Learn After Effects 2021: Beginners Tutorial

how is it going guys and welcome to the olufemi channel where a group of teachers that want to shore up your video production skills in as little time as possible yo it's herman here and today we're going to learn how to use after effects we'll be deciphering the interface and equipping you with the basic tools you'll find yourself using the most when you're in the program so if you've just downloaded after effects and it's your first time launching it or you know you're just curious about what it can do then this video is a great place to start so what is after effects it's a visual effects motion graphics and compositing software by adobe it's used by many filmmakers in post-production when producing film tv shows or web videos but how does this differ from programs like premiere pro or final cut now those programs are meant for efficiently editing your videos on a timeline while after effects is focusing more on the visual effects side of things in post-production so instead of focusing on placing clips side-by-side and cutting video after effects behaves more like the photoshop of video editing in which you combine a bunch of videos or images into one scene so you wouldn't want to edit a long video or film in after effects now by the end of the video you'll learn how to make a sick motion graphic like this and track it to whatever object you like we'll also learn how to replace the graphics and make variations now because we'll be covering all the essential tools as we make this it'll actually feel kind of like 10 tutorials in one because of how condensed all the content is but don't worry even though there's a lot to go through i'll be breaking everything down in a way that won't be overwhelming for you and if you'd like to use the footage and the project file that i'm using for this tutorial then you can download it in the description below so that you can follow along the version of after effects i'm using is cc version 18.2 so make sure that yours is up to date before following along with all that said buckle up grab a coffee and it's time to launch after effects now when it first opens up you can create a new project or open previous projects as you can see there are some recent projects that can open up as well and you can always just close the window and start from here oh boy you might find it intimidating with all the windows and symbols and geez there's just so many of them but don't worry you don't need to know everything from the get-go think of the 80 20 rule so 80 of what you'll be producing in after effects will be from 20 of the tools and techniques that you'll learn so i'll be guiding you through all the ones that you'll find yourself using the most often let's look over here on the top left panel this is the project panel as you can see it says project up top over here on the top left and it's where you will be organizing the things that you import and the compositions that you create now to import all you have to do is either double click on an empty space over here and then you can just browse through to find your file and then import it right over here with this button or an easier way is to bring in your window just like this with the clip and all you have to do is drag and drop it right over here to the project panel and then just like that it's imported into your project now it's important to make a habit of staying organized when you're first starting out because the longer that you work in after effects the more files and compositions you'll have and if you keep things organized it'll be easier for you to find certain things or make changes and a great way to do so is by creating folders and what you can do is just click this icon over here let's get a folder icon and when you hover over it a nice little message will say that it's to create a new folder as well so these are really helpful if you're ever hovering over things and you're not too sure what they do so in this case we're going to create a new folder and then you just write something like footage and you just put that in over here and then now you have that and i suggest that you make a new folder for different things you are going to thank yourself later for developing this habit we're now going to make a new composition which is basically a container for you to layer multiple files and composite your scene now there's a few ways that you can do this you can either drag your clip right over here over into an empty space down over here which is your timeline and once you let go it'll just create a new composition for you based off the resolution and the frame rate of the clip i'm going to hit ctrl z so i can undo that and i'll show you another way that you can make a new composition you can also drag it over to this icon over here which is to create a new composition and that's another way to do so and if you're wondering why you would want to do that it's in case that you know you have multiple compositions already open and then you don't have this empty space that you can drag your footage in so i'll ctrl z to undo that and i'll show you a third way and that's up top over here under composition you click that once and then hit new composition which the shortcut is ctrl n if you don't want to click around everything and you want to use keyboard shortcuts which is also a great habit to develop and then now you have this window with composition settings that you can change first let's just change it to i don't know main comp like this that'll be our main composition that we're working with and over here we can change the resolution of the composition in this case it's 1080 by 1080 which is not quite what we want we want the width to be 1920 by 1080 which is matching the resolution of the clip the frame rate you can change as well now most people in you know film they'll use 23.976 frames per second it's pretty much standard so if you don't know what frame rate you want to output or you're working for a client and they don't tell you what frame rate they want this is a pretty safe one that you can just use resolution is set to full you can leave that and then all this you can just leave on its own now duration is the length of the composition that you're going to be working in so in this case it's at 20 seconds so it's 20 and then zero zero frames so we'll just leave it at that for now and we'll hit ok and we can always change this later and how you would do that is by hitting ctrl k that's a shortcut to bring up the composition settings again so if you ever want to change your mind and change any of these parameters you can just hit ctrl k and that'll bring up your composition settings okay so what we'll do is drag this clip over to this composition as you can see in the tab it's our main composition that we just created and over here where the clip is sitting this is called the timeline and if you come from a video editing program like premiere pro or final cut they should look pretty familiar every composition has its own timeline where you can start building your scene play what you have or go to a specific frame of the video so all you have to do is drag this playhead over here this blue line and just drag it and you can scrub through and watch through the video and it's all under the power of you dragging this blue line isn't that crazy now this light blue block over here is the video clip that you just dragged in right and this is called a layer now whatever you slap into your timeline will be a layer and these layers will stack up vertically to build your composition now they can be rearranged up and down as if you're placing one thing on top of another now i'm just going to duplicate this so you can understand what's going on i'm going to hit ctrl d to duplicate it and now you can see that i have a copy of the video clip and i just want to show you what layers are and how they work so you're going to rearrange them up and down so i'll just call this top layer and we'll call this spot layer and renaming is as simple as just clicking on the layer hitting enter and then you can change the name or you can right click it and then hit rename it's up to you so they can be rearranged up and down so if i just hold on to the top layer and then just drag it down over here and let go then as you can see the top layer goes to the bottom and then the bottom layer is on top so they switch places now we can also do with layers is you can move them side to side and that'll determine when it will be played so this top one right over here i'm just going to move it over here and just like that you can see that once i scrub through this and we're playing through the first video it'll play again because the top layer is right over here so this is your timeline it plays linearly from left to right right and then it plays into the second copy of the video so that's how layers kind of work i'm just going to delete that one and i'll rename this one to footage like this just for now now you can also trim your layers by dragging either ends of the layer like this so if you can see that there's this kind of like two arrows right over here facing left and right that means that you can trim the layer so from the left side over here i can have it kind of like that and that way this uh more opaque kind of more solid looking part of the layer is when you can actually start seeing the layer and you can do the same thing on the right side as well let's say that i want to end the clip kind of around here instead of all the way over here i can just drag the right side over here by just clicking and holding it down while it's showing the two arrows like this and then while holding it down i'm going to let go on when i want to trim it too and just like that it'll stop playing right over there so that's how you trim layers now if you find that your clip is very long and you don't want to keep dragging with your mouse and everything then you can always use the keyboard shortcuts which is a great way to save time and for this one to trim the left side you can hit alt left bracket and it'll trim it to wherever your playhead is and in this case let's say that i want to trim it over here on the right side i can hit alt right bracket and that's how you trim the right side so alt left bracket alt right bracket are the shortcuts for trimming your layers so now that we know how to do that i'm just going to extend these back so that we haven't you know modified the clip in any way and speaking about layers let's talk about all these lovely buttons over here that can be a little bit intimidating at first since we don't know what they are now start on the left side those are the ones that are more important right now and the left one which is the eye icon uh basically is the visibility icon so if i turn that off so it's you know not filled in like this then it hides the layer so we can't see it anymore press the eyeball again and if it shows up we can see it so this one is to mute or unmute the track in this case there's no sound so you don't have to worry about it now the one right next to it that's a circle if i click that you're gonna notice that nothing changes and that's because it is to solo the layer so if you have multiple layers in your composition if you click that it'll only show the ones that are marked