Learn After Effects fast! Crash Course for Beginners Tutorial 2021

did you lie on your cv and say that you knew after effects when in actuality you don't we've all been there well actually i haven't because i have crippling anxiety and imposter syndrome and i do not need to be exacerbating that but if that is you or if you're just plain old impatient which i can relate to because i am very impatient well it is your lucky day because i'm about to give you a crash course on after effects and show you the basics of all the stuff that you will need to know to trick people into thinking that you are very well versed in this program i'm gonna introduce you to the interface and the tools that you'll use the most often as an animator or motion graphics designer you're gonna know it so well that you'll probably be promoted before the end of the week you're welcome so let's open it up once you have it open it's pretty barren at first a desolate gray wasteland waiting for your creativity to come fill it up with some sexy motion graphics and animation these two options here are pretty self-explanatory either create a new blank composition or create a composition around some existing footage you have so if you choose that option the settings will be set to match the footage if you don't have video footage you're working with you'll need to set up your composition settings like we'll do right now so you just click on that and now you need to know what specs you need to be working at so if you're working for a company or a client you need to know what aspect ratio resolution and frame rate you're working at and the length of the video or at least find out from them what they're using the video for so you can work it out for yourself what they'll need standard settings are usually hd square pixels 1920 by 1080 resolution that's a 16 by 9 aspect ratio with a frame rate of 24 frames per second you can use the hd tv 1080 24 setting for that which is in this drop down some places may prefer 25 frames per second or maybe you're doing something for like an instagram post that needs to be square or for tik tok which needs to be in a portrait layout so you really need to find out the specific specifications of your output once you have that and you've named your composition something relevant don't forget to name your composition please that is like a cardinal sin i'm gonna name mine right now quickly i'm gonna call it the flying striper main comp because this will be my main composition the thing i'm animating is called a flying striper so now you can just click ok once you've got all your settings laid out for you now your composition is all set up it opens here in this view panel this is where you're going to see everything now mine opened up to the effect controls here because i was previously using that but yours will probably open up on this project panel over here and you'll see your main composition over there this is this this composition is where we are currently at and this is your project panel so let me show you where everything actually is so like i said this is your project panel where you'll have all the stuff you've imported and all your compositions and the components of your project you've got your toolbar at the top with all these icons for the different tools that you can use and also there are more tools in these menus along the top over here on your right hand side as you can see here i've got the effects and presets panel there's an audio panel all sorts of stuff over here in these and you can just click on one to drop it down and take a look at what it does if there's anything over here that you need that isn't showing in one of these drop downs you can also go over to window and see over here there's a list of stuff that is unticked you can choose one of those and it will appear over here this is also dependent on what workspace you're in so at the moment i've got it set to all panels because i don't know i just like it that way but you can set it to all different workspaces and you can see how the workspace changes to be optimal for that thing that you're using it for i'm just going to go here to window workspace and set it back to all panels and at the bottom here this is your timeline panel and this is where all your layers will be and where you'll set your keyframes and make adjustments to the layers that you're working with so i'm just going to save my file now so you go to file save as and then you just save your file this is now the third time i'm recording this video so i'm just going to save over the last one that i did save because of course you know i recorded this on halloween i think it was maybe a little bit coast because the first time my microphone wasn't working the second time the overlay for the keyboard was not working so you guys couldn't see what hotkeys i was using so hopefully third time is the charm i can tell you right now that i'm not gonna re-record this if i've stuffed something up again so once your composition is set up and your file has a name and a place to live you can start importing your stuff your graphic elements renders audio and whatever else that you're going to be using over here on the left in the project panel where you'll see all of your compositions precomps footage audio any files you bring in and the compositions you can bring stuff in or import it by right clicking in this panel and then going to import and then file and then you'll be able to go and look for your file another way that you can import is if you go up here to where it says file in the toolbar and then import and file same story or you can just drag stuff in from a folder and dump it here so i'm just gonna right click import file and bring in my file which is an illustrator file if you're importing artwork from like photoshop or illustrator like i'm doing now it needs to have been layered in those files so that you can animate the layers independently otherwise it'll all come in as one layer