After Effects Tips

this video is sponsored by envato elements envato provides over 1 million digital assets such as graphic elements stock footage fonts music and much more so if you're interested i have provided a link down below in the description which will take you to their website and of course if you do decide to register i get to earn a commission hello everyone and welcome back to a new tutorial today we're gonna be going over a bunch of after effects tips which are in no particular order but i did organize them in a way that will make the tutorial flow a bit better instead of randomly jumping back and forth between tips and making it confusing for you guys there's a lot to cover so let's get started right away [Music] first off let's go over some shortcuts which will help in making the other tips easier to follow to bring up general values like position scale rotation and opacity we can use p for position t for opacity r for rotation and s for scale also say you want to reveal other values while at the same time keeping the scale you can hold down shift and click r t and p this way you got position scale rotation and opacity showing up at the same time if you want to hide all of these ui elements because they might be getting in a way or something you can simply click ctrl shift h and this will toggle the ui elements on and off you can use the tilde key to maximize whatever window your mouse cursor is hovering over so say you want to maximize this screen when you click on it click the tilde key which is right below the escape key on your keyboard and click back to minimize it and this works with every window in after effects if you want to close a certain panel without having to go to the menu button and clicking close panel you can use the shortcut ctrl w you can even use ctrl shift w to close all of these comps all at once if you want to switch the time display style between frames and seconds you can hold ctrl and click here if you happen to have a large project that you're working on then it's a good thing to stay organized one of the things that we could do is by simply going up to file dependencies and remove unused footage and you can see here 31 footage files have been removed while we're on the topic of organizing a good practice is to always rename your layers and color code them the way we can do that is by simply clicking on a layer hitting return on the keyboard and just renaming it to whatever you want and if we want to change the color of a certain layer we can simply click this box over here and change it to whatever color we want and once we have a bunch of layers and everything is color coded what we can do is simply click on say a purple layer and just click select label group and this will automatically select all the layers with that same color on your composition this way you don't have to manually select them all one by one you can adjust the label preferences by going over to edit preferences labels at the top you can see the label defaults for each type of layer that you can create inside of after effects and you can change any one of these to whatever kind you like and then down here we got the label colors which are the ones we're using right now and say we want to make red a more poppy red do that hit ok hit ok we can see it updated in our composition another obvious organizing tip would be to use folders in order to organize your materials and you can see here i've got folders for my compositions i've got folders for my materials precomp solids and to create a folder you can click this icon over here type the name or you could drag something into the new folder icon and it'll put those into the folder and all you have to do is rename it if for some reason you want to reveal your layers in the project panel you can simply do that by right-clicking reveal layer sourcing project you can do the same thing in reverse by right clicking on the material revealing composition and same thing goes for compositions so right click reveal composition in project and in our case we did this so we can swap it and the way we can swap layers is by clicking on the layer we want to swap and then clicking on the layer we want to swap it with then hold down alt and click drag and release magic to reveal all keyframes in your composition you can click u and this will bring up every single value that is animated you can also select a layer go over here to the search bar type in position and it'll reveal the position value or you can type in scale or rotation oh and keep in mind if you don't have anything selected and you type in rotation it will show up the rotation value for all of your layers there's a search bar in the project panel as well let's click u on this box to bring up the animated values again uncheck the stopwatch which will get rid of the keyframes and right click reset the reset option basically resets it to a default value which in this case is the center of our composition let's now click on the stopwatch once again move over by one second and then move it right over here at the right side by the way you can hold down shift to snap it horizontally or vertically and we can see now it animates from left to right and we can even scroll the values down here you can hold down shift to scroll faster or you can hold down control to scroll slower you can even use math to add subtract multiply or divide these values so say plus 100 it adds to it so you don't have to type it in or like do calculations or we could divide this by two and now we got 369 now let's give that a quick preview just to see what we got and you can see it's not a very pleasing animation and one of the ways we can make it more pleasing is by selecting both of these keyframes right clicking keyframe assistant easy ease or we can use the f9 shortcut and now if we preview it again you can see it slowly starts and slowly stops but we can adjust that value by selecting both of them again right clicking keyframe velocity and set this to say 75 and 75 and now when we preview again you can see it's even smoother but of course this is way