with a dot over here and that's soloing the layers so the one right next to it over here looks like a lock that's the locker layer so if i click it it'll flash this kind of gray flash i guess and it tells you basically hey your layer's locked can't move it around you can't touch it so that's what it does it locks the layer so i'm going to unlock that so i can still you know play around with this layer and that's all you need to know for now for layers so we now know what layers are um going back to this timeline in this composition you'll notice that if i play this through it's black because this video clip only goes up to you know right over here uh 6 seconds and 16 frames and that's what this is by the way this is your time code it'll show where your player head sits on your timeline so anything past that as you can see because the video clip is only that long uh it's only you know it's empty you don't see anything and we don't need all this extra space what we can do is move this uh work area just like that so i go to the very end right over here and it's kind of like think of it kind of like a layer now i can just drag the right side all the way over here kind of like that and basically what it'll mean is that it will render everything that is within this work area now if i want to trim the entire composition to fit into this duration of this clip or this work area what i can do is number one use what i taught you where i changed the composition settings to match the duration of the video clip but a faster way actually is to right click on the android over here and then hit trim comp to work area and as the name suggests it'll trim the composition to the work area and that's the fast way to trim the composition to fit to your work area so that this video clip right now fits nice and snug in the timeline now let's talk about what's up here now this window is called the preview window and it's where you actually watch back whatever's in your timeline and that's what we've been using to watch this video clip it's whatever is in our timeline right now and it's only this video clip there's a few things i want to go over on the preview window starting from the very left side of this window you can see this is 50 if i hover over it it tells you what it is it's the magnification ratio pop-up and what that means is that it'll show you how big the video clip will be to preview so this case this is 50 of the actual clip so if i click it i can change it to you know different percentages right over here or i can go and hit fit up to 100 so that way if i drag the ends or the borders of the panel like this and i can move things around it'll always you know try to be as close to 100 so if i bring that down it'll always fill up this panel and just like how i showed you earlier in terms of dragging around this so that i can move how big certain panels are you can do that with all panels so as long as you see an edge between your panels so this is the project panel this is a preview window and this line over here right in between it'll show you this kind of symbol and that'll mean that you can hold down and drag left and right top and bottom so you can extend certain panels i know i'm side tracking a little bit but let's go back to over here on the preview window on the right side this is uh set to full right now and this is the resolution that you can see for the video clip so right now it's at full resolution now if you feel like when you play back your clip it's a little bit laggy because you have a slower computer or maybe you have a really big file then you can make it a little bit easier for your computer by clicking this and then changing it to you know half resolution or third resolution or even a quarter and in this case if i were to change it to half as you can see the quality drops down just a little bit not too noticeable right now but if we were to change it to quarter for example as you can see it looks you know much more low quality and that's a quarter resolution so in this case when i go back to full button right over here with the lightning bolt with the uh square is fast preview now if you want to watch back in full resolution all you have to do is just keep it on off and as you can see in parentheses it says final quality and this is the final quality of the composition when you're playing it back the one underneath over here is adaptive resolution so if i click that and i were to drag it left and right now right now my computer is having no problem handling this footage and playing it back in real time but if you're working on a slower computer or you know your hardware is having a little bit of trouble processing this footage since the fans are worrying and it's starting to sound like a lawn mower then you might want to have adaptive resolution on and basically what that means is when you're scrubbing through like this then it'll dumb down the resolution so it'll end up looking kind of like this while you're scrubbing through it and then when you kind of let go then it'll go back to the full resolution so basically what it means is that it'll automatically adjust the resolution of your preview so in this case we can keep it off so it shows the final quality fortunately my computer can handle it now right over here is the toggle transparency grid i love these little pop-outs and how they provide me the actual name for these buttons and when i click this it'll show me the transparent parts of the composition now in this case because this footage is fitting up the entire composition you can't tell the difference but if i were to make this video smaller or if i were to just move it off to the side like this and all i'm doing is just dragging it over and just you know just clicking it down and then holding and dragging it over you can see that this area is black right now now this part doesn't have anything but it's actually transparent but by default it shows black so if i click the toggle transparency grid it'll show me this grid instead of the black so i know for sure that this isn't a you know black video or a black solid or something and it's actually transparent so in this case i'm going to hit ctrl z or control z depending on where you are and we'll toggle that off because right now it doesn't matter now the rest of the buttons over here and these symbols uh you can hover over them like i showed you before and you can see what they're called but in this tutorial we're actually not going to go over these because they're not the most crucial things to learn as a beginner except for this one this one's kind of important when you're trying to line up things this will basically show you some grids like this if i hit grids as you can see there are these green lines like this which is called the grid and we can use this as reference when we're trying to line things up now you have some other options over here as well instead of grid i'm going to uncheck that and then we can go to proportional grid and it'll show me these wider grids in this case we're going to uncheck them since we don't really need them so that is the preview window let's go back to the timeline over here and we're going to talk about the core tools and parameters you'll be changing for your layer so under layer if you see this arrow that's facing the right right now if i click that it'll kind of drop down some more options for you in this case we're going to go to transform click that arrow it'll show me these tools over here and these are going to be really important when you're animating or changing anything about a layer now let's go from bottom to top actually so starting from opacity over here opacity means how transparent the layer will be so right now it's at 100 that's 100 in terms of being opaque and then if i bring that down it'll be more transparent now if i were to toggle the uh transparency grid like this you can see that you know it's kind of fading into the grid showing that it is uh becoming more transparent so i'm just going to turn that back off and that's what that means right on top is the rotation and if i were to click on this number with a degree icon over here and i were to drag it right or left as you can see it'll pivot the layer to however many degrees that i show i'm just going to hit ctrl z to undo and then right on top is the scale and that'll change the scale of the layer which basically means how big the layer will be so by default it'll be at 100 but if you want to make it bigger 136 percent like this then you can zoom in and increase the scale like that or you can lower it and make it smaller and then the position over here will change the position of the layer so the left side over here the 960 that's your x axis so you can move it left or right and all i'm doing is i'm clicking down on the number and i'm dragging the mouse left or right to move it or the y axis right over here that says 540 right now i can drag it left or right to move it up and down another way for you to simply move the position is like i showed you before you just click onto the layer and then you can just drag it around and the one on top that says anchor point basically means where kind of the pivot point of your layer would be so the anchor point is right here on the center over here and it looks like a crosshair like so with a circle in the middle and what you can do is actually move that by hitting y to bring the anchor point tool and you can hold it down and click and move this anchor point to a different location and i'm going to show you as an example uh what it does so i'm going to move it all the way to the right side over here so the anchor point is now on the right side of the layer and if i were to you know change the rotation it'll rotate from that point instead of the center as you can see and then if i change the scale and make it smaller it'll scale down based off that point instead of from the center so as you can see it's collapsing closer to the right or expanding from the right side so i'll hit ctrl z so that the anchor point is back in the center and then if i want to go back to the selection tool where i can you know click things and move things around i can just hit v that is the shortcut for the selection tool and we'll be going over a little more about these tools and the shortcuts later but while we're in the timeline let's talk about keyframes keyframing is the backbone to animating any of your layers they're basically little markers that tell the layer what should happen at what time for example i'll go to the beginning over here and then i'm going to keyframe the position so i'm going to animate the position of this layer and how i'm going to do that is i'm going to hit the stopwatch over here next to position now as you see everything that you can keep frame will have a stopwatch next to it but i'm going to click the one that's right next to the position if i click that once it'll create this kind of like diamond as you can see and it's blue and then it'll also show this as well on the left side and then i can drag my playhead forward to you know about one second like this at one second i want to move the layer so that it is to the right over here all the way to the right and just a quick tip if you want to keep it straight while you're dragging it and you don't want it to kind of like go lopsided