so under import as where it says footage i'm going to change this to composition retain layer sizes i'm not using footage because it is not footage if i save footage then it's going to import it all as one layer it will give me an option after i save footage to either import it as merged layers so that's as one layer or to pick a layer but not to import all the layers at once so you don't want to do that and i'm going to use composition retain layer sizes because if i don't if i just import it as composition then every single layer is going to be the size of the composition which makes working with them really difficult so you want to make sure that it says retain layer sizes so that each layer is the size of the graphic on it it's not the size of the entire composition and the sequence options i'm going to leave that off because this is not a sequence it's not like a render.jpg sequence or a png sequence or anything like that it's just an artwork file and now that i've got all those settings done i'm going to just say import and it's going to bring it right in so now you see it has imported into our project you can see this over here this highlighted composition this is the one that we just imported and here are the layers for it these are all the artwork layers from the illustrator file if i want to open up this composition that i just brought in i can just select it here in the project panel double click and it will open up here in front of me and now we've got a new tab here in the timeline panel and this is where all the layers are of this guy now if you take a look at all his layers you can see that there is a hierarchy the layers on top are literally on top of the ones below them so what i mean by that is these wings here you can see that they're on top of the body because they're at the top of everything over here but if i drag them all the way to the bottom now they're behind everything so there is a hierarchy of layers the layers that are on top are literally on top you're going to see them first and above all the other layers so let's go back to this project panel over here where these things imported now you see what i mean by this is where everything you've brought into your project gets stored a lot of the time this is going to be just full of stuff that you've brought into your file you should always keep this project panel neat and tidy and organized to trick people into thinking you're a grown-up professional who's got their together if they ever look in your file or need to work with it also because it'll just make your life way easier so what you can do firstly is name your compositions properly and also you can create little folders that you can put things in so all your audio stuff can go into an audio folder or your pre-compositions can go into a precomps folder and the way you can do that is make sure you're in the project panel with your mouse right click and say new folder and you can make a new folder so i'm going to call this precomps because i'm going to put all the precomps in here there's going to be a few and i'm also going to make one called artwork i'm going to show you another way that you can make folders is just by going here to this icon create a new folder and i'm going to call that artwork and i'm going to put all these layers these artwork layers into there so now if i happen to bring in any other photoshop files or illustrator files or anything like that i would put them into this artwork folder and any pre-comps i make are going to go into this pre-comps folder now speaking of pre-comps what i'm going to do is bring this composition down into this main composition so i just grab it and i drag it down into the composition and now i've got this comp inside this comp and now because i put a composition inside another composition that's a nested composition otherwise known as a pre-composition so i'm going to bring this guy into the pre-comps folder because now it's a pre-comp it's a composition within a composition the reason i'm doing this is because it does have quite a few layers making him up and if i put them into this main composition along with the background animation and text animation and anything else i might do in this composition it's gonna get really really messy and overwhelming to have that many layers in this composition as a general rule if you have a character or a creature or any sort of graphic that has a lot of components that go with it it's often a good idea to have it within its own nested composition or pre-composition just to keep your main composition as tidy as possible it's really handy to use pre-comps or nested comps where it makes sense to keep things tidy and also it makes it a lot easier to make changes and adjustments a lot of the time and you can reuse the same composition in a number of other compositions so the timeline like i said before is where you'll see all your layers just like in here and it's where you're going to be basically making magic being a boss you'll be adding your effects keyframes moving layers around whatever in your timeline panel and that's what we're going to do now you can move and scale and rotate your layers down here in the timeline panel by making sure it's selected and just hitting this little drop down over here and you've got all your transform properties you can also i'm going to deselect it now just by clicking randomly outside of this work area but you can also select it in here and do stuff with it like that so either way you can either select it down here if there's a lot of stuff in your composition it can get a little difficult to select stuff in the comp viewing area so you can either do it here or here there are also hotkeys that you can obviously use for these properties so if i collapse that back if i hit p i can animate the position if i hit s that isolates the scale property r is for rotation and t is for opacity so you can isolate those and that also makes the workflow a lot quicker if