5 After Effects Tools You Don't Use...But You Should!

After Effects has a wide range of built-in tools that can quickly become overwhelming let's narrow your focus with these five tips that can help save time [Music] hey everybody Sarah wait here to talk about five built-in after-effects tools that you really should be using but you probably aren't by the end of this video your workflow should feel more streamlined so let's check these out first we're going to take a look at something called this layer dot name even if you're not an expressions guru this one's going to be super useful maybe even more useful than our good old friend the wiggle expression first I'm going to twirl open this text layer named school of motion I'm going to twirl open the text and alt click the stopwatch to add an expression then I'm going to just type in this layer dot name lowercase this capital L in layer this is called camelcase and it's really important that you get the capitalization right you see how After Effects is trying to fill it in for me I'm going to type in a semicolon there now whatever I name this layer is going to show up as the text there right now it says school of motion but if I select the layer and hit enter I can rename this layer to say school of motion loves you so this is going to be super useful especially if you end up with projects with a ton of text and a client that likes to change things on you at the last minute this is going to make what would have been a two to three step process just one step the next tool I want to show you is actually two tools when used in combination that are really really powerful the first one is the motion sketch panel and I can get to that by going to window and right down here to motion sketch which opens up this panel let's go ahead and make a circle that we can animate hit ctrl alt home to Center the anchor point there and now that start capture is active I'm going to leave it at the default settings capture speed at 100 smoothing at 1 now in the motion sketch panel I'm going to hit start capture and then I'm just going to left-click and drag this shape layer to create a path so now I've got this really cool motion path and all I had to do was draw with my mouse so you may notice this pack has a ton of points it's not quite as smooth as I wanted so I'm going to use the smoother to smooth that out I can get to the smoother tool by again going to the window menu going down here to smoother you can see it pops up over here now I've still got this layer with the path selected so what I'm going to do is leave spacial path as the selection and I'm going to type in as an example 25 and hit apply now look at that beautiful smooth animation path I can go in there now and grab those Bezier handles if I want to drag it out and edit the path we made that path rather quickly but we can adjust the path with these Bezier handles and even move the keyframes around then you can play with the timing by holding alt and left click all the capabilities are still there making this a really powerful tool there is a way to shorten this process but it depends on how you like to work I personally like to draw the very detailed path and then use the smoother tool to smooth it out but in this motion sketch panel there is this smoothing value if I were to draw the path with the smoothing up higher say at 24 or 25 then it would smooth that path out as we were capturing it personally I like to capture more detail and then smooth it out so that I can go back and forth but you may find that you want to compress that process and do it all at once so that is motion path and the smoother speaking of motion paths let's say I don't want to draw my motion path in that super smooth fun easy way using the mouse because maybe I don't like using the mouse or a stylus say you want to use the pen tool because Bezier handles are fun and they give us so much control and power let's see how we can do that to animate this ellipse here I'm going to select the pen tool up here at the top or you can hit G on the keyboard I'm going to make sure that I have no fill selected I'll keep roto Bezier enabled there right to the right of my fill and Stroke options and I'm just going to go ahead and draw a few fun swoopy points I'm not going to connect it because I don't want to loop just yet so I've got a shape layer now with a path and then I've got my ellipse that I want to animate if I want this ellipse to move along that path and I don't want to take the time to create all these keys and do all of the smoothing out of the keys and trying to get it to move just right here's what I'll do I can twirl open this layer reveal the path I just made and copy that past data with ctrl C next I'll reveal the ellipses position by hitting P and just paste with ctrl V and what it did is basically pasted keys for that ellipse to go along that whole path if I hit the spacebar to play magic right it's super magic and then I can even move that whole animation I can move the path around adjust the handles all the different things again I can grab those keys and stretch them out I can go into the graph editor to do all the things I would normally do in the speed graph and automatically I've just got all that animation I've got all those keys generated just like that again you draw the path copy the path data go to the position property of the layer you're animating and control V paste that path into the position and you will get auto magic animation this next trick is more of a hidden feature than a trick if you're coming to after-effects from Photoshop or any number of other design tools you're probably wondering why can't I just draw a box for the text why does the text always have to come up in this way if I write school of motion and I'm in that layer I can't drag it around I can't make a box for it if I go into these paragraph options they're all grayed out super frustrating right so there's a fix for this it's just in a super-secret location so let's get this text centered well roughly centered okay I'm gonna select my text tool and the layer in the timeline then without selecting the text then I'm going to right click check this out convert to paragraph text and now when I click in there I have all the tools I can shape the box I can make it skinnier the text will automatically wrap and I can come over here and I can use force just if i and all of those fun things that were grayed out before uh-oh so this looks a little terrible i'm going to go back to centered but the important thing is you can access all the paragraph text tools that you know and love for Photoshop or InDesign or every other application in the world it's just hidden in that super secret place so let's say you want to go back to the other kind of text I'm going to again select the layer select the text tool but don't select any of the text in it right-click over it and choose convert to point text and then it's back to the old way you can't access any of the stuff anymore but maybe that's what you want because not all text needs to be paragraph text hopefully that's helpful super secret don't know why it's so hidden but now that you know where it is you will never ever forget okay this next workflow tip is really flexible and really powerful you're probably going to find a hundred different ways to use it so I'm going to select this layer and I'm going to add a blur effect to it so let's go to the effect menu blur and sharpen and let's just pick camera lens blur and let's say I want to localize or focus this effect to a specific part of the layer right now it's blurring the whole layer I don't want that well here's the super magic trick I can use a mask and a little-known compositing feature in the effect we just applied so let's go ahead and keep the ellipse tool selected and with the layer selected I'm gonna draw a mask now if I reveal the blur effects I'll show you this magical compositing option if I click this plus button every mask I have in this layer is going to come up and I can select them I only have one in this layer so it's automatically selected now the blur will only show up where the mask is so if I were to grab this mask and say change the feather of it change the opacity of it I can move it around whatever I do to this mask that effect is localized to it so let's try adjusting that feather now that I'm using this compositing option I can also change the opacity of that effect down here we've got this blur so let's really amp up the blur so that we can see where it's affecting that's better it's clearly inside of that mask circle and let's say I want to just tone it down or animate it coming on and off I can change this effects opacity in the compositing options and if I want to I can set keyframes to turn that effect on and off I can set keyframes to move that mask around so I can control the opacity as well as where that effect is localized I can make that mask expand contract animate all those things so this is super powerful it works for any effect and what's great is you can use these compositing options for every single effect in After Effects you can select any masks in the lair to have that level of control again that's by hitting this plus button so if I wanted to have a second mask I could select a second mask or maybe I'm going to have both go to two again effect opacity is going to be right here and that's going to control how visible that effect is it's a super powerful tool this may not be the most exciting way to use this compositing feature like we did here today but you can already see where this can be useful and that's it so those were five tools and After Effects you probably never use but you really should if you want to stay on top of the latest and greatest in motion design make sure to hit the subscribe button and click the bell icon so you're notified whenever we post new content and if you want to learn more school of motion has courses for everyone from the complete newbie to the advanced motion artist head to our course page in the description for more information [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 94,629

Rating: 4.9667478 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: cepYy5HFbbo

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020