5 Tips For Getting Started In After Effects | Motion Graphics Tutorials

hey how's it going this is Todd with shutterstock and I'm here to tell you why Adobe After Effects is nothing to be afraid of here are five easy quick tips for getting started with After Effects [Music] so let's get started with number one motion blur so motion blur is what's going to separate your graphics from looking like a PowerPoint presentation and if you're doing your graphics in something like premiere or Final Cut you're not going to be able to get motion blur so using this really basic animation as an example this circle is moving and you can see it's got very stuttered motion it doesn't look very smooth it's not very pretty to look at but if we want to use motion blur you click this button right here so we're gonna turn that on and then now you can actually turn on motion blur for each specific layer so right now nothing has motion blur on it but now for this circle layer I'm gonna go ahead and click on this little button here and that's going to turn on motion blur for that layer so if you'll see right there now the circle has motion blur on it so here's what this looks like with motion blur and without it and you can also customize the amount of motion blur with our composition selected we're gonna click in here and go up to composition and composition settings and here we can go to the Advanced tab if you want more motion blur you can just turn up your shutter angle all right now number two keyframes so a keyframe basically tells your software at this point in time I want this thing to look like this and then if you set another keyframe you're telling the software to basically go from this keyframe to the other and bridge the information in between so let's go back to our little circle buddy here and select it and I'm gonna bring up the position keyframes to do that I'm gonna hit the P key so hit P so this little thing right here it's a stopwatch and what that's gonna do is basically create a keyframe it's also going to make it so that any movement you make with that object from that frame on is gonna create a new keyframe automatically I've started the stopwatch right here and now I'm gonna go one second into this composition and I'm gonna go ahead and move this circle over to this side so now After Effects is going to go ahead and fill in the information in between by bridging the gaps and basically creating motion say we want to go ahead and add a keyframe manually what you can do is click this button right here and now that's going to add a keyframe right where the playhead was at when I click this button and so for this keyframe let's say we want it to go higher so now After Effects is going to push the object higher on that specific keyframe and in that moment in time now let's say we want this whole animation to be shorter you can click on this button right here and now select the word position here and what that's going to do is it's going to select all of those keyframes and now holding down the Alt key we can select the final keyframe that we made there and drag to the left and now it's going to basically squeeze all those keyframes together but keep the relative timing the same but if you want to move all the keyframes up and down or left and right at once you can actually select a hit position again and again with the last keyframe selected you can move all of the keyframes up and down and it's going to move that entire animation so now we're going to talk about easing keyframes and the speed graph editor they're kind of hand-in-hand but there are two different ways to do it and I'm gonna show you both what we have here is just the shutterstock logo and I want to make a really nice logo animation so the way I'm gonna do that is I'm gonna go ahead and start the scale stopwatch so what that's done is it's set a keyframe at the point of the playhead and I'm gonna just drag this out so now what I'm doing is I'm moving that keyframe data over to the side and let's put it at about something like 12 to 13 frames and now here at the beginning I'm gonna just click on this number here and I'm just gonna hit the zero key so that's gonna scale everything down to zero so let's see what that looks like right now that looks kind of bad it just moves up and it just stops really abruptly it's not very professional-looking it kind of has that PowerPoint type feel and you could do that in Premiere first off I'm gonna go ahead and make sure that motion blur is turned on so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click on that keyframe and then I'm going to go to keyframe assistant in there I can select easy ease and what that's gonna do is just gonna make that keyframe movement a lot smoother so now see how it kind of ramps down to the stop okay and now we can actually take it even one step further and make it even smoother so a really popular look nowadays is some really really heavily eased keyframes go ahead and select scale so we'll select both of our keyframes in the scale property now and right here you'll see this button and this is the graph editor so when you click on that so now you see a visual representation of basically the speed of that motion so if you click this little drop down here you'll see the option called edit speed graph so what that's gonna do is open up a different view that I like a little bit more and so here you have keyframe one keyframe too I'm going to select the second one and now we get these little handles so using those handles you can actually customize the speed of that keyframe so what I'm gonna do is drag this out so what I've done is I've shifted the motion to where all the speed happens here at the beginning and then it ease is really really softly into that final resting place so let's see what that looks like look at that really really super smooth okay so now let's talk about masks and track mats so solid layers are kind of like the building blocks of After Effects to get one you can just right click down here go to new new and solid and the thing is you use solids a lot for effects so say I want to add a gradient background well now I have a solid that I can apply an effect to so now I can go up here to effect and select generate and select gradient ramp and now I have a solid with a gradient ramp on it and I can come over here and change it to a radial and swap the colors and and we'll make this one a bit darker and now boom right there I have a nice little vignette so that's how you use solid layers another thing about solid layers is you can add masks to them so with that solid layer selected I'm going to select the pin tool and you can also do this with ellipse tools or rectangle tools if you want to draw circular or square masks but I'm gonna use the pin tool and now I can just draw a shape around this solid and so once I've done that it's actually gonna cut that shape out and what I can do is even with that solid selected that I've put the mask on I can hit the M key twice and what that's gonna do is it's going to open up the mask properties so here I can feather I can expand or I can even animate the mask path and all of these things are also keyframe abble as well so say you wanted to have this logo reveal itself so what I'm gonna do is draw a rectangle and so now this is gonna create a shape layer which is different from a solid in a lot of different ways but that's a whole other tutorial but I'm gonna draw a square and I'm gonna cut the square off right at the bottom of the Shutterstock logo and now we're gonna do a thing called a track match so with this Shutterstock logo layer selected I'm gonna go over here to this drop-down that says track mat and I'm gonna use this drop-down and select alpha mat but now the Alpha channel of that square is has also become the Alpha Channel of this logo so now if you wanted to you could do a slick animation where the logo starts down below the Alpha Channel and then it animates in and we'll go ahead and make that an easy YZ keyframe we'll open up the speed graph editor make it nice and smooth and we will turn on motion blur and let's see what we got all right and number 5 the final tip I'm going to give you in this one is null objects they're basically empty objects that you can use to control other objects so now I have all this stuff going on here I have this track mat I have this logo animation and what I want to do is move all that stuff around without messing with any keyframes or anything like that I'm gonna right click down here I'm gonna go to new and select null object and so now you can do a thing called parenting you can parent any object to another object or you can parent something to a null object so parenting is basically where whatever the parent does the child will do as well so let's say I don't want to move my background but I want to move this little text animation that I did and I don't want to deal with any keyframes or anything like that what you can do is take this thing it's called a pick whip and we're gonna move it and just select our null object here so now anything I do with this null object whether I move it around position wise or scale it that animation is going to do it too and nothing has changed we can move around as much as we please so it's a really handy thing to know how to do when you have a lot of objects and you want to be able to move around lots of them at separate times without messing with any of your keyframes so there you go there are five quick tips for getting started in After Effects I hope you found this helpful and as always like comment subscribe and I'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Shutterstock Tutorials

Views: 33,937

Keywords: Filmmaking, tutorial, cameras, videography, photo, lenses, photography, cinematography, premiere pro, after effects, creator, DIY, hacks, color grading, techniques, audio, lighting, motion graphics, filmmaking 101, computers, studio, Motion Graphics Tutorials

Id: zEQ-CBAQq00

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018