you're just working with one property at a time so for your graphic to move and be animated you need to use keyframes keyframes tell it where it needs to be at what time in the timeline so let's do some animating here so i want to make this guy fly across the screen of my main comp it's much easier just to animate the pre-comp here in this main composition for that so that it can move right across the entire screen because you see the pre-composition here is not the same size as this main composition so it wouldn't make sense to animate it flying across the small part of screen when the main comp has a much wider screen so i'm going to go here make sure the layer is selected and i'm going to press p to isolate the position property and i'm going to drag this guy right over off the edge of the screen because i want him to fly in from off the edge of the screen and now to make a keyframe all i do is i go over here to this little stopwatch looking guy and i just click it and now i've made my first keyframe this little blue diamond it's blue because it's selected right now if i deselect it it's gray so that diamond is a keyframe and now i'm going to move forward to one second on this timeline i use this timeline indicator to move forward and tell after effects where i want to make the next keyframe and i'm just going to grab him and i'm going to move him across the screen and now it made another keyframe for me automatically so if i go back to the beginning and i press spacebar so that i can see the animation it's going to cache that's this little green thing over here and then it's going to play the animation so spacebar and he flies across the screen there you go red right you can adjust keyframes and timing just by literally grabbing them and moving them up and down so if i move it further away he's going to fly across slower if i move it closer he's going to fly across a lot quicker and that's how keyframes work it's actually super easy i'm going to bring it back there so that it's just one second as it flies across so spacebar is to preview your animation but you can also go over onto the right hand side here over to preview and you've got little play buttons and stuff here in different settings for playing like play around the current time play in the work area the entire duration whatever so you can play around with those settings too and see what suits you but i prefer to just use spacebar because it's a lot easier and quicker so sometimes the caching is going to take quite long like i said it's that green bar across the small green line that's to show that this entire part has cached but if you have a lot of effects and layers and stuff that after effects needs to process it's going to take quite a long time to cache i mean sometimes it's ridiculous then you can just go and drop the resolution over here where it says full at the moment because i'm working with full res you can just drop it to a half a third or quarter or whatever and that means that it's a much lower resolution if you can see here he's quite blurry and pixelated now because i've dropped it only to a quarter resolution you can work a lot quicker because there's less pixels and less information for after effects to process if you want to delete a keyframe you just select it and can you guess can you guess what you do you press delete and there it goes there goes your keyframe but i didn't actually want to delete that so i'm just going to say control z which is the standard undo for most programs and there we go we have it back so we've got him zooming across the screen now yeah cool it's whatever it's fine but his timing is super linear like he just goes across all at the same timing and how you can actually see timing is these little dots on this path this animation path each of these is basically a keyframe and they are very evenly spaced at the moment there's no difference in timing so what we want to do now to make it look a little bit better is to select both these keyframes and put some easy ease on them this means he starts the movement out slower and then speeds up a bit and then ends it a bit slower so he eases in and then he eases out of the movement and that just makes the animation look a lot better and more natural you can either press f9 or you can right click say keyframe assistant and say easy ease and now it's added some easy ease there and if you can see here the dots on this animation path they've gotten a lot closer together there at the beginning then they spread out over here as the animation gets quicker and then it eases back in as it comes to a stop and they get closer together over there so that's how you can see that the easy ease has worked because you see that the timing now has changed a bit i'm actually going to turn this back up to four rays and let's play it through now spacebar to play so he sort of comes in a bit slower then zooms across and then eases out a little bit as he comes to the end and i think that looks a lot better you can also change the animation path the course of the path so if you want to give it an arc which you know is highly suggestible you can use these handles over here on the path to make a little arc you know arcs are your friend you should always use arcs in animation i'm just moving the path down a little bit here i've got both keyframes selected so both of them move when i grab and move it around if i just had one selected then just that one would move but because i had both both moved and now i've just moved them down a little bit in the position so he's flying across and it looks fine a little bit fast maybe i'm gonna just drag that keyframe out a bit that's a bit better but he could really do with some rotation because i mean it looks a bit silly the way he's going now with no rotation so i'm going to go back to the first keyframe because i want the rotation keyframe to align with that one and i'm going to press r that's the hotkey just to isolate rotation and i'm going to