Introduction to After Effects

- [Instructor] The purpose of this movie is to give you a short introduction to After Effects. And at the same time, review the project that we're going to create. So if this is the first time that you launch the application, you will probably see this home screen. Now I'm not going to use it throughout the course, but if you like, you can click on the Learn over here and just watch few of the After Effects tutorials over the Adobe website. You can also sync your settings, create a new project, open an existing one, or take a look at the new features. Anyhow, in my case, I'm going to click on the AE icon here, which is going to hide it. Next, I'll go to the file menu and choose Open Project. I'll navigate to the exercise files and I'll open up Hawaii.aep, which stands for After Effects Project. I click open and the first thing that I want you to do, so both you and I would be on the same page is double click on the word Default here. And this is going to ask you if you want to reset your workspace arrangement. So I'm going to say Yes, and this is going to reset those panels to the factory default. Now as you can see After Effects is a big frame consisting of few panels. On the left over here, we can see the Project panel which hosts all of the assets. So if I'm going to drill down the folder named Source Files, you can see that we have couple of movies here as well as a JPEG. And another folder which has some Photoshop files. And inside is another composition. So you can rearrange your stuff when you bring it into the application. And then if you need, you can also sort and find it from here. So for example, if I'm going to start to type the word post, After Effects is going to isolate everything that it finds with the word post in it. Actually, the four letters. In my case, I'm just going to drill it up and clear this search term. Now over here, near the project panel, there is the composition panel, which is also the viewer to the timeline. So those are the three most important panels inside the application. And each panel can be moved and rearranged according to your needs. So if I'm going to hover just at the cross sections between those three panels, I have these double-headed arrow, which I can then drag and rearrange my panels the way I want them to look. I can also close some of the panels and move them to another place in the interface by holding down my mouse on top of the name of the panel and then dragging it. And After Effects will give you a preview where this panel is going to land. So if I'm going to release over here, it's going to create another tab in the same panel of the project one. So once again, I'm going to use the handy shortcut that I showed you at the beginning of this movie, which is double clicking on the word Default to reset the workspace. So all the panels will be visible as we saw them before. Over here at the right hand side, we have couple of additional panels that we can use while we are working. Now by default, each one of them is being soloed. So when I'm going to click on Info, I'm going to hide away all the other ones. And if you want to override this behavior, you have the options over here and under the Panel Group Settings, you can tell After Effects if you want this solo behavior or not. Anyhow, I'm going to press Escape a couple of times to get out of this menu and then I'm going to click over here to highlight the timeline. Now this is the most important thing in after effects. When you're working with something, you need to click and tell After Effects that this is the panel that you want to be active. In other words, it will create a blue cyan line around it, meaning that now After Effects is aware that this where you want to take action. And according to what is selected, the command over here at the edge of the application is going to work for you. So if you're seeing something which is not working, dimmed, it's probably saying to you that you're not selecting the appropriate thing. For example, if I want to access one of the tracking options, I need to select at least one layer and then if I'm going to go back to the animation menu, those will be available for me. All right, so I'm going to click here to make sure that the timeline is active and then I'm going to press space bar which will start the playback. Now in my case, those frames were already cached. This is why we saw the blue line over here, which is now being transformed to green one. This is obviously because I already worked with this project, opened it, and then cached those frames and After Effects remembered them. So by default, this is the behavior of the application. This is also going to show you the final result, well, almost the final, one step before the final of what we're going to achieve in this short training. So to pause the playback or to stop it, you can click again on the space bar. And if you want to maximize one of the panels so you can actually take a look at one of them in full screen, then you can hover your mouse on top of the relevant one. In my case, the composition panel and press the grave or the tilde key which in American keyboards usually exists near the digit one. This is going to maximize the screen. Now if you can't find it on your keyboard, another way to work here and I'm going to press again the same keyboard shortcut, is to double click on the name of the panel. So in my case, double click on the word Composition and this is also going to maximize this panel. And now if I'm going to press space bar, I'm going to once again initiate the preview so we can get a sense of what we are about to create. All right, I'll pause the playback. Press again on the tilde key or double click on the name of the Composition. Then I'm also going to call your attention that we have couple of tools over here and each one of them will serve a different function as we're working with the application. Now if you're curious to know what each and everyone of them is doing, you can hover on top of them and After Effects will give you a tool tip. And in parenthesis the keyboard shortcut for activating this tool. Now, we're not going to use all the tools here, but obviously, if you're coming from another Adobe application, you already recognize that some of them has additional tools underneath. So if I'm going to click and hold on this rectangle tool, we'll see that underneath we have some other options that we can choose from the same menu. And this is my introduction to the After Effects interface and at the same time showing you the project that we're going to create.