Get started using AE like Illustrator

- [Instructor] If there's a primary concept behind this course, it's that when we find ourselves in an unfamiliar environment, it's helpful to discover familiar elements that translate to where we come from. So let's suppose you had just landed here on Planet After Effects, and you were an inhabitant of Planet Illustrator. You would be greeted by this home menu, which is familiar to you in that it exists in Illustrator. This one looks a little different. And one thing I'll tell you right off the bat is it's not all that useful. It doesn't even have the presets that you get in Illustrator. So I'm actually going to close it and reveal Planet After Effects, the main UI. And here, suddenly, we're confronted with a lot of fairly unfamiliar elements. Now, we could start pointing to where some of the more familiar elements live. Some of them are up here in the toolbar, but that's grayed out, or over here among the default panels, but those are closed, and you have to click on them to realize they open in a different way than you're used to. However, I'm going to focus on the least familiar areas and the most essential ones. And for that, I'm going to switch my workspace. So I have a workspace menu. Under "Window" here, I'm going to go to "Minimal." If your workspaces don't look like mine, you can reset to what shipped with After Effects by just choosing "Reset" down here, under that same menu. And now I've just got my composition panel and down here what's called the timeline. So for an Illustrator artist, the composition is what we might call "the art board," and the timeline is what we could call "the layer panel." But it does a lot more than that. Now, to get started, I could click on one of these 'cause these are buttons. I could say, "New composition." And then I'm confronted by many more unfamiliar options and settings. And so I'm just going to close that right back up and instead choose a more standard way to start, which is "New composition from footage." Now, footage could be an Illustrator file, but I'm going to start with actual moving footage. This is a film term for moving footage, video, film, and it's actually a film term. Here is my footage. And you see now the timeline has a layer in it, just one. And you see that the project panel has opened up and that the source here and this composition are shown over there. So I have a source that's inside the composition. If I want to see what it is, I can drag my current time indicator to scrub through it, or I can just press the space bar, and that plays through it. And this green line that's being created is buffering it into physical memory, into RAM, so that it plays back smoothly. And that, in a nutshell, is the easiest way to start in After Effects. Now, what did that get us? Well if I go back to my composition settings, they have now been set to what was in that footage. So the standard is HDTV. That is the most common one. And that is shown as 1080 because it's 1080 pixels high, and it's actually 1920 pixels wide. And then these numbers that follow are the frame rate. So 25 happens to be the European television standard. I believe that this footage is 25, not because it's necessarily from Europe, but because it's stock footage, which often uses that frame rate. In any case, those two most essential settings are now populated for us. One other that we could adjust in here is just this confusing starting time code number, which came from the footage as well. I'm just going to go ahead and set that to zero and click "Okay." And now, at the beginning, my time is shown here as zero. Okay, well, we've landed on Planet After Effects and made ourselves familiar with one starting point. Having done that, let's now focus on introducing Illustrator style elements to the workflow.