adjust the rotation over here i can see that it's changing because i can see the outline of the entire layer and i'm going to make a keyframe over there then i'm going to press u with the layer selected so that i can see the keyframes on the other properties that have already been keyframed which is just position for now and i'm going to press k to jump to that keyframe if i wanted to go back to this beginning keyframe i'll press j so j is to go to the keyframe before k is to go to the next keyframe on the timeline and i'm going to change the rotation now to be downwards and if i go back and play that [Music] i think that looks a lot better a lot more convincing let's put some easy ease on these just select them right click keyframe assistant easy ease so what i want to do now is to cheat some perspective a little bit so i'm going to have him start out big and then to make it look like he's flying a little bit away from the camera like into the distance he's going to scale down a bit and decrease a bit in opacity so i'm going to go back to the beginning again press s so that i've got the scale property i'm going to make a keyframe because i want him to start big so 100 scale is fine i'm going to press u to bring up all the keyframed properties which is position and rotation and i'm going to press k to hop to the last keyframes and then i'm going to bring the scale down a little bit over here quite a lot actually not a little bit so now he scales down as he flies i think we should put some easy ease on that too let's see how that looks yeah that's fine and now for the opacity so i'm going to press t for opacity hit the stopwatch so that i can make a keyframe press u to bring up all the other keyframe properties press k to jump along to the end keyframe and bring the opacity down a little bit there we go 45 and let's just put some easy ease on that too because a little bit of easy ease never hurt nobody and there we go he's just zooting along like that hey see how nicely flies across the screen does buzz oh we can actually add that as some text that'll be pretty cool right that could be a band name or something okay so the way you add text is that you just go up here to layer new and then text and you see there's an empty text layer that has now appeared here in the timeline panel and there's a little cursor there so that you can type in your text i'm just going to type it in wait i want capitals let me just select that and put that on for all caps go back there we go there we go now i've got my text okay but it's colliding a little bit with that guy so i'm going to bring it down a little bit just hit p for the position keyframe bring it down i'm not going to hit the stopwatch because i don't want to keyframe the position i just want to move it down a bit now i don't know if it's really center a line so what i can do here is go over to a line on this right hand panel over here click it to drop it down and you need to make sure you've got align layers too and that it says composition and not anything else because you want it to be aligned to the entire composition then i'm going to go to these two little blocks that are directly underneath each other and that's going to align it horizontally on the composition so if i press that you see it jumps to the middle and now that i know it's perfectly aligned to the middle of the comp so i've got this text now which is fine but i'm sure you want to know how to add some animation to some text like this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you two different ways that you can animate text obviously there's like a million different ways you can animate text but i'm going to show you one with the preset and a cool way that you can do it manually with a track mat so making sure this layer is selected i'm going to say control d to duplicate it so now i've got two copies of the same layer and i'm going to turn off the visibility of this bottom one which is just this little eyeball looking icon turn that off now you're like um we can't even see if you've turned it off or not because there was two of the same ones so to show you here see that is the visibility so now i've got this bottom one off i'm just going to work with this top one for now which is going to be the buzz buzz i'm going to put a mask over it so that it cuts out the bottom word so i'm going to go over here to rectangle tool click on that and i'm going to drag a rectangle out over that and you see now it's cut out the bottom part of that text it's made a mask over it so everything within that triangle now is visible the way masks work is that there are other settings you can use so if you've got like three or four masks on one layer you can have one subtracting from another one intersecting there's a bunch of different things you can do you can also invert it so that you know the inverse happens but i'm going to leave it on what it is for now so i'm going to put an animation preset onto this i'm going to go over here to the right hand side where it says effects and presets i'm going to go to animation presets and then text this drop down over here super convenient it has a whole section just for text i'm going to use animate in because i'm going to have the words animate in not animating out and i'm going to just choose a simple one um fade up words to have each word fade up so i literally just grab it drag it over and drop it on the layer and now i've got my words animating on like that just fading on nicely so if you wanted to adjust the keyframes like this while they look like this you're not going to have much luck what you need to do is just press u to make sure you get the keyframes on that layer and now you see that they're diamonds they're easy to move and you can adjust them just like you would any other keyframes just moving them along the timeline like that so using presets is that easy obviously some are a little bit more complicated but the basic ones are very quick and easy to use