From the course: Video and Audio for Designers with Creative Cloud: Part 1

The After Effects interface

From the course: Video and Audio for Designers with Creative Cloud: Part 1

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The After Effects interface

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- [Instructor] This chapter is all about just familiarizing yourself with the After Effects essentials, the things you really need to know before we start doing anything of any consequence in here. So we're going to start off with looking at the different interfaces, and I'm saying that in the plural intentionally because you might see several different configurations although, don't be alarmed by that. And I'm here in an untitled project, we're looking at creating a new project in the next movie. And I'm in a composition, and compositions that live inside of projects, we'll be covering that in the movie after that on projects. But I've just got some stuff in here so you can see the basic areas. Now, I'm going to use the default work space for this and these are all of my different work spaces up here. So I'm going to use the default to begin with and I'm just going to click this small hotdog menu next to that and choose to reset that to the save layout, just in case I changed anything. And that is how it should look by default. So the main window here is the composition, that's the area we are working in in After Effects. Compositions are kind of like the basic tools or the basic constructs that you make inside of After Effects, and they can be thought of as smart objects in many ways because you can nest them altogether and have comps inside of compositions and so on. Underneath that, the largest area perhaps of the screen, is the timeline just here. And so that's how we can see things changing over time. Then we've got our project window on the left hand side. These are all of the different things that we import or ingest or make in After Effects, they will live in here. Above that we've got our little toolbar so a range of different tools, and then over on the right hand side some panels, the info panel tells us different things, audio gives us audio information. Preview, so this is our little transport bar here, that's what you call the play controls there. And a few other things. Then our effects, just there and you can click on any of these things to expand and collapse them by their name. Like so, and I've just expanded that quite a bit just there so I'm just going to reset my default layout there just for the time being. And my libraries and other things. And in the main, that's where we will be working throughout this entire course, but there's the standard layout here, there's the small screen layout, ideal if you're working on a laptop and feel free to work in that if you are. Because you'll be able to access everything pretty much that I am. And if you can't find a panel that's here, just go to the window menu because this is where you find them. So I'll just cycle through a few of those, cos there's few more here if you were doing something that was all around color, for example. Then you could click that and you get some really funky looking stuff just there. And if I choose a minimal UI, which again might be something if you're on a small screen, might choose that if you were doing stuff that was text heavy then that just has those panels. And so on. If you do introduce new panels, you can dock them wherever you want. So for example if I choose this brushes panel for example, and just drag that out you'll see that I get these highlights just here and it basically tells me where it's going to drop that in relation to the content that's already there. So if I just go over my project panel here and drop that you'll see now brushes and project are nested together. And I can switch between them like so. And if I drag that out into the center of the comp window there then again I can go between those two there. And other places besides like putting it side to side. And so on. Anyway, that's the basics of the interface, you can always reset any of the interfaces that you're using. If I go to the default just by clicking on the hotdog, and so you should be fine with that. In the next movie we're going to take a look at creating a new project.

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