20 Quick Fixes to Common After Effects Problems

if after effects is doing something that you didn't expect or something that you didn't respect these might help you out [Music] okay we've got this layer and we want to animate its position so let's add a few keyframes and drag it around our composition and after effects has decided that our path should follow this arc now sometimes that can be okay but it's best that we decide that for ourselves and what if we wanted a straight path so to fix that we can select these keyframes right click choose keyframe interpolation and on spatial interpolation change that to linear and hit ok now our layer moves straight between those points and to make that the default setting go up to edit preferences general and choose default spatial interpolation to linear if we want our object to move in an arc we can select our convert vertex tool drag on the vertices and we've got our own arcing motion path now having audio bezier on by default can also add unexpected motion between two keyframes in the same position these two middle keyframes here are in the same position but because after effects is trying to make a smooth motion between them and there's really no motion to be had it adds this little arcing motion and creates a little bump in your animation without any warning so best to stick to linear okay here we've got a shape layer and we're animating its path property with two keyframes going from a square to a trapezoid but if we animate it it looks like this that is not what we want and this is all happening because of the first vertex now the first vertex is the point of the vertex that was drawn first in our shape now we can tell the top right is our first vertex because it has an extra square that appears around it and in our trapezoid that appears on the bottom left so in the animation process this point is going from here to the bottom left down here and all the other vertices are doing the same which essentially is flipping our animation in the middle to get them to opposite points of our second shape and because we want a smooth animation we want this vertex in a similar position in the first and second shape as possible so to do that we can go to the top right in our trapezoid select that vertex and right click mask and shape path and set first vertex and now we have a much smoother and more expected animation here we're going to draw a new shape with our pen tool but when we create our new shape our anchor point is in the middle of our composition so if we want to rotate our shape it will rotate around that point which we don't want and to get that to the middle of our shape we need to use the pan behind or anchor point tool and drag it into place but we can make the anchor point appear in the center by default by going to edit preferences general and select center anchor point in new shape layers because the center is where we want it 95 of the time all right we've got this square and we want to add a mask to it so we're going to select our pen tool and when we try to draw a mask it just drills another shape it keeps drawing shapes and we don't want that so we need to be aware of these two options up here on the left it says tool create shape and on the right tool creates mask so if we toggle the right one on the next thing we draw will be a mask and this also works for all other shape tools as well sometimes you might be selecting layers but it's not showing what shape you've selected in the composition window it's only showing the anchor point and the bounding box so what's happened here is that this has been unselected toggle marks and shape path visibility so if we hit that and now it brings back what shapes are actually in our layers and we have a much better idea of what we're selecting now sometimes you might find in your timeline that there are a bunch of columns that are missing now all you need to do to bring those back is to select these three icons down the bottom here left for the layer switches the middle for the transfer controls pane and the one on the right which gives us all our time codes i generally tend to keep that off though okay we can see we've got three shapes in our composition window we can select them all and tell that they're on different layers but there's only one layer visible in our timeline so where are the others they have been shied and you can view shard layers by clicking this icon which is this chap looking behind a wall and here are our other layers and we can set whether they're shy or not by toggling this switch down here often layers are made shy so that they can be easily hidden and unhidden very handy once your timeline starts getting full up with a lot of layers in certain projects and this is often seen in templates where if something doesn't need to be edited it is locked and then shied away so no one can touch it so it's out of sight and out of mind okay we've got a bunch of elements in this composition that we want to animate and we're moving things around and then suddenly we're in this view where has everything gone well we happen to have accidentally double clicked our logo either in the composition or in the timeline but if we click our composition view back over here we can see our composition now this won't happen if you double click on any shape layers or any compositions but if double click on any footage or any image it will open up just on its own okay we have imported a vector file of our logo because we want to scale it up and not lose any quality but when we do scale it up it gets all pixelated what's the deal well we need to check this box here which is continually rasterized and as soon as we do our vector is nice and sharp and we'll keep that sharpness even if we scale it up infinitely okay we've got this shape layer and we want to move some of its vertices but when we click on it they are not visible and we can't edit them so we can do two things we can either double click and now we can view them and then we can click on any one to edit it or with our layer selected we can switch to our pen tool and edit from there now from that point if you accidentally double click and select everything we will need to deselect it by clicking elsewhere and then selecting it to start again if you're finding some of these fixes helpful please give this video a like it will make me very happy and that'll help youtube show this video to any other people using after effects about to smash their head into their screen in frustration okay we have got a gradient fill on a shape layer and there is this very handy bar here where we can set where the gradient starts and where the gradient ends but if we select off that shape and want to come back to edit it it is nowhere to be found now we can get it back by clicking on that gradient fill up here and then without even doing anything clicking okay here let's try umphantly returned and if we lose it again all we need to do is select the shape from the contents in our timeline and that will reveal it as well okay we want to use this rectangle as a map for our star layer a great way to do that is to add the set matte effect to our star and we want to take the map from layer 2 our rectangle and as soon as we do that we can see that this is not what we were expecting at all this is because our layers are different sizes with