now for the second one the bottom word yes it's i'm going to put a mask around this as well to cut out the buzz bars because if i turn this off now you see it's still got it's still got the buzz buzz on it so i'm just going to go back to rectangle tool get it draw it out over the bottom word so i just have that showing and now if i turn this top layer on again you see that top one just says buzz buzz and the bottom one just says so now how i want this to animate on is to sort of drop down from behind buzz buzz so i'm going to move this timeline indicator over a little bit i'm going to make a keyframe for the position because i want it to stop exactly where it is right now so let's just keyframe that position so we can keep it then i'm going to bring the timeline back to here and then i'm just going to move it upwards in position and now i've got it dropping down like that let me just also add some easy ease on to it okay so yeah it looks really gross and messy right now obviously so i'm going to use a track matte to cut it out when it's at this phase of the animation so that it can come cleanly from behind and it's not interfering with the other text the reason i'm going to use a track matte is because as you can see right now while this is animating the mask is moving with it because the mask is on the layer so if you change the position of the layer the mask is going to move with it with the track matte it's an independent layer so you can animate stuff around it and behind it without that independent track matte layer moving at all it can stay exactly where you've left it so attract matte is like a mask but it's a little more versatile because you can use other layers as track mattes and the other cool thing about track mattes is that you can use almost anything as a matte layer so you could use text you can use footage you can use pictures or any other graphics basically or you can use a solid with a mask on it which is what i'm gonna do now i'm gonna go to layer new and then solid it's a white solid i'm just gonna rename it to track matte because that's what it's going to be and i'm going to say okay and now you see it's made a white layer over everything the size of the composition so now what i want it to do is block out the word when it's behind buzz buzz so i'm going to draw a rectangle as a mask i've already got the rectangle tool selected i'm going to just draw it out over there until it comes to about the bottom of buzz buzz over there so we'll start seeing the word as it comes out from under the white i'm going to press f while i've got the layer selected so i can just feather that mask just so it's a little softer and not as jarring and doesn't cut off the text as it appears under you can see that it's got a nice soft feathering and now you see the word goes behind the white layer but obviously we don't want to actually see the white layer so i'm going to select the text layer the layer that i want to be masked out basically that i want the track matte layer to work on and i'm going to go over here where it says under track matte under the track matte column now if you don't see this don't panic you might just need to toggle your switches or your modes which is down here just press that button and it will change so i'm going to go over here under my track matte column where it says none and i'm going to change it to alpha inverted matte and now you see it disappears that layer turns off but that's a good thing because now it's invisible if i turn on my transparency grid you can see now it's completely invisible all that stuff with the blocks on that is alpha that's transparent the reason that it's the alpha options is because they use the alpha layer which has transparent parts so the white part of my track matte layer is solid that top half that's solid white and then the bottom because i used a mask is transparent so it's using that information from the alpha as a mask these luma matte options these use the luminance of the layers so if you have a solid layer and some parts are white and some parts are black that information will be used to mask the layer beneath it so either all the black parts will show the graphic beneath it or all the white parts will show the graphic beneath it so now i've got my little guy flying i've got my text animating on yeah that's cute man that's pretty cool now i actually want to pre-comp the text layers because you know what if i want to use them in a different composition exactly as they are just in a different composition with some different elements so i'm going to select them i'm going to collapse them by pressing u you will either if you press it will show you all the keyframes on a layer or it will collapse the layer so now i've got all three of these layers selected make sure that the track mat is selected with them because it's linked to the layers you have to take the track matte with the layers that they're affecting and i'm going to go ctrl shift c to make a precomposition of those layers you can also if you have them selected just have your mouse on them and then right click and go pre-compose and that will do the same thing and you can make a precomp i'm just going to call this text remember to name your stuff i'm going to keep it on move all attributes into the new composition because i want all these layers to go into that composition and i'm gonna say okay and now you see they've collapsed into their own composition it's basically one layer now if i double click on that it's gonna open it up and there's my text with its layers again so if i go back into this main comp again you see now the text is this one layer and if i want to put this text now on something else in a different composition say for instance i want to put it over some footage i'm going to import some footage here right click import then file and then bring in some footage i'm going to just grab this footage that i just imported and drag it down here to the sort of film icon over