or anything like that you can hit shift and it'll automatically stay on the axis that you're dragging so in this case i just want to animate it so it's completely out of frame just like that i'm going to go to the very beginning and if i hit space bar to play it back it just kind of moves out of frame like this so what i'm basically doing is i'm telling this layer that at the zero time code right over here it's going to stay in this position and then over at one second as you can see in time code it moves all the way to the right out of frame and everything in between is automatically filled so that it moves all the way over to the final position so if i move you know forward into time and then i were to drag this back over here to the composition like this and now i have three keyframes first one telling me that it should start in this position second one it moves out of frame and then it goes back over to the left and that's how you keyframe in after effects now i'm just going to hit the stopwatch once more now right now it's highlighted blue but if i click that it'll delete all my keyframes and i want to show you that this isn't limited to just the position but literally any parameter and effect in after effects that you can see has a stopwatch so if at this point i want to change the scale i hit the stopwatch over here and then in the very beginning let's make it you know like 43 41 like this and if i were to hit space bar to play it back it'll grow bigger all the way to the final scale of a hundred while we're talking about keyframes i want to talk about easy easing your keyframes now if you highlight your keyframes like this so they're highlighted blue as you can see and i hit f9 what this does is it'll easily ease your frame and what that means is it'll smoothen out the motion between your keyframes don't look as sharp so here's a side-by-side comparison between two animations where one is easy eased and one isn't and this is one of those things that i didn't first learn when i was getting into after effects but i really wish that i did because it makes you know your motion not look as cheesy so it'll kind of feather out that movement so basically it'll slowly ramp up and then it'll slowly fade and feather out the motion so that comes to not a sudden stop but a nice smooth gradual stop and if i were to click one of the keyframes and i hit this icon over here this is the graph editor now honestly i actually don't know too much about the graph editor but i do use it a lot for this particular purpose so if i click that while a keyframe is highlighted that i've already converted to an easy ease frame i can see the two keyframes right over here the one on the right and the one on the left right and i can take the handles over here and i can drag it over like so making sure that it's aligned like this and then if i were to play it through like that basically it ramps up in speed like this and then it'll come to a slow gradual stop as you can see now i can also drag the handle on the left keyframe right over here like so and then it'll gradually speed up and then gradually slow down so this hump over here this hill is basically when it will speed up if you don't see this right now after hitting the graph editor and you don't know what i'm talking about all you have to do is click this icon over here you choose graph style and options and it's right next to the eye icon and next to this one over here if i click that just make sure that the edit speed graph is check marked so in this case it already is so i don't need to worry about it but if yours isn't then make sure that you choose that all right and that is how you keyframe things like i said it's the backbone of animating things in after effects and you now know also how to smoothen out the keyframe so i'm just going to go to the end over here where it's a hundred percent and then i'm just going to hit the stopwatch so that stays at 100 and nothing's animated anymore so let's hop over to the main toolbar where all these lovely symbols are that we don't know what they do right now but don't worry we're going to walk through at least the ones that you're going to be using the most often now this first one is the home icon uh basically if i click that you only like you you don't really need this this brings this back over here and the one next to it is the main tool that you'll be using a lot and it's the selection tool and remember that the shortcut for that i mentioned was v and basically that lets me you know select things like i can i can press and select different objects so that's what the selection tool is the hand tool and i can basically just grab things and i can move things around it's an actual hand and i can grab things around so as you can see i'm grabbing onto the timeline and i'm just dragging it around so that i can grab it left and right and pull it around basically but i never really click the hand tool up top over here what i like to do is i just hold on to space bar and that gives me the hand tool and then i can just drag things around so that's a shortcut basically making this button kind of useless for me but the one next to it the zoom tool is another tool that i don't use very often because if i click that i can basically have this magnifying glass and i can just click once and it'll you know manify closer so it zooms in and i can also hold on to alt and then it'll show this subtract icon on the magnify tool and if i click that it will uh you know zoom back out but like i said i never use this tool because all i have to do is just scroll up with my mouse wheel and that'll do the exact same thing same thing for the timeline over here but the only difference is that i need to hold alt so if i hold down alt and i scroll up and down i can zoom closer into the timeline or zoom out to the timeline now if i want to fine tune that magnification i can also use my mouse and drag this so this smaller kind of like mountain two triangles i'm not sure what it is actually uh means that it will be zooming out and then the right side will zoom in so if i drag that dot over it'll zoom in closer to the timeline and i can zoom back out like that but what i do most of the time is just hold alt and i use my mouse scrolling wheel up and down so back to the main toolbar these ones that are grayed out right now we're not going to be covering in this tutorial since you don't really need to use them and then this one this rotation tool if i click that basically what that does is it allows me to rotate layers like this but that's another tool that i basically never use because when i'm rotating things i just like to change it on the layer right over here as i mentioned before the anchor point tool was the one that we went over before where the shortcut for that is y so i can move the anchor point as you can see like this right just by holding it and dragging it around i'm just gonna go back to the center over here and while we're talking about anchor points i want to give you a quick shortcut that is quite important if something like this happens to you where the anchor point is like you know somewhere out of whack like it's just right over here on the right side and we don't want that so what you can do is hit the shortcut control alt home on your keyboard and it'll bring the anchor point to the center of the layer just like that so you don't have to drag it and you know guess that it's in the middle and let's say that your you know footage is somewhere over here you can actually hit the shortcut control home and then bring the layer to the center based off where the anchor point is so when you're moving a bunch of layers around these could be really important shortcuts for you to use okay but that's enough about the anchor point and the import tool the one right next to it is the rectangle tool but this is actually kind of your shape tool and you can change this by holding down on the icon instead of just clicking it once so if i hold it down it'll show in this menu over here so we have the rectangle tool we have the rounded rectangle tool the clips tool the ellipse tool the polygon tool and the star tool now i'm not going to go through each and every one of these but basically these are the different shapes that you can create while you're holding down this icon so if i hold down and i let go on the rounded rectangle tool for example then i have that selected and i can draw a rounded rectangle now we'll be having some fun and drawing some shapes later so i'll get back to this in a moment but let's talk about the one right next to it that is the pen tool if i click that basically i can draw certain points and i can either draw a shape or i can draw a mask but in this case we're going to talk about that again later this one is the horizontal type tool and basically when i have that big t selected i can click on an area on the composition and you can start typing things like tutorial oh if i can spell oh my and that is basically what it is it creates this new layer on your composition which is a text layer that you can you know change your text and we'll be talking about that a little more later as well when we're actually making some stuff right next to it is the brush tool and then we have the clone stamp tool eraser tool rotor brush tool and so on like these are tools that you're not going to use as a beginner but they're very powerful tools for very specific things that you'll learn later on and like i said if you need to you know learn these tools and actually use them you can hover them over like this and you'll know the name of them in this case the eraser tool and do some further research on it so we're not going to be covering them today in this beginner's after effects tutorial all right i hope that your brain isn't fried because we've covered quite a bit so far a lot of buttons and we know what most of these tools and buttons are so let's get into more of the fun part and actually start creating stuff first thing i want to do is i want to hide the visibility of this layer because we don't need to worry about it right now we're going to actually go over here and quiz time what is this tool over here that i'm hovering all right now much of a quiz when it pops up like that but uh we're going to use the rounded rectangle tool and if you can't find that as i mentioned before you can hold it down and it'll give you this menu and you can just let go onto the shape that you want to create in this case the rounded rectangle tool and while you have one of these shape tool selected you'll have these parameters right over here on the right you'll have a fill and a stroke now fill is basically whatever is filled into your shape stroke is the outer edge of the shape so it's basically the outline so if i click fill just the name over here and not this empty space if i click that it'll give me these fill options the first one is you know no fill so there's not going to be anything filling the object the one next to it is a solid color so it'll fill it with a solid color the one next to it is linear gradient and then radial gradient so this will create gradients in your shape in this case i'm just going to show you what it looks like if i were to choose a solid color and i'm just going to hit ok like this and then make the stroke you know nothing like this