too short of an animation so let's drag it over to say three seconds and this is going to make it a lot more noticeable say we want this to come back to this spot well what we could do is simply copy both of these keyframes ctrl c to copy go over to six seconds or maybe say five seconds and paste but now what happens is since the first keyframe is at the center it now immediately goes back to it and we don't want that so what we can do is right click keyframe assistant time reverse keyframes and now it lingers in that spot for like two seconds and then comes back if we want to slow down or speed up the entire animation without having to individually click on the keyframes what we could do is select all of these keyframes and while holding alt and clicking on either the last keyframe or the first keyframe we can click and drag and this will enable us to slow it down or speed it up and seeing as we have multiple keyframes on our layer click these arrows to jump between these keyframes if you want to move the playhead throughout the timeline and have more control you could use the page up and page down keyboard shortcuts which will allow you to move forward or backwards by one frame and then you can hold down shift to move forward and backwards by 10 frames you can also use the page up and page down controls with a layer so you can select it hold down alt and then page up and page down to move it in time by one frame and then while holding alt you can hold down shift as well and this will move it by 10 frames if we wanted to trim this layer to say three seconds maybe drag this corner over here and then hold down shift to snap to the playhead also we could use the alt close square bracket to set an out point and then alt open square bracket to set an in point and say now we want to cut the work area to the length of this layer we could maybe just bring this in hold down shift again you know move it in time but that could take a long time so let's maybe do that and then with our layer selected click ctrl alt b and this will set the work area to the length of our layer and then we can right click trim comp to work area if you made a mistake or for some reason you want to change the length of the composition you can maybe right click here to the keyframes composition and go over to composition settings the same thing you can do is by going over to comps right clicking here composition settings and also composition composition settings a million ways to go over to composition settings right here we got some boxes which are being extruded upwards and say we want to shift the timings of these so we want the first box to come in first and then the second box to come in second well what we can do is select the bottom one hold down shift select the top one to select all of these and then go to frame five and then alt close square bracket to set the out points and then right click on them keyframe assistant sequence layers and hit ok and this will shift the layers by five frames each so remember let's control z depending on the length of your layers that's by how much they are going to shift from each other and also depending on how you select these layers so from top to bottom or from bottom to top is going to differentiate by the way they shipped before we did it from bottom to top and this was the first one that came in well now let's try top box and bottom box and then right click keyframe assistant sequence layers hit ok and you can see the difference so the top box comes in first and then the others extrude all of these and you can see the animation if you want to crop a composition without having to go over to composition settings and maybe using the values here and since we have the preview button on we can preview it in real time but this is not what we're looking for so let's cancel and use this button which is the region of interest and we can use this to crop to whatever size we want so say we're happy with that what we can do is go over to composition crop comp to region of interest if say for example you have a 1080p comp and you want to switch that to a 4k comp without having to go over to composition settings setting the value here to i don't know 4k the problem is your layers are still 1080p and the way we can do that easier and faster is by selecting the comp going up to file scripts and scale composition and then here you can type in say 3840 and just click scale and you can see now not only the composition has been scaled up but also the layers inside and you may have noticed here in the scripts panel i got a bunch of these rd scripts and i will include these in the project files it's basically a bunch of other scripts which are more advanced and which will help you a ton in speeding up your workflow when creating masks on your solids you can either use the pen tool which is g for shortcut and then click and drag to make points or you could use the different shapes here or you can click and drag on that to reveal the other shapes and even use the cue as a shortcut and say for example we want the rounded rectangle tool we can click and drag and a few things we can do while in edit mode is by holding down space we can move this we can hold down control to scale it from the middle point and at the same time hold down shift to scale it proportionally and finally we can use the scroll wheel to increase or decrease the size of the rounded corners okay so i have a composition here set up with a road a finish line and a car and i want to make this car go from here to the finish line along the road well one way we could do that is by clicking p to bring up the position and then go over to the beginning set a keyframe move forward maybe bring it here go over here maybe bring it there and so on and so forth but this takes way too long and then i have to adjust the points as well the timing of the keyframes and all that and we don't have that much time well an easy way to do this is to simply copy the path of this road which i have created and it is a shape layer so let's select it go over to the search bar type in path copy the