After Effects Precompose | Tutorial for Beginners & How to use it

anytime you have a composition what's made up of many different layers just like we have here if you would like to gain more control over those layers you might want to consider using that pre composing function you can take a few layers and put them into one container which is called a composition as you can see on my left side I have a few compositions here I have my main comp open and I have an example comp let me now show you how compositions work and how to fit this all together if you want to have everything under control compositions at an level of extra depth into what you are doing let's for example take this animation we have this animation here on the top which is made up of one shape layer and one text layer if I'm doing any adjustment to this composition I would not like to hurt this little animation so I take this layer I press the shift key I also select the shape layer and by hitting ctrl or command on Mac shift C or right-clicking here and hitting pre-compose I can create a pre composition out of those two layers let me maybe call it red animation and as you can notice this little red animation is now a separate composition now what are the pros and cons of a pre composition the best thing inside of a pre composition is that you can always access all the layers which are inside those layers have a completely separate working area and I can for example add effects here and those layers inside would remain the same I would not hurt this text layer and this shape layer a little problem however you might sometimes run into is if your original composition is longer let me go ctrl or command K and I'll extend the duration of my original composition here to 20 seconds now my composition is longer I can of course make all my layers longer my background longer but I cannot make this composition this pre composition longer because a composition has its own settings I would have to go manually inside of this composition press control K here and extend also this composition it's rather rare that you run into such problems because while designing you already know that the certain element you wanna pre compose will be displayed only during a few seconds so once you are pre composing them you already know why are you composing them let me show you another small example which is very important which we were talking about when explaining the timeline but I didn't explain it fully it is regarding this little button which is collapsed transformation I will make a new layer now let's make me make a big text it will say Wow now I add a few shapes to it maybe with the ellipse tool some ice here some ice here and I have a shape layer and the wild text I take them both I press ctrl or command shift C I pre compose them and now I have this composition if I take my selection tool and I move this composition it's cropped on the right by default compositions will be cropped but if you would like to remain the informations and display all the layers to its full extension you need to hit the collapse transformations button this little button will allow the entire composition to display no matter how big it is by default after effects is unchecking this because if you are pre composing something you most likely want it to be as small as possible but if you are for example animating it and you need it to be bigger you just open up this option and inside of the layer no matter how big it will be it will be always displayed inside of the composition in which it is placed that's all I wanted to explain you about compositions and pre composing now this is an essential option you will use very often inside of After Effects so get used to it write this down in your mind and action item for you for this lesson is going inside After Effects creating a few layers and pre composing them on your own I want you to create three compositions and place one composition inside of another composition of course don't try to place the same composition inside of the same composition because that's not possible create one composition precomposed something and use those precomposed items to place inside of this composition this was a very theoretical lesson in After Effects but you also need to learn and know about those things while you work in this software thanks for tuning in and if you enjoy how I teach you can subscribe to this channel to see more of such videos

Channel: andrew pach • PowerPoint and video

Views: 133,885

Keywords: online courses, youtube tips, precompose, precomp, comp, after effects, ae, AEcc2015, adobe after effects, composition settings, composition, layers into one, split layer, merge layer, ae layers, make layers together, after effects merge, AE project, adobe AE, precompositioning, pre-comp, ctrl shift c, precomp shortcut

Id: xLcSAfNAAzw

Length: 4min 48sec (288 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2016