and then if i want to change the color i can click this box with a color and the shape fill color window will appear and i can change the color of the shape that i want let's go for something like i don't know blue and hit okay now i can draw my shape and show you what it looks like all i have to do is click down and hold and drag and it'll create a rounded rectangle based off you know how big i want to draw it like this and for this particular tool i can actually change how round i want the corners of this rectangle to be so as you can see it's rounded on the corners but if while i'm holding down and not letting go yet i can hit the up arrow a few times okay just like that i'm just gonna hold it actually and you can see that it becomes more round if i hold down it'll make it less rounded like like that in this case i'm happy with something like this and i'll let go just like that and a shape layer is created as you can see on the timeline over here in your composition there is now something called a shape layer one and the contents show that it's a rectangle and this is a rounded rectangle now if you've already let go you made a shape and you're thinking oh man i gotta make a new one i gotta delete this that's gonna be a bit of a pain don't worry you can change the parameters of this rectangle by hitting this arrow to show more options over here go to the rectangle path and then you can change the roundness over here so don't worry you can always make changes like this and as you can see right next to the word roundness is a stopwatch so if i were to click that i can start keyframing it but that's not what we're doing in this case i just want to show you that there are stopwatches next to certain parameters that you can animate now for the particular example that i'm using i actually want a outline instead of a filled solid so i'm going to go back to stroke over here and click that once and then we're going to go to solid color so that there will be a solid stroke if i click ok it just looks like it got a little bit bigger but you can't really tell so what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn off the visibility of the fill so i'm going to change the fill option to none meaning that the inside of the shape won't be filled i'm going to hit ok and as you can see it's just the outline of that rounded rectangle that we drew and congratulations guys you just made your first shape or in this case an outline of the shape now this shape right now is kind of like off-centered slightly to the top of this composition as you can see and i want to talk to you about aligning things in your composition now there should be an align panel somewhere over here but if you don't see it which in this case i don't see it anywhere right now and even this double arrow where i can show more panels i don't i don't really see a align panel so if you ever don't see certain panels you can go to the window option over here click it once and you can find all the panels that you can open up in this case i'm going to click align and as you can see a new panel opens up next to paragraph called a line and if i click a layer like this i can align it to the center of the composition and right here it says align layers to the composition which is exactly what we want to do and we're going to click this which aligns it horizontally so it'll be centered to the composition and then we're going to also align it vertically so if i click that it'll align it vertically to the composition now this is a great example for me to refer back to the anchor point tool as you can see the anchor point right over here is not centered to the composition or to the layer it's just kind of like off over here so another quiz time feel like we're back in high school but hopefully you've been paying attention how do you move the anchor point back to the center of the layer that's right the shortcut is ctrl alt home and as you can see the anchor point goes back to the center over here and that'll help if i wanted to scale this or rotate it and wanted to make sure that the anchor point was in the center while doing so so far you've been doing a great job if you follow along up until here because you've created a shape but because we'll be making a message for when the button is pressed on the controller we want to add some text and if you remember how we created text is by using the horizontal text tool over here or you can hit the shortcut ctrl t and you can see that if i were to hover it over in parentheses ctrl t is the shortcut so if i do that and i click to a space on the composition it'll give me this red line which shows me where the text will appear as i type so i'll write something like inish [Music] oh my gosh whenever i'm recording the screen i like forget how to spell so hopefully you can bear with me and to align this to the center uh what we can do is go back to the align panel over here and click to align vertically like this so now they are both aligned uh to the center of the composition now if i want to make any changes to the text over here it will be under the character panel on the right over here now this shows me the font that i'm using in this case i'm using one called audio wide and then underneath are the you know sub-categories for this font right now there's only one option which is regular but if you have a different font selected it might show you different options like bold or thin or italic now this one over here that shows the little t and the big t this is to set the font size now i can either click the number over here and then input my own value so right now it's 90. i can make it bigger and write like 100 and it'll make the text bigger so i can either do that or i can click on the number hold down and then move my mouse left and right and that's a quick way for me to make it bigger or smaller like this in this case i'm going to go back to 90 because i think that's actually a pretty good size now the rest of the tools over here you can play around to find out what they do to affect your text so you know for this one i can space out the characters and set the tracking for the characters like this so i can space them out and then there are other parameters to affect your text as well but these are the kind of the main ones over here that will affect your text that you'll be using the most often and then going back to the panel over here where it says line there's also one that says paragraph and there's another thing that can affect your text as well it'll change how to align the paragraph and all these other parameters as well so in this case if i were to write like a lot of text like i don't know let's just write some jumbled letters right now it's aligned to the center so it'll center the text but if i were to you know align it to the left like this then all of it will align to the left as you may have guessed same thing for the other one you can align it to the right but in this case we're going to keep it centered and we're going to hit ctrl z to undo that so at this point you've been making some significant progress and you want to make sure that you don't lose it all because something can happen what if your computer breaks down what if a tornado strikes your house knock on wood hopefully that doesn't happen especially in the middle of this tutorial but that's where saving your project file comes into play so you can either go to file and then hit save or you can hit the shortcut control s and that will save it to a new project file if you haven't made a new project file yet and in this case by default it will say untitled project we'll call this uh ae underscore begin it's terrible typing again tutorial one just like that and then hit enter and it'll save it and right on top over here it'll show you where the file is located and what it's called so every so often it's good to hit control s really quickly to save your progress and by default after effects will also generate auto saves for you in case something happens if you're still keeping up with all this new knowledge i've been throwing at you then congratulate yourself because you're doing an awesome job and we're about to get into the even funner part which is animating what you just made if we were satisfied with it not moving we'd be in something like photoshop but because we're in after effects let's add some movement to this graphic for now i'm going to hide the text layer by hitting this i icon right over here just like that so it only shows me the shape layer i can actually you know rename it to something like uh i'm gonna hit enter to rename and let's say rounded rectangle now to create movement i'm gonna do exactly as i taught you earlier on creating keyframes so i'm gonna keyframe the position just like what i did before i'm gonna hit the shortcut p now that brings up the position parameter like this right over here i'm gonna hit the stopwatch and this is the final position that i want at around you know a second and 12 frames right now i can always move this keyframe around as well by clicking it holding it down and then dragging it around um let's say over it over here and then i'm going to go to the very beginning and then i'm going to shift the position just like that so it's just kind of touching the edge of frame so again any time that you make changes to the layer uh during different parts of the timeline it'll automatically create a keyframe so basically it's telling after effects hey something is happening over here in this specific time spot so if i were to hit spacebar to play this back as you can see it's this very sharp and robotic movement like i tell you earlier we're going to easy ease these frames by highlighting them hitting f9 like this and then now it smoothens it out a little more but we're going to further smoothen it out by highlighting one of the keyframes going to the graph editor as i showed you earlier i'm going to drag the handle for the right keyframe over here over to the left like this so that it starts off a little bit faster and then feathers out and smoothens out to a slower stop uh on the left side i'm going to actually drag it like this so that it goes really fast and then slows down so i'm going to click the graph editor again so i can see this normal timeline again and i'm going to play it from the very beginning now i don't want to sidetrack too much but you might be wondering that in this workspace what is this green stuff happening and why is it empty over here there's some green over here like what is this what it is is the ram cache so it shows you which part is stored on your ram for faster playback so basically these parts that are you know not green right now basically it's not stored on your ram yet so if i were to hit spacebar it might take a little bit of time to ram preview where it will store the preview onto your ram so when it's all green like this it'll mean that it'll play just fine very smooth and it won't have some choppy playback and if you ever find that your computer's slowing down a little bit and it's really hard on your ram you can always purge whatever store on your ram right now by going to edit purge and then all memory and disk cache and it'll show you how much space you can delete off your disk cache so i can hit ok and as you can see it all goes great except this one frame that