The language of After Effects - After Effects Tutorial

- There are a few terms common to After Effects, motion graphics, and video you may hear me use in this course. Here's an overview before we get into specifics throughout the rest of the course. First up the timeline. The timeline is not only the heart of After Effects, it is truly the application's killer app. It's where you build up a composition, what you might think of as a shot or a sequence, by creating layers and determining timing. Like a Photoshop file an After Effects comp can have a nearly unlimited number of layers. And like Premier Pro their settings correspond to specific timing. Properties. Layers in the timeline have what are called properties. These are specific values of one type or another, of numbers but also text, color, something simple as an on off button, or more rarely something that can't be quantified by any of those such as a value selected from a list. keyframes have a long history in animation. In the early days of Disney keyframes were first drawn by the lead animator to show the most significant moment. The top of a leap, the depth of a crouch, the point of impact. And junior artists would add the in between frames. In After Effects keyframes give the software specific settings at specific moments in time and it computes any needed in between information for any keyframe-able property. Timecode is more or less what you probably think it is. The timing of a specific frame of video. It represents one fraction of one second as hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. Typical frame rates are 24, 25, or 30 frames per second. But to adhere with old television standards for syncing the sound in the United States, you'll often see 29.97 frames per second instead of 30, and 23.976 instead of 24. Render. As you probably know, applications that create moving images typically require you to render footage. This is simply writing a copy. Say QuickTime or H.264. That doesn't depend on the application to play it back. Codec and format. Like still images, digital video files exist in multiple formats and most of those formats also allow you to determine the amount of compression applied to the moving image. Some formats such as QuickTime can include lossless compression which makes for big files that are difficult for the system to play back in real time. Popular compression formats such as H.264 compress videos so that it can be easily transferred and played back on any device that supports video. Even your phone. Alpha Channel. Also common to still images, the Alpha Channel is a fourth channel besides red, green, and blue that determines the opacity of a pixel. It is used to create transparency, and hold selections. You may not think about this channel much in Photoshop or Illustrator, but After Effects relies on this channel as a selection for each layer. There are more terms common to After Effects but rather than overwhelm you I just want to familiarize you a little bit with the most common ones. Once you see them in action you'll have a better idea of what they actually do.