shape bring up the position for the car let's go over to the beginning and then ctrl v to paste it on the position and you can see what happens it simply animates it along that path and of course we could go over to the end here and maybe just push it slightly forward and then go back to the beginning and bring it in as well also you might notice something weird going on here at the keyframes these two are diamond shaped but these ones aren't these are like circle keyframes now the reason this is is because after effects automatically set these to rove across time what that means is is basically gonna put the keyframes where it thinks they should be in order to have a smooth animation another thing you might notice is this car is orienting along the path and the way we can change that is by right clicking transform auto orient it's set to orient a long path but look what happens when we set it to off it's basically locked in its own orientation but in this case we need it to orient along the path so let's control z and that will undo the option if you want to set markers along your compositions or even your layers you can use the star key on your keyboard or if you have nothing selected it will set a marker on your composition you can also use shift and 1 to 9 to set numbered markers so 1 2 3 and you can even double click on these markers and set a comment so say finish hit okay and find where the finish is and set the marker there something similar you can do in the project panel is by leaving comments on layers so select this one say this car is fast and in case you want to delete these because they annoy you right click delete this marker or right click delete all markers same thing goes for layers if you want to use certain layers in your compositions just for reference in this case i got these two colors here and we can use those to pick the color from those boxes so say you want to have the layers award to be orange but you only want them to be shown here in this composition and not on other compositions or when you finally hit render well the way you can do that is by setting these to be guide layers so select both of them right click guide layer and say we want to bring this guide layers comp to the markers comp you can see we got the words the background but not the colored boxes say you're making adjustments to your layers and as you go along you want to see the difference between before and after you did those adjustments well what you can do is use snapshots which is this button over here and what this allows us to do is let's take a snapshot now and then turn off the before layer and turn on the after layer and now by using this we can show the snapshot that we took before so before and after you can also use f5 on your keyboard i've gone ahead and set up a very scary looking creature but i want to make the eyes red and the way we can do that go over to effects and presets type in fill and drag that in and now we could copy the fill effect paste it on the right eye but say i want to change the color to something like green i would have to go back to the left eye and do the same thing and all that stuff instead what we can do is select the fill go to edit copy with property links and then paste it on the other eye and now this is linked to whatever this value is so say we change this to blue you can see it automatically changes with it in this comp i've gone ahead and animated some shapes which is a triangle circle and a square but i'm not quite sure i want to keep the position as is instead i want to shift it towards the right side and what we could do is hit p to bring up the position on the square and while we're at a keyframe we can select the entire position keyframes move it over now this updates all the other keyframe positions relative to that adjustment but now we'd have to go to the triangle position and the circle position and do the same thing and this takes way too long and it's still not going to be precise a much better way to do this is by going up to layer new null object and then parenting all three of these shapes to the null and then moving the null over to the side then we can delete the null and there you go over here i have this moving circle and this square and another circle and what i want to do is isolate both of these shapes to only be shown when this solid is crossing on top of them and one way we could do that is by duplicating this maybe bring it on top of the square and we have a mat on top of the circle and select both of them hit f4 to toggle the switches or you can click the button down here and then set both of these to alpha matte and you can see what that does it basically just isolates it and both of these shapes use the matte and sure this works fine but in cases where we have a bunch of layers this wouldn't really be efficient a much more efficient way of doing this would be by using the set matte effect so let's select the square go over to effects and presets and type in set matte and then double-click to add the set matte effect select the matte and set it to masks in this case you can see whenever the matte comes over the square that's when it is shown and then we can copy this effect paste it onto the circle effect and there you go whenever you're using text layers you can use the character tab to customize it over the top you got the font then you got the font thickness next up there's the font size the vertical gap the horizontal gap moving down we got the stroke width and in order to see this we're going to have to change the second box color which is the stroke color to say something like red and now it is visible and depending on how thick you want it to be just scroll it up and down then next to it we got the stroke mode so maybe fill over stroke or stroke over fill and then all fills over stroke which makes it so all the letters are over the stroke then you got the vertical scale the horizontal scale and all of that stuff and then down here you got a bunch of other options like fake bold italic and say you got like outline typed in lower caps well you can click