the playhead is sitting on and we're just going to go back to the very beginning over here and then we're just going to hit spacebar again where it will play back quite smoothly but that is how you play back your video and make sure that it plays smooth and it's not playing like super choppy or anything like that or if that were to happen you know exactly what it could be so right now we only have the position of our shape animated but although we hid our text layer we haven't forgotten about it let's turn it back on by hitting the eye icon like this and it's not animated because we haven't set any keyframes to it and instead of adding keyframes to that text layer what we can do is parent the layer to the shape layer and how you can do that is by clicking this pick width this one that looks like a swirl right over here is this parent pick whip i'm gonna hold it down i'm gonna drag it over to the rectangle layer because that's the one with the keyframes and i'm gonna let go and as you can see in the box over here it says the name of the layer that it's parented to so the parent layer is the shape layer and the child layer is now the text layer basically the child has to listen to the parent so if the parent layer is keyframed and moves around then the text layer will follow it as you can see when i'm scrubbing through the playhead and if i were to hit spacebar boom the text follows the shape layer now this is really useful if you have like multiple layers let's say that i have like you know a bunch of text layers like this so parenting them all to one layer that has the keyframes and it's animated will save you time from having to keyframe each and every one of these layers so i'm just going to undo that and parenting only works for transformation options like position scale and rotation so that's something that you'll want to keep in mind now we're going to be parenting something later again in the tutorial so try your best not to forget about this feature all right so our shape and our text is now animated and what we're going to learn next is how to pre-compose your layers now what is pre-composing what that means is it's going to basically group the layers into its own composition so what i'll do is i'll highlight the layers that i want to pre-compose which are these two right over here the text layer in the shape layer i'm going to hit the shortcut ctrl shift c and it'll bring up this window which says pre-compose and i can change the name of the composition in this case i'll call it a pop-up like this and then we're going to make sure that we move all the attributes into the new composition and basically once i hit ok it's going to create this composition called pop-up and inside that composition i'm going to double click it so i can open it up and as you can see a new tab opens up next to the main composition we were working in and in that composition is now the text and the rectangle so this is a really useful feature if you want to keep your composition neat and tidy without like a bunch of layers in one composition and this is also useful if you want to apply effects or do certain things to everything that was pre-composed as an example let's do the next step i'm gonna go back to the main composition by clicking the tab over here like this and as you can see in the timeline we have the pop-up composition that we pre-composed and also the footage layer that we are hiding the visibility of so we can't see it yet now with the pop-up layer highlighted and selected like this i'm going to take one of these shape tools i'm just going to keep it to the rounded rectangle tool and we're going to draw a mask around our pre-comp pre-comp is short for pre-composition now remember how we use this tool to draw this rounded rectangle earlier when we highlight a layer and we have the shape tool selected it allows you to draw a mask and masking lets you choose which specific parts of the layer you want to be visible so in this case we'll draw one that's around the graphic like this and basically everything within this mask will be visible so i'm just going to go to the beginning over here and if i play that back by hitting spacebar as you can see it's basically hidden so that we don't see anything that's outside of this mask just like that and i don't have to use the shape tool i can hit ctrl z so that we don't have a mask anymore i can actually use the pen tool as well to draw a shape and with the layer selected as you can see it's highlighted i can also just you know draw a shape like this and then close it off like that and that creates a mask as well so if i were to play it from the beginning if i just scrub through it as you can see that line is kind of that dividing point where everything within that mask will show up and if i wanted to invert this so basically everything past that line outside of that mask would be visible then instead of this being add right now so this is the mask that was created it's called mask one right now right now it's set to add so that everything within the mask is showing up if i click that and then click subtract everything outside of that mask will show up so once it goes into that mess that we drew it just becomes invisible so in this case i'm going to delete that mask just like that i'm going to go back to the rounded rectangle tool just as a bit of a refresher and i'm going to draw the area that i want to show that's visible and masking is one of those essential tools that i use for basically a hundred percent of what i do in after effects now i'm noticing that this animation is a little bit slow it's like a slow slide in kind of deal and i want it to be happening a little bit faster so what i can do is go back to the pre-comp so i can click the tab over here that says pop-up or i can double-click this doesn't matter it'll bring me back to this composition and then i'm going to highlight the rounded rectangle tool hit p to bring up the position because that's the one that i keyframed and i'm going to just drag this keyframe so that the end position will reach sooner so if i play this back it'll be a little bit faster let's actually make it a little bit faster like this and because this text layer is parented over here i don't have to change any other keyframes other than this one over here and that's another very convenient result of parenting things so i'm happy with speed let's go back to the main comp and i can see how it looks like with it masked as well so with our basic animation complete let's have it stick onto the controller on the footage that i just hid so let's turn that visibility back on and this is the controller that i'm talking about and we're gonna try and stick this animation onto this so see how the controller is moving around we're gonna make it so that follows along the controller now you know about keyframing positions but thankfully we don't have to manually shift the positions of the graphic frame by frame because can you imagine how painful that would be i'm going to teach you the simplest way to track in after effects using the built-in tracker and basically we're going to track the movement of the controller and then have this graphic follow it along now when you become a bit more experienced i recommend using a built-in plug-in called mocha ae for more accurate tracking and for more tools but for pretty simple tracking jobs where there's not like huge motion or anything like that then using the one in after effects is just fine so i'm gonna hide this graphic layer for now so i'm gonna turn off the visibility so i can just pay attention to this footage and with this footage layer highlighted like this we're gonna go to the tracking panel should be on the right over here but i don't see it so remember how we can bring up windows that we don't see is by going to the window up top over here and then we're going to go to tracker and once i click that it'll show up this panel on the bottom right and this is your tracker panel and what we'll be doing is tracking the motion so we're going to hit track motion like this and it'll bring up a new window now remember in the preview window uh it was showing our composition but right now this is actually not the composition that we're looking at as you can see it's a new tab next to the composition and this is the layers source footage so we're not looking at the composition and you're not going to see any effects that have been applied to it you're just looking at the footage layer and here is where we have our first tracking point over here and as you can see back onto the panel over here right now it's tracking just the position but if we look back at this footage over here it kind of rotates a little bit as you can see to the right and then to the left and we're making a little bit tricky for ourselves so what we can do is also track the rotation so if i hit that you're gonna notice that there are now two tracking points like this and let me talk about what these tracking points are and how to use them so let's just focus on tracking point one so zooming in just like this you're gonna notice that each tracking point will have two tracking boxes now the inner box right over here with the cross in the middle that's going to determine the particular area which you want to track the motion of in the outer box will help search for the tracking point through each frame of the footage so we're going to zoom out and we're going to find a point for the area that we want to track so in this case i'm going to click down and drag over this box over to this area because i feel like this is a pretty big spot for it to track and i think that might do for this example so i'm just gonna stretch it out like that and then i'm going to move the box so that it fits in the parameters of this light and then i can make this second box a little bit bigger like so and i'll just kind of search within that area and we have the second tracking point and it's basically the same thing but i need to find another point so i can determine the rotation so in this case another thing that doesn't quite move around is my finger but in your case whatever footage that you're using you kind of want to use something that's around the same area so in this case something like this button would work really good because it's part of the controller and this is this first tracking point is also attached to the controller so that will work fine but for this particular footage it's actually not good because in the beginning over here i kind of block the button over here so it's going to have some trouble tracking it so i'm going to go back over here i'm going to move that tracking point over to my finger over here because my finger has been staying on the controller the entire time and i'm just going to have it track my finger like that so i have two tracking points so once you're happy with the positions of your tracking points what you can do now is go back to the panel over here and you can analyze your footage and as you can see this is analyzed over here and you can click these buttons and what it'll basically do is create keyframes for every frame and track the area that you've determined with your boxes so what you can do is you can analyze backwards like this or you can analyze forward or you can analyze frame by frame so you can click this one