10 Essential After Effects Tips

hello and welcome my name is Michael and this tutorial topic is 10 essential Adobe After Effects tips two quick things before we start first there's an overview over the topics including jump marks in the description of this video so if you know about a topic already you can easily skip it second I started a patreon page recently and this tutorial wouldn't have been made without the support of the patterns over there but nevertheless we're still far away from anything remotely close to be called sustainable so if you're going to learn something from me today it would be great if you'd check the set out and maybe become one of my patrons one of my mates on Twitter asked how should I even stop with After Effects unfortunately I can't fit a whole introduction into a 10 quick tips video but here's a very brief overview of the most essential things the UI is split into your project panel where you see all your assets be aware that external assets won't be saved inside the file that just referenced so don't delete or move the source and keep a clean and organized project folder outside of After Effects as well the viewport panel where you see your extra camera output and can draw shapes and masks on this deck of self-descriptive panels like for example the preview panel that handles all your animation previewing settings and the timeline where you edit and animate your layers layers can be imported assets like film footage vector files sounds bitmap files and so on our After Effects natives like compositions solids nulls text layers shape objects and more each layer has individual properties such as opacity position rotation and so on which you can animate using key frames to create keys you toggle on the little stopwatch icon of a property every time you change that property at some point After Effects creates a new keyframe for you the frames in between are getting interpolated what makes up the animation when you add an effect to a layer its properties and animatable parameters will also be listed here but that's also a dead the panel for the effect properties next to the project panel a composition in after-effects is like a box within a box you can double-click a composition to enter its timeline which runs parallel to the timeline of the parent comes this way you can make encapsulated animations or just bring some order into your files for example if you want to add an effect to a group of layers to do that you precomposed them by selecting them and hitting ctrl shift C and then you simply add the effect to the new composition the top menu carries all the functions of After Effects and is way too much to be explored in a short tutorial but most of the stuff you need at the beginning like how to save a project is at the same place as in any other Adobe software lastly I can also recommend having a look at the animation presets which you can study and dissect to learn about effects and animations you navigating the timeline I'm not a big fan of tutorials just telling you about keyboard shortcuts but these are so essential for you to navigate quickly that I summed up my most used for you hitting you on layers is expanding only the properties with keyframes on J and K are used for jumping back and forth from keyframe to keyframe page up and page down from moving one frame back or forth in time hold shift additionally to increase it to 10 frames interval tres I Oro for jumping to the in or out point of the current layer use the square brackets to move the selected layers beginning or end point to the current time indicators position P and n are used to define beginning and end of the work area which defines the preview range and can define your render range last but not least control-shift see to put all selected layers into an own composition a method often referred to as pre comping you to browse all shortcuts go to help and then down to keyboard shortcuts this will open the overview website in your browser changing the anchor point the anchor point defines from where all transformations of a layer original from in most other software packages you would refer to it as a pivot point there are two main ways to change the anchor point first is to open the properties of the layer and hagun some numbers into the anchors fields when doing this it actually looks like it doesn't move the anchor but the layer what you often don't want the alternative is to use the pen behind tool to change the anchor point activated then look for the little anchor symbol and simply drag it to the desired position a lot of otherwise more complex animations can be achieved by putting the anchor point to another position he has some quick examples you moving along a path if you want to move a layer along a path like this little car here you first need a path I designed this whole scene in Illustrator so it's the most convenient way to create the motion path whereas where your illustrator artboard should have the dimension of your video so that everything will be in the right place when transferring it unfortunately after effect sent us all paths it receives via copy and pasting from illustrator but we got a workaround for that in Illustrator you should have two paths one that will be the motion path exactly the size of the output next it gets tiny with tricky so I am giving you breaks to pause between the steps ready first could be both paths in Illustrator by selecting them and hitting ctrl C switch back to After Effects and create a solid by hitting control Y select the solid layer and hit ctrl V to paste the paths this will create two masts exactly in place open the mask properties by hitting the M key click the mask path property of the motion path and hit ctrl C to copy it now select the Carla expanded and click the stopwatch of the position property to keyframe it last but not least hit ctrl V to paste the path you can delete the solid now as it fulfilled its only purpose if your motion path is one of the rare kind being centered on the artboard originally you can save all the solid layer steps and directly paste the path from illustrator okay nice the car is now following the path but hey why isn't it rotating accordingly don't waste a second thinking about keyframe of the rotation instead to the following right-click the layer go to transform and then down to Auto Orient and the pop-up choose around a long path and voila our little car now gets rotated according to the curse normals just in case you're not working with illustrator you can do all the previous steps by drawing a mask with pen tool in After Effects