here that's for a new composition and it's going to make a composition from that footage with all those footage settings so that includes like the resolution and the size and the frame rate and everything so now if i look in the project panel you see it made a composition of those lights i've also got the footage of the lights which i should put into a footage folder let's just do that so that'll go into there light says the main comp so i'll leave it out text is a pre comp i'm going to drag it into the pre-comps folder and now i can bring the text into this composition there we go now i've got the texture and you can see it's exactly the same as it was it's just over a new background i'm going to scale it up a little bit because this composition is a lot bigger this footage was probably 4k i think maybe i don't know i'm just going to bring it up a little bit there we go with the position and now like let's be real this purple on this gold is knotted it is not a vibe i'm going to change this so i've got my layer selected i'm going to go over to effect and i'm going to go to color correction and then i'm going to choose hue saturation because i want to change the hue of this i don't like it but i don't want to change it in the original composition which is why i'm putting the effect onto the pre-comp and not in the original composition which is this composition if i changed it in here it would change it in here as well which i don't want to happen i only want it to change in here so i'm going to put the effect on the pre-comp in this composition i'm gonna go to master hue over here and just change the dial till i'm happy there we go and now i've changed the color it's this nice sort of goldeny yellow but if i look here it's still the same old perp still the same old perp and that's why pre-compositions or nested compositions can be super dope because you can reuse the same thing in a number of different ways and a number of different compositions now i'm sure you want to know how to render so let's render this composition for you so make sure that you're in the composition that you want to render and you can go to composition add to render queue and it will add it to the render queue over there for you or you can just be in the composition and press ctrl m and that will also add it to the render queue the cool thing about the render queue is that it literally will cue the comps you want to render so you could go and cue a bunch of compositions and then render them all at once but we don't have a bunch to render right now so we'll just do this one best settings i'm just going to leave it at that because it's the best say okay under lossless i am going to change this i'm going to change avi to quicktime because it's just better quality you can see i've already got it set to apple prores double four double full that's what i use there are a bunch of other options over here animation is also pretty good and all these apple pro razors are pretty okay so you just need to test or find out what's the best thing for your usage you can also change in the format uh you can do a jpeg sequence or a png sequence or just an mp3 whatever so you just need to explore and see what works for you but i personally pretty much always use quicktime with apple prores double four double four under video output with the channels i'm going to keep it to rgb for this but if you want to render something that has an alpha channel so for instance if you're going to render you know a logo sting that's going to be overlaid onto some other footage by an editor or transitions or anything like that that has an alpha channel or a part that needs to be transparent then you can render it with rgb plus alpha but that is extra information so don't use it unless you really need to so i'm just going to keep it on rgb and i'm going to say okay where it says output 2 that's pretty obvious you're just going to output it to a folder so i'm going to say v2 there we go because this is like you can see it's literally the third version this is the third time i'm doing this video because i kept messing it up and now we've set an output path for this guy we've set the render setting so we're just gonna go and say render the sound of victory so let's watch our render and see how it turned out there we go buzz buzz so now we have our little guy animating across the screen and we have some animation on our text from using a preset as well as animating ourselves we've used the position rotation scale and opacity keyframes learned easy ease what precompositions and compositions are how to mask and how to use track mats how to apply effects and use the effect controls as well as render if that is not a job well done then i don't know what is you now know quite a lot of the essentials of after effects one might even go so far as to say that you're now a pro okay i wouldn't say that because that is ridiculous but you're well on your way there so bravo thank you as always to my patrons your guy support means the world to me and i really appreciate it subscribe if you want to subscribe you'll learn a bunch of other stuff about animation and motion graphics or hit the like button on this video if you got this far i mean that's a lot of time you've invested to not even hit the likes so i don't know it's up to you but okay thanks for watching guys love ya bye

Channel: RobynO

Views: 1,418

Keywords: after effects beginner tutorial 2021, after effects basics for beginners, after effects motion graphics crash course, adobe after effects crash course, after effects for beginners, motion graphics basics after effects, how to animate in after effects, how to learn after effects fast, how to learn after effects 2021, beginner after effects tutorial, after effects tips for beginners, after effects for beginners 2021, learn after effects, motion graphics after effects, motion design

Id: brhzgeSL9C0

Length: 33min 36sec (2016 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021