to analyze one frame forward or one frame backwards so in this case my playhead is right over here right so i'm going to need to analyze backwards for the rest of the footage and then i'm going to have to go back over here and analyze forward as well so i'm going to first analyze backwards and let after effects work hard and create its keyframes so i'm going to hit spacebar to stop it because as you can see here the tracking points get a little wonky and it basically slips off and drifts off the point of where i want to track because the controller starts going out of focus but because my animation isn't going to be coming in at this point i don't need to worry about this but i do want to quickly touch on how you can adjust your tracking points so if something like this happens where it slips off whatever you're tracking you can manually change the position so in this case i can just drag it over back to the finger like this i can drag this box over so that it fits the light just like that and then that will fix the position so you can do this frame by frame and how you can move frame by frame instead of dragging this playhead left and right a quick shortcut is to hit page up like this to go a frame backwards or page down to go forwards so i'm gonna hit page up so you can go back and as you can see the tracking box is nowhere near this light because it's out of focus so it's giving it a hard time and it doesn't know what to do so we're gonna move it manually like this move this back to the finger and as you can see if i play it back and forth it follows the movement because we're manually moving the boxes but i'm not going to do it for the rest of the footage because like i said i'm not going to be having the animation happen during that time but if you ever find yourself in that situation you now know how to do it so i want to find the point where i can start analyzing forward now i can either play and then you know find the point where it stops moving around or i can go to the layer over here and i can hit u and the shortcut u will show you all the things that have keyframes so in this case i have two tracking points and showing all the keyframes that it has made so far so i can go back to the point over here where there's no more keyframes going forward and i can go back to the panel over here so that i can analyze forward and then once i click it after effects continues to work hard and analyze the rest of the footage [Music] awesome so i can see that the playhead is all the way to the end and i've got all these lovely keyframes so it is done analyzing i'm going to highlight the layer i'm going to hit u again so that i don't see all those key frames it gets a little overwhelming and intimidating seeing all those keyframes sometimes and i'm going to go to an empty spot on my composition i'm going to right click and i'm going to go to new and then i'm going to go to null object and click that and it's going to create a null object now what this is is an invisible layer that you can set properties to and then parent other layers to it so in this case we're going to transfer all the tracking data over to the null object so over in the tractor panel right over here we're going to click edit target so that's going to change where we want to apply all the keyframes to and we're going to change it to null number one that's our null object and then we're going to hit ok and then we're ready to click apply and that's as i said before apply all the keyframes and we're going to make sure that it will apply the x and y axis now you can always change this to x only or y only but in this case we want to make sure that it follows along with the movement of it moving up and down and left and right so when i hit ok and then now as you can see on this null object there's a bunch of this tracking data and then we can rename this to something like tracking oh my i need to start a counter on how many times i misspell things and then now all we're going to do is we're going to enable the visibility of our pop-up layer right over here this is our animation and we're going to find a point like over here and then we're going to parent the layer over to the null object that tracking layer and by letting go just like that i can play through and scrub through and as you can see the movement of the graphic follows the movement of the controller that we tracked earlier pretty amazing right and definitely beats keyframing frame by frame so i'm going to hide whatever's showing me in this tracking layer right over here and i'm gonna click the pop-up layer i'm gonna hit s which will bring up the scale that's a shortcut for bringing up scale and we're going to rescale it so it's a little bit smaller and we're going to just drag it over so it's closer to the controller like this and if we play it through it's now looking a little bit better and i want to make sure that the animation happens when i click down onto the button so that's when the message should be appearing so something like right over here i'm going to play through boom that's when the message comes up pretty cool right but something does look kind of off about this animation now it's not really facing the same way as this controller as you can see the controller is angled slightly off meanwhile our graphic is facing towards camera and straight on so what we're going to do is change this layer this pop-up layer into a 3d object now i won't be covering much about 3d objects in after effects but i will be touching the very basics of it so how you turn this into a 3d object is by going to this column over here so this is the 3d layer so as you can read the description it says that allows the layer to be manipulated in three dimensions so going down that column you want to make sure that you click that checkbox and that will enable some new parameters over here now if i just close this and open it again you can see that there are more numbers to work with now if you're like me and you're not good at math and you don't like looking at numbers all the time this can be a little bit overwhelming but luckily there's not too much that's different what we want to play around here with is the rotation we want to rotate it so it's facing somewhat the same angle as the controller and what we can do is hit r and that's a shortcut for rotation so as a bit of a recap for shortcuts p will bring up position s will bring up scale and then r will bring up rotation and instead of just one parameter of rotation that we can change we can now rotate on three different axis the x rotation which will rotate kind of like this as you can see from the preview window and then we can also animate from the y-axis like this and we can also rotate on the z-axis so in this case we're trying to angle it so slightly uh in the same angle as the controller so i think that's the y rotation that's the one i'll play with and i can just angle it slightly off kind of like this and then make a bit of a readjustment on my z-axis like so and i can always move this down a little bit by dragging onto the green arrow over here and it's just that if you ever move things around in 3d space to drag it from the arrows instead of like dragging like this otherwise some weird things can happen so in this case i'm just going to shift it down by the y axis so i can have it aligned with the controller so that i can kind of fine tune it and make sure that it's closer to being aligned and then i can just move it back to where it was before like this and i'm pretty happy with this i think this looks pretty good hit ctrl s so i can save my progress and make sure that nothing bad happens now for this particular footage and this graphic as you can see it kind of doesn't stick very well with the controller and that's just because the footage that i'm using doesn't give a lot of points that give you a great track but as you can still see after effects does a pretty good job it does most of the bulk work so i want to make sure that the end position over here matches the controller and how i'm going to do that is by keyframing so i'm going to look to the point where it looks pretty normal so kind of over here this is still okay i'm going to click the layer the pop-up layer over here hit p to bring up the position and when i hit the stopwatch so i create a keyframe over here and i'm also going to change the rotation now if i want to show the position and the rotation at the same time because if i were to hit r right now it'll just show me the rotations but i don't see the position anymore what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit p again so i can see the position i'm going to hold down shift and i'm going to hit r and then now that'll bring up the rotation parameters along with the position right over here so that can come pretty handy if you want to look at more parameters at the same time so i'm going to keyframe the z rotation as well by hitting the stopwatch and as you can see two keyframes are created over here this one for the position this one for the z rotation i'm going to move forward to the point where it looks kind of off which is kind of like over here and i'm going to just kind of rotate it back so it's aligned with the controller and then i'm going to move the pop-up so it's a line more centered to the controller as well and then i'm just going to highlight them hit f9 so it easy ease the movement in case it's any sharp movement that i don't want and then if i play it through it's aligned a little bit better now it looks like there's some movement over here which i don't really want so i'm going to move these keyframes kind of like around here and that looks a little more natural so i'm going to zoom back out and i'm going to see if anything weird looks like it happens i think it's actually kind of off over here so i'm going to move these keyframes by just dragging it kind of like this and as you can see that's how easy it is to shift your keyframes around just highlight them and then move them and if i play it through look at that you've essentially done the bulk work in making a sick animation that is tracked to your object so i congratulate you if you've made it this far because you've learned most of the tools you'll be using on a regular basis but we're not quite done yet we still want to add some things to actually make it look good so the next thing i want to talk about are blending modes now blending modes control how each layer will blend with the layers underneath and how you change the blending mode for a layer is that if you don't see a window that gives you that option what you can do is click this button that says toggle switches and modes and when you click that it'll show you some new parameters over here and as you can see this says mode which is your blending modes and you go to the layer that you want to change the blending mode of which in this case is the pop-up composition when i click that normal and you'll see all these words and boy there are a lot of them but i'm gonna break down the ones you'll be using the most but to break things down simply without going too much into detail of each blending mode i'm gonna break them down into different sections at least the ones you'll be using most often and you'll also notice that there's this gray dividing line between certain sections as