this button while having all the letters selected and it'll automatically make it all caps for you and keep in mind all of these values that you see here can be animated going down over to text and you can see down here it says animate and you got a bunch of ways you can animate this text i have a tutorial on my channel which covers text layers and ways you can animate them so make sure to check that out as we're talking about text layers say we want some text animations on our text but we don't want to do as much work well there are some pre-made animations that come with after effects and we can find them over here at animation presets and scroll down we can find it under text and there's a bunch of animations right here and in this case i use the animate in typewriter effect and you can simply click and drag these presets to add them to your text layers or while having the text layer selected you can double click and then we can click u to bring up the keyframe and it'll add the keyframes at your play head if you have a bunch of text layers and all of a sudden somebody tells you hey yo we need a different text on there well we're not going to go ahead and just rename all of these one by one and then copy and paste and paste and paste instead what we're going to do is duplicate one of these bring them over here and let's select the first one go down under text and all click on the source text and do the same thing bring down the source text for this one that we duplicated pick whip the source text of this one to the when we duplicate it and now whatever we type in here is going to be updated over here and now in order to apply this to all of our text layers copy the source text of this select all the other layers and ctrl v and there you go and then we can select all the other layers turn on the shy layer right here lock them so we don't accidentally move them and then hit this button which hides all layers that have the shy button enabled and now we got a very clean looking composition and only one layer to worry about when positioning objects in your composition it would be good to use the align tools which you can find them in the align tab so say i want this to be centered horizontally click this align horizontally button and then click the align vertically button or you can use the align left button align bottom button so on and so forth now also let me show you a cool little trick you can use with the align tool so let's align vertically maybe move it over here and what you want to do is select the leftmost object align it to the left select the rightmost object align it to the right and then select all of them and just click distribute horizontally some more tools that help us align stuff are these buttons over here so let's snap along edges and turn on the snapping and now what we can do is basically use those to snap objects to objects and you can see over here if you zoom in let's click this button to toggle the mask and then select bottom corner here you can see how it snaps to that point and this works with every corner you can also use guides so view show guides but right now we don't have any so in order to create them we have to bring up the ruler so show rulers bring up a guide bring up a guide and then view make sure lock guides is checked and now you can see how these lock to the guides another cool thing you can do is export these guides and also import them back and then in the end if you want to clear them just click clear guides you can also use grids the same way whenever we have a masked layer in our composition and we want to move the layer itself but not the mask what we can do is use the pan behind tool or we can click y on the keyboard to bring it up as a shortcut and just click on the layer and drag this way it moves the layer behind while preserving the position of the mask by the way you can use this barcode on your phone to win a million dollars to adjust the anchor point of a layer we can click y to bring up the anchor point tool again and then click and drag on the point and hold ctrl to snap it to whatever point we want a shortcut to center the anchor point to a layer is ctrl alt home and then you can click control home to center the layer to the composition itself so you have a 3d object in your scene and you want to look at it from different orthographic views well you can do that down here by clicking on the active camera popup and setting it to front left top or whatever you you want you can also change the one view to two views horizontally for example you can set this left view to be active camera and then over here on the top view select the top side move it around and we can see how it updates automatically on our active camera view by the way this is a minecraft dirt block and i'll show you real quick how i achieved this inside of after effects i have each side of the texture in its separate own comp and what i'm going to do next is select all of them turn them into 3d layers then for the top side i'm going to select it click y on the keyboard to bring up the anchor point tool click and drag and hold down control to snap it to this point and then click w to bring up the rotation tool and then rotate upwards by holding shift to rotate it in 45 degree increments then for the left side let's put it on this side hold down shift rotate it then do the same thing for the right side on this point and so on and so forth and there you go okay so that's pretty much all the tips i got for you guys today let's now move on to the outro of this video alright guys thanks for watching and being patient all the way through consider subscribing and hitting that bell button to be notified whenever a new video comes out if you want to follow my work or ask me any questions personally then you can find me on instagram if you have any suggestions then leave a comment down below thank you once again for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Broken

Views: 10,380

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Id: exfC6RgtrwM

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020