From the course: Creative Cloud Crash Course

Adobe After Effects

From the course: Creative Cloud Crash Course

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Adobe After Effects

- [Instructor] If you want to create an animation with all the control you'd ever need, then After Effects is the way to go. So you can create movie titles, intros, animate a logo, a character, the sky's the limit, which is why the it's the industry standard for motion graphics. And typically we're going to start, just going to create a new composition. I already have one made right over here. So this is where we'll start. Just double click right there. And we can check out the composition settings. We can take a peak right in here. We can see the size. That's an HD size and the duration is five seconds. Sure enough, right down here, this timeline goes to five seconds. So that's my composition. That's where this text lives right in here. I can see this text. I can sort of turn on those layers and turn them off as well. And they're going to exist the whole length of this composition, when really I want to change that. So what I want to do is I want to have these two top layers to come in later. So shift select both of those. I can move them on down to say three seconds, for instance. And now they'll appear at that point in time. All right. If I wanted other layers, like this top layer to actually not exist at a certain point, I'll just drag it over like so. So that's typically what I'll do. I'll drag it in, make sure it ends at that point. Same thing for this layer right here. Make sure it ends at that point. Just kind of moving everything into position, but just be mindful of that. Be mindful of your timeline. If you don't see something, it might not exist until that point in time. Okay. What we could do now is we can control these objects. So I'm going to move both of these text layers in. And just so you know, they were just created with the text tool right up here. We'll just kind of line those up like that. We have properties for them over here, pretty simple. And then right here, that's when these text layers will exist and pop in, and that's what we have for this animation. Just clicking the space bar, we can see it play the timeline, but I want to animate this content. Okay. So I want to have this text slide in. So for in the layer you can twirl down and access all of the various properties for that layer. So going into transform, I'm going to scrub one second in, and I want to change the position. I want it to animate over time, clicking on that stopwatch. It adds this key frame right there that you could move around. Now I'll scrub to the first key frame. Okay, right here, this very first frame. Notice there's not a key frame there yet, but since I've turned it on, it means when I slide it over, it's going to add that key frame right there. So that's typically how you animate, you can go a little bit faster by selecting multiple layers and hitting P for position or T for opacity. Clicking right here on these stopwatches with both of these layers, it adds those key frames. Then we can scrub to the beginning and then maybe move this over, like that. Move this down, like so. Maybe even using my arrow keys to kind of move it off like that. And now we can see everything kind of animate in. All right. I usually like everything to be a little smoother. So I'll select those frames by just clicking and dragging a box over them. Right click, key frame assistant, go to easy ease. It's just going to make everything look a little smoother like that, okay. Another thing you can do who is turn on motion blur for those three and it makes it look a little blurry and just smooths it out a lot. But still this text is kind of running into one another. Well, we can stagger these out. So we want this for to kind of come in later and the nia to come in even later than that. Sure enough, slides in, slides in, slides in, all right. And don't forget to adjust the time for this particular layer, so it doesn't exist at a certain point right there. But let's get into animating a new object. This is going to be really fun. What I want to do is I want to create something new right up here. We have shape layers that we can create and we can use this rectangle tool to add a rectangle. And in this case, I don't want to give it any fill color. So just click okay there and make sure there's a line through it. And then for the stroke, I want to make sure this is just a nice pink. And in fact it's the same color. So just adding the eye dropper right there. Making sure it's about 50 pixels and then just click and drag a box around this text like that. It creates this shape layer that has this rectangle in it. Right? So there it is. We can see it exist this whole time. I can always use my selection tool and kind of adjust accordingly and maybe move it into position like that. And let's animate this coming into place. Okay. So that's what I'm going to do right over here. We have this lovely rectangle and you won't see anything in here, but if there's a stopwatch next to it means you can animate it. But what I want to do is I want to add something new. There's a number of things you can do in After Effects. I want to add this trim paths, 'cause I want to trim up that path and I want to animate that line coming in. So clicking trim paths right down here, trim paths, twirling that down. Just kind of hiding some of the other things, just so it doesn't get too confusing. We have this end line so I can scrub on this and oh, okay. That's what that does. Right? That's what I want. Well, I want it to end at a hundred percent. So click that stopwatch, scrub back a little bit and then take this down to zero. And now we have this layer and that line animating in, which is really cool. All right. So that was a way to add some animation to objects. There's more things we can do. In fact, what I want to have for the background is yeah, I can add a graphic or I can add some other objects as well. So go to layer, you'll see a number of them, different objects and different things you can add. But actually what I want to do is just add in some video. So I'll actually go out to my desktop. You'll see if you have access to the exercise files and the assets. There's this video folder. Grab whichever video you want. I'm going to go with this one. People riding bikes, dropping it in here. Right? Notice how I can drop it right on the timeline. There it is. It appears in my project panels. So I might have things that I'm not using in this composition. I could have more compositions. It's really cool. But people on the bikes, I'm going to put that in the background like so, right. And now we can see how that looks fantastic. I might want to blur out the background a little bit. In that case, I would use effects, here's effects and presets right down here and I can type in Gaussian blur. GAU, there it is, Gaussian blur taking effect. I like to drop them on the actual layer. So I target the right object. There it is. And we can just blur this out a little bit just to make it a little bit more soft, so it focuses on the text. And I can easily animate that effect as well, but let's get into presets. That's the last thing we're going to do because for this text, made and you, I'm going to select both of them and I can go through these different effects and presets. So let's just kind of scroll down. There's these animation presets, right. That we can check out. But I like going up to animation and browsing this way. This will open up Adobe Bridge and I can go into text and I'll go into animate in. 'Cause that's what I want to do with that text, using a preset. And I love this because I could actually see what everything looks like and pick the one that I want. In this case, I'll just do fade up characters. I'll just double click on that. It applies it to those two layers that I had selected. Hit in the space bar. We can see that play and then we have a beautiful animation made in After Effects. From there, you can always export that out as a rendered video. But After Effects is a lot of fun, so I encourage you to check it out today.

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