and then copying as described before how to scale timing sometimes you want to make a segment of your animation faster slower but you already have a lot of keyframes in between that segment before you go in and move all keys individually by probably messing up your timing do this select all keyframes you want to scale the timing off then hold down the Alt key while clicking and dragging the last keyframe around and there you go you are just in our keyframes at once swapping footage sometimes it happens that you need to swap out an animated asset on your timeline and you can't just solve it by pre composing in that case just click the layer you want to replace then go to your project panel hold down alt while you click and drag the new asset onto the layer is selected before and drop it and voila the assets have been swapped and all animations and keyframes have been transferred and still work as before using notes for everything that's a pro tip I often not use myself and always regret in longer projects you can use notes which are empty layers to drive other layers animation you can either use expressions for that or for the simplest form of parenting you can use the so called parent pick whip you you can either parent a whole layers properties to the note so that it acts like it's pre composed with the know or just parent individual properties this is making a file very flexible for feedback and changes while also speeding up your workflow in the long run a pretty cool addition lately is the functionality to use nodes to drive vector points of a shape object or the other way around you find that function a bit hidden and a window and then create notes from paths unfortunately it doesn't create notes for the tangent handles if you need that kind of deep control you find free scripts and plugins online for that links and the description of this video sequence layers when I started with After Effects one of the most time-consuming tasks was to sequence a huge bunch of layers tediously dragging one by one around simply because I didn't know better so if you're a beginner be lucky you never have to do that just select all layers right-click on one in the timeline and go to keyframe assistant and then sequence layers if you want them to overlap you can enter the amount of frames the cella overlap here if not leave it blank and each layer will start one after another use free plugins after fixes extremely extendable so plugins became a whole market on their own we said huge and expensive ones here are two free ones I highly recommend first is animation composer that comes with a lot of animation presets and ready-made pre comps which you can either directly use for your project or dissect for educational purposes it also comes with a handful of awesome tools like the keyframe wingman and the anchor point mover the keyframe wingman lets you edit the easing of keyframes very quickly without you having to fill around in the graph editor you and the anchor point mover lets you quickly realign the anchor point of a lair you it's made by mr. horse and you find the link in the video's description and then there is DUI K or du week which is so huge that I could make a whole series of tutorials about it it is the ultimate rating tool for After Effects if you don't know what rating means it is essentially giving your character skeleton where each bone is in relation to each other so you can animate it a bit like a shadow puppet but Dueck is so feature-rich that you can use it for all kinds of things outside of character animation as well like adding controls to shape objects points and tangents I highly recommend checking it out link is in the description using After Effects for web and apps using the body movement plugin by Hannah and Teresa in conjunction with Lottie by Airbnb lets you export shape layer animations as json files which can be used for html5 web sites web apps and native apps nice indeed you just extended your range of clients by the whole interaction design field both tools and their installation are very well explained on the Lottie page link is in the description of the video you illustrator to after-effects tricks there are different ways of getting your illustrator vectors into After Effects for example be a copy and paste to be used as masks and motion paths as described in tip number three four-vector compositions the most trouble-free and convenient way for me is to set up a file in Illustrator using the HDTV template that way the artboard and color mode matches with the settings of my composition if you work in 4k or any other formats it's of course recommended to use the corresponding dimensions each object I want to animate individually gets its own layer in illustrator naming the layers on creation saves you time and trouble later on set the AI file and switch to After Effects double-click in the project panel to import footage find and select your AI file and in the import s drop-down select composition retain layer sizes hit import and voila after effects created a comp in the size of our artboard containing all of our layers if you want to scale your vectors up without the lines getting pixelated don't forget to check the little box with a Sun icon to enable continuous rasterization if you want to actually animate the paths of an object you can create shape objects from any illustrator layer just right-click the layer go to create and then create shapes from vector layer this will give you access to all the special shape object properties that's it for now a lot of tips I collected over the years didn't make it into the video like talking about expressions or showing you some tricks with a puppet tool but hey you might want to consider supporting me on patreon to fund the creation of new videos covering those topics a huge shout out and a big sorry if I pronounced your name is wrong to this month's top supporters Cyril ghost app - xenos Chan and Joe Hesketh thank you so much for your support you made this tutorial happen goodbye for now and happy creating you

Channel: Let's create something

Views: 40,528

Keywords: tutorial, tut, how, howto, how to, tuts, learn, learning, course, class, design, graphic, professional, vectors, vector, graphics, tool, tools, education, edu, after effects, aftereffects, ae, adobe, graphicdesign, motion, motiongraphics, mograph, animation, timeline, moving along path, sequencing, nulls, navigating, shortcuts, swapping, layers, web, app, plugins, timing, workshop, illustrator, essential, tips, beginner

Id: BWfdV9QVOU4

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019