different aspect ratios so to make the set mat look like we expect both layers need to be set to continually rasterize like we did with our vector logo earlier and as soon as we do that we get the result we want and the rectangle of course is already continually rasterized because it is a shape layer and that is selected by default and draw a mask over the bottom half using our rectangle tool making sure tool creates mask is selected that isn't applying over to our matte on our star layer our style layer is still visible in the areas that we had masked out but all we need to do to fix that is change this setting up here from take matte from layer we want to change this to effects and masks so this takes into account all the masks and all the effects that have been applied to our map layer okay we've got a simple animation here it is 1080p and just 10 seconds long a small animation but if we render it with the default settings this file is almost one and a half gigabytes that is massive and that is because the default render output format is lossless so it's essentially as big as possible with zero compression now most of the time we don't need nor want that now there are a whole bunch of different formats so you might want to explore your files for different reasons i won't go into all of them but 99 of the time i only use three different ones pro is four to two pro is four four four four or h264 so from the render queue we can click on the output module and instead of the format being avi change that to quicktime which will give it a mov container and then to change the codec we go to format options choose the video codec from here and here we can choose prores 422 hq if we like or quad 4 if you have a transparent background that you want to keep in the export hit ok ok again and then render now you can also use adobe media encoder to render your scene under composition and add to adobe media encoder queue this will open up adobe media encoder which may take a minute and here on the right we have our queue and we can change some settings here mine is set to the last use which is h.264 which you could select from this drop-down menu and this codec is a great balance for the smallest possible file size with very little noticeable compression all the videos that i upload to the web instagram youtube use this codec then we'll hit the green play here that will render or encode and we can see from our rendered files both the prores versions rendered around 35 megabytes and h264 under three megabytes and there's barely any noticeable compression in it at all okay now the next one is a strange one sometimes pressing the spacebar won't preview your animation and if that won't play your animation but you can preview it with a play button up here there's something you can do to fix it now i don't know why this happens or why this fixes it but if we go to edit preferences and audio hardware and i swap my default output device hit ok and then swap it back again that fixes it 99 of the time now this one seems a bit like witchcraft to me i don't know why this is linked with audio hardware but i swear it's not a placebo so try it if you get stuck now sometimes when you're importing a file let's say this logo here in our project timeline it has a slightly different icon and when we drag it into our comp it has a very short length of only a few frames and it seems to make no sense now this is because we accidentally imported this as an image sequence so if we go to our import window we can see that when we select some files it brings up some sequence options and it auto checks png sequence now this is because after effects assumes we want to import this file as a series of frames because it is surrounded by some other files with increasing numbers in its name so this one is one we have o2 o3 and after effects is thinking hey maybe they want to import this as frames in an animation but if we just want to import the image uncheck this and hit import and now it behaves like any image file now sometimes after effects projects get corrupted by whatever reason and after effects cannot open it but not all is lost sometimes if you create a new project and then you import that corrupt file into that project after effects will be able to read it and then you can just save that new project and continue working from there okay let's say we've been in a comp and we've been messing around with some 3d layers and we've been using the different views to make sure they line up we've been checking we've been checking the left views and maybe a custom view as well and then we go back to our regular view render it out and our render is not what we expected now this is because i often go back to the front view when i should be going back to the active camera view the active camera is what renders in your composition even if you don't have a camera added and the front and the active camera can look very similar in a lot of circumstances so just be warned and look out for that now a fix for a lot of generic issues is to purge your cache if something isn't working and you don't know why you've tried everything here and nothing works you might want to go up to edit purge and click all memory and disk cache and hit ok now this may take a little while but it won't delete anything in your project it is only deleting temporary files that after effects uses to preview faster and you'll probably free up some hard drive space as well for a little while now that the cache is purged after efx is no longer looking in its memory for what to preview which might have acquired a little bird glitch at some point after effects is now calculating everything i knew fresh for the first time so you might fix some errors that way essentially you're turning it off and on again and i'll also add to this section restarting after effects restarting your computer and as a last resort reinstalling after effects are the next protocols i've never had to go as far to reinstall after effects but if you're convinced what you're experiencing is a software error that should almost certainly solve it now the last unspoken rule which i speak as often as i can is to label your layers it is the ultimate solution for not knowing what is going on inside after effects so rename your layers down here on the timeline and use the labels here on the left to change their color as well this keeps your timeline organized your project file organized and will make anyone you work with absolutely love you it does take some time to do this but it will save you time and sanity in the long run i guarantee it if you'd like to learn animation and motion design techniques i've got a playlist of some of the best tutorials on this channel for you to take a look at i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 114,382

Keywords: fix after effects, after effects tips and tricks, after effects workflow tips, after effects tutorial, after effects beginner tutorial, ben marriott, adobe after effects, work faster in after effects, after effects workflow, after effects workflow tutorial, after effects process, after effects speed, motion design workflow, motion design process, motion design tutorial, after effects problem fixed, how to use after effects, after Effects issues, after effects

Id: 3neS3NCItFc

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021