well so starting from here where it starts with darken all the way to darker color these basically make the brighter parts of your layer transparent from add to lighter color right over here this section this will make the darker parts transparent and then starting from overlay over to hard mix this section over here it'll make the grays transparent and then starting from difference to divide this will display the difference between the colors and the tones of your layer now in this case we're going to hit screen like that and as you can see basically it makes it look a little bit translucent and brightens up the parts over here where it overlaps with the finger so i'm going to hit ctrl z so you can see the difference and then ctrl shift z will redo what i did so you compare the two and giving it that translucent look makes it look a little more like a hologram and if you're ever not sure of which blending mode you should use you can always experiment to see which gives you the best result and a quick way to do that is by having the layer highlighted like this and then hold down shift and hit the subtract or plus button and what this does is it will go down the list of blending modes so you can see which one gives you the best results but in this case i'm going to go back to screen because i think that's what's going to be most appropriate for this and for a cool holographic effect like this it's only natural that the graphic would glow if it's light being projected from the controller and as the name after effects implies you can add some effects to help you do this now we're going to go to an effects and presets panel and as i mentioned before if you don't see it it's usually on the right side you can go to window and then you can go to effects and presets like this and it'll bring up this new panel over here and you can search up an effect that you can apply from after effects in this case we're going to add a glow so we're going to type that in and we're going to scroll down until we find the one that is under stylized and it says glow and we're going to click that we're going to hold it down we're going gonna drag it over the layer that we want to apply the effect to in this case the pop-up layer so i'm gonna let go and then a new panel shows up on the left side over here it's right next to the project panel and this effects control panel will show all the effects that have been applied to the layer and in this case it's just the glow now under glow there are a lot of parameters that you can change but in this case all we're going to do is we're going to play with the glow radius and that'll determine how far it'll spread so that looks pretty good and then we can change the glow intensity as well kind of like that so i'm going to adjust it until it looks pretty good like this that gives a soft glow and the trick to having a really good glow is by actually duplicating the effect so i'm going to hit ctrl d while i have the effect highlighted and it will make a second glow like this and this is looking a little bit bright but what we're going to do is we're going to increase the glow radius like this and then we're going to bring down the glow intensity so basically it gives a softer spread to the glow and then we can always adjust this a little bit and then i can duplicate it one more time so i have three glows and i'm going to increase the glow radius even more and bring down the glow intensity so now if i zoom out as you can see there's quite a nice glow on this graphic that we created so if i play it through from the beginning this is what it looks like now one detail you should definitely remember is how to enable motion blur now depending on what you do enabling motion blur can give it a more natural look so i'm gonna go back to the pop-up composition that's right over here and if i play this through it's looking really clean right now if i add a motion blur this is what it'll end up looking like so i'm going to go to the column over here that says motion blur okay it's like a bunch of circles and diagonal like this and i'm going to enable both of them and a quick way for me to do that without clicking them individually by the way so i'm going to unclick it is if i click and hold down and then drag my mouse down and then let go it'll highlight everything towards the direction that i bring my cursor to so in this case both of them are enabled and although motion blur is enabled on these layers you want to make sure that it is actually enabled by having this icon highlighted blue like this so if i turn that off it will disable motion blur so even though it's toggled on these layers you won't be able to see it but i want to make sure it's actually highlighted and then if i play it from the beginning like this you can see that there's a bit of a blur during the motion of the graphic that's moving upwards so if i just scrub through it as you can see there's a bit of a blur right and it basically replicates the blur that would happen in real life if there's motion happening in front of you now if i go back to the main composition and i want to enable motion blur for this pop-up layer and i don't see that window remember we can click the button toggle switches and modes and then we can look for that icon right over here this column click that and that will enable motion blur for this composition as well so if i play it through from the beginning boom there's a bit of a blur and it's a really nice detail to make your animation look more realistic as you can see if i zoom in because it's rotating along with the controller there's a bit of a blur along that motion now now as i mentioned before if you ever want to make changes to your animation or add more elements to your animation then you can go back to the pre comp make any changes without affecting the glow or the tracking data so in this case let's say that i wanted to change the color of this rounded rectangle so right now it's blue let's make it something like i don't know like orange like this and hit ok so now it's an orange outline but if i go back to the main composition it also changes to orange and the glow and the tracking is still applied to the pre comp now in this precomp you can also add more shapes or text or import other footage or animations that you have in this case i'm going to be adding some animations from my motion graphic pack that i handcrafted called enter the future it includes a variety of assets you can use for your music videos commercials live streams narrative films you name it it also comes with a tutorial on how to use it even if you're a beginner in after effects so if you need transitions borders or custom text animations to give your video a modern edge i recommend checking it out so quick recap on how to import things you can just highlight whatever that you want and then you can just drag and drop it into your project and then i'm going to drag that into a folder like this on the folder icon and then call it enter the future assets like this and then while i'm making new folders i can also highlight these two put in a new folder and call it compositions like this nice and neat so in this case i'm going to make this a little bit smaller so i have more room to drop in more things i'm going to hit s so i can rescale it down like this and then of course that will affect this as well but that's okay and then i'm going to drop something like this loading bar over onto my timeline or i can directly drop it onto my composition like this and what i'm going to do is i'm going to trim the layer so it starts over here where it says zero percent by hitting alt left bracket like that so it'll appear during that time right and then i can shift this over so it happens a little bit earlier i'm going to have it happen right when this initiating box is about to stop and then i'm going to rescale it so it's just kind of like over here on the top right corner and actually instead of having it appear suddenly like this but what i'm going to do is i'm going to keyframe the opacity so remember the shortcut for that is t t for opacity and then we're going to hit the stopwatch so right now it's at 100 but i'm going to actually have it kind of like flicker in so i'm going to go one frame back like this and change the opacity to 50 percent go back one more and then go back to 100 like this go go back one go to zero go back one more and then go to 100. so what happens is that at the beginning of this clip it will be at 100 opacity it'll go to zero then 100 then 50 and then 100. so if i play this through it looks like it flickers on and i can always move these keyframes over a little bit like this and then trim the layer by dragging it from the edge like so and then move the layer so all of this happens as soon as that comes to a stop like this so this is what my animation looks like so far now i'm going to see which one i want to use next and if i want to preview it and have it play back because i don't remember how the asset looks like i can double click it like this and then it'll open up a new tab right over here and as i mentioned before this shows the source footage so i can see that this plays back and this is what it looks like let's load up another one like over here and let's use this one so i'm going to go back to my composition window right over here i'm going to drop in this animation like this hit s so i can rescale it because i think this is looking a little bit too big and then i'm going to align it kind of like over here now because this is like really long and i kind of want to keep everything contained over here i'm going to mask the area that i actually want to keep visible so i guess this whole section of the tutorial is a good recap of all the tools that we were using earlier so i'm going to go to the shape tool like this right now is the rounded rectangle tool which is totally fine and i'm going to draw a rectangle around where i want to keep which i think something like this is okay and i think i'm going to hit v so i go back to the selection tool and then i'm going to move that inside over here and i can always scale down the animation kind of like this and i can always make changes to the mask what i'm going to do is i'm going to double click on one of these points like this and it will select the entire mask and drag this over like so drag it over to the other end like this and if it's not lining up to the edges of this border over here i can have it so that it's underneath the rounded rectangle like this because remember the visibility goes from top to bottom so because this rounded rectangle is on top of this tape layer as you can see it's basically stacked on top and it doesn't show the edges of that tape animation anymore now because this is over here i'm going to move the initiating text up top like this so it fills up the space a little bit nicer now if i play it through as you can see the tape animation does not follow the box so can you guess what we're going to do next that's right we are going to parent it over to the rectangle like this by holding on to the parent pick whip and dragging it over to the rectangle like so and then now it follows the box so that's essentially how you make adjustments in your precomp and then if i go back to the main composition and as you can see the new elements are showing up