts will greatly speed up your workflow in After Effects.

When you get more advanced with After Effects, you will have many layers in your timeline. One way to identify a layer is to turn off all the other layers. Another reason to temporarily turn off a layer is to see how your composition looks without that layer. These eyeball icons are for turning off your layers:

Eyeball icon

Remember when the eyeball is visible, it means that the layer is visible. When it's not visible, the layer will not be seen in the composition.

Soloing your layer can be a life-saver. This will help you temporarily show one single layer or many single layers at a time. What makes this switch so important is that it's easy to turn on and off without changing any of your original layers. It's also easy to tell which layers you have soloed, making it easy to turn off the solo switch when you need to. To activate the solo switch, simply turn on the solo button. If you solo something, you will see the grid behind it, and this grid means that it is a transparent background. Turn off the solo switch to return the layer to its original condition. This becomes really helpful when you have a lot of layers and you want to locate and identify and work with just one layer; you can solo it:

Solo layer

Understanding how to solo your layers will help you quickly turn on and off hundreds of layers with no fear of ruining anything. Try practicing with the solo button on a layer.

Tagging your layers can be especially helpful for identifying and organizing your layers in the timeline. You can change these tags to be any color you want. When you need to quickly edit something, sometimes you can select it, but sometimes it can be really hard to find it. Identifying layers is an important part of After Effects. When you have a very complicated project, it's very important to be able to identify your layers. This is when naming and tagging your layers correctly becomes very important. Organization is very important:

Tags

In After Effects, your composition window is like a stage. You can see images outside the frame or stage. You can also drag things into or out of the main stage area. This is helpful when you want to start your animation off-screen and end up on-screen.

Your layers have transform properties, which are the heart and soul of animation. Anything that has a stopwatch next to it can be animated. All these parameters can be overwhelming at first glance. Let's go over each property shortcut to familiarize yourself with them all. Twirl word transform down to see all the properties:

Pressing any of these keyboard shortcuts while your layer is selected will bring up that parameter:

Transform properties

All these transform properties can be animated across time. All such properties appear with the icon of a stopwatch, which indicates the feature of animating them in the timeline.

After Effects comes with different guides you can use to create more precise alignments of your objects. If you look at the top-right of your tool panel, you can enable Snapping:

Snapping

This will make your objects snap to your guides. In the Guides section, you will find a variety of guides and grids to go beyond the guesswork of lining up your object in After Effects. The guide Title/Action Safe is used for video monitors. These guides can be accessed at the bottom of the composition window by clicking the grid icon:

Guides

If you choose the Rulers option, you have access to guides that you can drag across your composition and align objects to the guides:

Custom guides

Guides can be a great help to layout your composition and arrange text precisely.

Click once on one of the squares in the bounding box, and insert an image of the masking solid:

Selecting a single point

The square will fill and you will get bezier handles. This enables you to edit one single mask point:

Editing a single point

To edit the entire mask:

Masking a bounding box

This is masking off the rest of the solid. Under the properties for masking, there is a mask column where you can choose other parameters. This will hide your mask or give you different masking options.

You can take these basic shapes and make other more complex shapes. You can also change the color of the mask by clicking on the color box in the mask. After Effects also has other parameters that you can work with. Clicking on the mask gives you other parameters that can be edited. You can edit this mask by adjusting the feathering parameter. Adjusting the feathering amount means the outside of the mask will be feathered. Of course, the feathering is able to be key-framed. You can expand the mask as well. The expansion can also go the opposite direction, so you'll actually be eating into the mask in the negative direction. I'd like for you to experiment with all these mask-editing parameters.

Masking is a very powerful tool used for roto scoping and creating shapes. You have control over how your mask will behave, and you can choose to add or subtract from your mask shape. We will focus on the subtract feature:

Subtract mask

See how it cuts that shape out? This is how you can create interesting shapes in After Effects. Have a lot of fun with this; there's so much you can do with it—the sky's the limit! Masking becomes very important when you need to cut layers, videos, images, and so on. Think of layers as scissors to cut out what you don't want to see. I'd like for you guys to play with these shapes. Start editing these mask points. You can create complex interesting shapes with these techniques.