20 Tricks in After Effects for 2020

I'm back 2019 officially over when I'm back with another video start 2020 with a bang I missed you guys in all seriousness 2019 was an awesome year for me and I wanted to start 2020 off with a bang so I'm gonna do 20 tips and tricks and after-effects for 2020 see what I did there okay we're gonna start this list off with one of my favorites and that is increasing the size of your points and handles if you go into your preferences in general it's the first option you can increase this up to about 15 I think it just makes seeing your points and handles a little bit easier alright moving on to the next one this one is a time-saver and it encourages you to stay organized and that is project templates to create a project template just open a new project create your template with whatever folders that you need then save that project anywhere and then just go to your preferences new project and find that project template now whenever you open After Effects you'll open it with this project template already set up keeping you organized okay so the next one is another time-saver and that is the mini flowchart yeah you can access the mini flowchart by hitting tab and this shows you what compositions are in your current composition and what composition your current composition is in so you can navigate through your project with ease and this little blue line always shows you where you came from alright moving on to my next tip and that is page up page down to move frame by frame although if you're on a laptop like a MacBook you can use command arrow keys to go frame-by-frame or if you're on a Windows laptop that's control arrow keys now the next tip is if you are moving frame by frame if you hit K you can move from keyframe to keyframe so the little tip all right next one is battle-axes Overlord this one is a game changer if you're using illustrator files with just one click you can bring your illustrator files into After Effects as shape layers and you can bring them as one layer or you can split them up all into different layers it's awesome ok if you don't want to fork over the money for overlord and you want to use illustrator files with traditional way and you bring your illustrator file into After Effects and you scale it up and you see that it's pixelized well if you click on the continuously rasterize little button on the timeline your illustrator file will be smooth again just a little tip for you alright sometimes you'll have several different layers that have keyframes on them and you need to move them all but you don't want to have to go into each individual layer and move its position because there's already keyframes there and it's a lot of work and you have to do it for multiple layers and it takes a lot of time well you can just create a null object parent all the layers to that no object move them to wherever you need them to go and then delete that no object cuz you no longer need it and no one will ever know the composition is too long you can adjust the length of your composition by dragging the work area handles to the length that you want and then just right clicking on this little gray bar and trim to comp area trim to work area I think yeah trim to work area boom now you have a shorter composition now if you accidentally trimmed it too short well you can hit ctrl K to bring up your composition settings and then go down to the duration and adjust your length there okay if you want to stagger some animations just select all the layers you want to stagger cut them down to the number of frames you want to stagger them by and then go to sequence layers hit OK and there stager and then you can just extend them back out and if you want them to stagger in the opposite direction just before you do all that select them in the opposite order okay so we know the pic whip will parent a layer to another layer but what if you want that layer to be in the exact same position as the layer you're parenting it to well when you do drag the pick whip to that layer make sure you're holding shift and that will snap your child layer to the parent layers position okay let's say you have a bunch of images in your timeline that you want to replace with an image from your project bin well first select all the images on your timeline that you want to replace then in your project bin select the image you want to replace them with and then drag that new image onto your timeline onto the layers that you want to replace while holding alt and you'll replace the image in your layers with your new image and it will retain all the keyframes and all the the changes you made to that original image pretty nifty right an easy way to do quick shadows is to duplicate your layer go to the effects and presets search for CC slant apply that effect to your new layer and then turn off the stretching and then just turn up the effect and then you could go in and add a fill to make it a shadowy color all right so you have a layer that you've animated and you want to save time animating it out well you can go and copy those first two keyframes paste them and then select them both right click and do time reverse keyframes and boom you've got your in-and-out animated time saved okay this is an effect that I think doesn't get enough attention but it's the transform effect and if you apply to your layer it gives you a whole nother set of transform properties that you can animate and one that I like is the skew property because you can apply this to texts turn up the skew and now you've got this nice little slanted text effect okay sometimes you've animated a lair has a bunch of keyframes but it needs to either be quicker or slower and you don't want to have to go in and individually adjust every keyframe well there's a shortcut you can select all the keyframes and then either clicking the last keyframe or the first keyframe while holding alt you can drag the keyframes to retime them okay this is a website called cooler schoo and it's a great website for just randomly generating different color schemes if you're having a hard time knowing what color scheme you want you can just cycle through color schemes until you find one that you like or if you have a color that you know you want to use you can put that into coolers and then lock that color and then you can generate a color scheme around that initial color it's pretty cool and then you can export these color schemes and import them into your After Effects project and use them as a reference okay next one is moving your mask with the space bar if you're drawing a mask and then you realize it's not in the right position if you just hold down the space bar before letting go of your mouse you can actually move the mask position on your composition and then once it's in the right position you can let go of a space bar and then continue you know resizing your mask if you need to resize it pretty nifty okay if you're well organized you color code your layers and there's a great way to select all the layers in a group and that is just by going to the layer label and then selecting group by color or select by group well whatever it says there I can't remember I don't have After Effects open right here okay and the last one is another plug-in from battle-ax but this one is free but it saves you a lot of time so let's say you have a bunch of different shape layers a bunch of different strokes and you want them all to be round cap well traditionally you'd have to go into each individual layer and go into the stroke go all the way down to round caps well with but kapor you can just select your layers and then select what kind of cap you want super easy saves you a lot of time especially when you have ton of layers all right well that is 20 tips and tricks for 20/20 in After Effects and I had a really good 2019 I hope you guys did too it was a year of a lot of growth and I became better as a motion designer and I'm excited for 2020 and continuing on that path if you guys have any ideas for future tutorials please leave those ideas in the comment section below I read every comment that I get and if you guys just want to tell me something leave that comment in the comment section below and if you guys like this video or specifically if you learn something new in this video I really appreciate it if you hit that like button and if you like content like this and you want me to keep making this kind of stuff make sure you hit that subscribe button to tell me and if you do hit that subscribe button make sure you turn on your Bell notifications so that you're notified whenever I come out with a new video yada yada yada you know how they get to work and again thanks so much everybody who has subscribed and has shown support I really do appreciate it 2020 is gonna be a great year and we'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Keyframe Academy

Views: 34,900

Keywords: Useful Tricks in After Effects, after effects tips, after effects tutorial, adobe after effects, after effects secrets, after effects, after effects tricks, after effects hacks, after effects beginners, after effects beginners tutorial, after effects animation, starting in after effects, after effects basics, after effects transitions, after effects edits, animation tips and tricks, after effects process, after effects workflow, learn after effects, how to after effects

Id: 0EOYhdGXUfA

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Psaic]

Nice video, dude!

[u/BasementNerd]

Nice video and content my man.

[u/futurespacecadet]

cool vid, straight and to the point. sometimes it felt a little too fast, and the music a little too much going on to focus on the tips. i need just a second to digest the information. The handles / bezier size is such an important tip, I'm surprised Adobe doesnt do better at informing people about this. Oh p.s. i noticed you say "just a little tip for ya" after several tips lol

[u/Bcabalum17]

Great video, learned lots. Thanks!

[u/lucassilva12]

Nice! Super handy! Thank you

[u/friskevision]

Great stuff! I learned at least ten new tips. Thanks!

[u/Team_Rocket_Landed]

Great video with great tips

[u/CIairvoyant]

thank you for spacebar on masks dude!

[u/mattclementsgoattee]

I'm just starting out in AE so this may be something I need to learn first, but the null object tip doesn't seem to work after I delete the null object. Awesome vid.