so the next animation i'm going to drop in is this i one and i'm just going to quickly reposition it and rescale it and not go too into detail with the tools you already know and as i mentioned before you can also add in graphics as well or still images so these animations are mov files as you can see the extension over here but this one is a png file so it's a still image i'm going to drop it in and it works the same way all i have to do is reposition it to something else and then i'm going to hit r so i'm going to bring up the rotation and i can change it to something like 90 degrees hit s again and rescale it and then just get it to something that i'm happy with and just put it right over here like that and i feel like this is a little bit distracting i can always hit t so i bring up my opacity and let's change it to something like 20 so it's really subtle and the only accent color here is this orange and it's only happening with this box over here but if i want to change the color of this eye for example i can add an effect called tint so remember how you apply effects you go to the effects and presets panel over here i'm going to change that so that it says tint like that and then under color correction tint i can take that i can hold it down and drag it over to the eye over here and that'll open up this effects control panel and for this particular effect we're going to map the white so everything that's white in this animation we're going to change it to this color over here how i'm going to do that is i'm going to click this eyedropper tool if i click it once basically it's going to choose the color that it wants to change it to which in this case is the color of this box if i click it just like that it changes the eye to orange now right now as you can see it's not animated so i'm going to have it kind of flicker in just like this loading bar and the nice thing about keyframes is that you can copy and paste them over to different layers as well so i'm going to click this loading bar layer hit t so i can bring up these keyframes i'm going to highlight these keyframes by clicking down onto an empty space dragging over them so i can highlight them so that they're all blue hit ctrl c so i can copy it and then i'm going to go to the eye layer over here and then hit ctrl v and i paste the parameters now you don't see them right now because the opacity isn't opened up so i'm going to hit t and then now i can just drag them over so that it either matches over here or have it offset just a little bit like that so as you can see the i'm animation flickers but i'm going to trim it so that it happens around here as for the still image right over here i'm going to apply the same thing i'm going to hit ctrl v okay and i'm going to make sure that the end opacity over here is set to whatever i had before i think it was something like 30 or maybe 20 and then trim the layer just like what i did and then we'll just kind of offset it a little bit kind of like this so now when i zoom out and i play from the very beginning they just kind of flicker in and i can always readjust the time for these layers by highlighting all of them and just clicking and dragging them over so that they appear a little bit sooner so once i'm happy with this i can go back to the main composition and see how it looks and as you can see this eye is kind of chopped off and the reason is because we have a mask over a pre-comp so if i select that and then i can see this pink mask over here i can click the points that i want to move so in this case i'm clicking this point and then if i want to click this one as well then i have to hold down shift and then i can select multiple points in this case just these two are highlighted right now and i'm just going to shift it up a little bit so that we can see the eye just like that now it's a little bit bright so i'm just going to change the opacity for that by hitting t go to like 95 still looking a little bright let's go to 85 percent now this is looking like it's a part of the scene and then we'll scale it a little bit bigger because we scaled down earlier in our pre comp so if you're at a point where you are pleased with all the hard work that you put in and you want to actually have a video file you can upload it and share it with all your friends on youtube or instagram or something then how we do that is by exporting our composition into a video file how we do that is that within the composition over here we're going to hit the shortcut control m and that will bring up a new tab over here called the render queue and this is the composition that will be exported otherwise known as rendering so rendering and exporting basically means the same thing in this case and then you can change some of these options over here so render settings right now it's at best settings i don't need to touch that for output module though i can click this arrow and it'll show me some more options that i can pick from and basically have the video file in different qualities but in this case i'm going to click away i'm going to click the name of it and that'll bring up this output module settings and all this can look pretty confusing at first and there are a lot of export settings depending on what kind of quality you're looking for for your video now a format that kind of retains the quality quite well is something like this quicktime under this menu and then format options and you can click something like animation and that does a really good job in retaining the best quality of your video and you can hit ok and hit ok again and the thing about having high quality videos is that it'll take more space it'll be a pretty big file and if you're uploading something to the web like youtube or facebook then you can export to something that isn't as high quality because youtube will automatically compress whatever you upload anyways it'll just kind of dumb down the quality so what i like to do is cue it in ame which stands for adobe media encoder it's a separate program that will open up and then you can export from there but if you click it and it doesn't open up then maybe you haven't set your output to location so this is basically where you want to output the video file to so if i click the name over here so in this case i'm going to go to the exports folder over here and then i'm going to rename it to something like ae beginner tutorial export like this hit save and i'm going to hit the button q in ame and then this window will pop up which is adobe media encoder and then i have something that looks like my render queue earlier but i have it set to h.264 now i'm going to click one of these parameters like this one over here it might give you this window where it's basically loading up the information from after effects and then we open up this window and there's a lot of parameters that you can change and i'm not going to go through each and every one of these but to give you a good video file setting that you can upload straight onto something like youtube having the format to h.264 is a good standard you can change the preset as well and although there are a lot of options you can just choose high bitrate and under the basic video settings as you can see it's grayed out unless you were to uncheck it then you can change it but this is the resolution of the video that will be exported there's the frame rate and then all these other parameters that you can kind of ignore and then you can just hit ok and to have it actually export you're going to have to press this green play button over here on the right and that will start the queue we're going to click it once and as you can see it is rendering with this nice blue loading bar and as you can see over here there's a nice green check mark and the status is done so i can click that once and that will open up the folder that the video file is saved in and then as you can see it is a dot mp4 file which is a video file that can do whatever you want with it so double click it and you can admire the results of your amazing progress today congratulations guys if you have made it this far it means that you are now equipped with the most basic knowledge of after effects all those grey boxes and buttons don't look as intimidating anymore huh as you can see there are a lot of different tools that help you accomplish what you need in after effects now this particular application you'll learn today where you track a pop-up animation to an object can be useful if you're doing a product video that requires some cool text callouts or if you want to show a message pop-up from someone's phone now the possibilities are endless and only limited by your imagination you can actually put after effects as a skill on your resume without lying anymore because you graduated from the herman's after effects beginners course all right maybe i'm making it sound a little fancier than it actually is but everything that you continue to learn about after effects from now on will depend on the fundamental knowledge that you learned today the way i learned after effects wasn't from school or from a course but from youtube videos and tutorials like this one and if you want to improve quickly my number one piece of advice is to keep applying what you learn over and over again yes you have made a sick animation today that you should be proud of but it's only the beginning of many things that i hope you'll be creating in after effects each time you make a new thing just reapply the shape tool the text tool tracking masking keyframing etc that way it becomes just another language to you and you don't even need to think about how to use these tools anymore so you can focus on creating even more amazing things not sure if all that made sense but i hope it helps and that this tutorial helped you as well as i mentioned before if you'd like some sick motion graphic elements to add to your videos and make yourself look like a pro right away check out my pack called enter the future you can click the little pop-up for more information but it's something that i made for creators like you to give your videos a modern edge if you'd like to see more content like this from josh myself or other instructors on the channel then make sure that you subscribe to the olufami channel and click the bell notification so you don't miss the next video also drop a link in the comments below of the video that you made after watching this tutorial so that everyone can check it out or drop a comment of what you would like to make in after effects and if you want to stay in touch or see what i'm personally up to check out my instagram the handle is at coffeelicker that is it guys again my name is herman and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Olufemii

Views: 159,039

Keywords: how to video edit, video editing, video production, tutorial, video editing tutorial, olufemii tutorials, olufemiitutorials, easy video editing tutorial, video editing tips, video editing basics, how to edit, how to learn after effects, after effects, adobe after effects, learn after effects, after effects masterclass, after effects for beginners, beginner after effects tutorial, after effects animation, after effects 2021, after effects 2021 tutorial

Id: mjBb6ZqNuD0

Length: 76min 56sec (4616 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021