Learn After Effects in 10 Minutes! Beginner Tutorial

so you want to learn After Effects maybe you've lied on the job application you've gotten the job and you're watching this on your phone in the bathroom on your first day that case here's everything you need to know about After Effects in ten minutes [Music] here is what After Effects looks like if it looks like this your boss isn't paying you enough here on the Left we've got a project panel here we can drag and drop all of our assets images our videos and anything that we'll be using if you want someone to think you're a pro keep this organized and use folders let's click on this button down here to create a new composition if you're not sure what settings go in here ask whoever told you to make the video what the delivery specs are if no one cares use these settings 1920 by 1080 24 frames per second make sure to name it though let's call this intro 1 and we can change all of these later and now you can see that composition is added to our project panel and is open in our composition window it looks black because there's nothing in there yet so let's drag in some of that footage perfect and that appears down here in our timeline for this composition the timeline works similar to the layer panel they might use in Photoshop and we can add more assets like our logo to our composition and now both our logo and that footage appear down here this logo is way too big so let's select this dot in one of the corners hold shift and drag that towards the center to scale it down there if a layer is above another in the timeline they're visible on top in the actual video so who move our logo below our footage it becomes hidden underneath it let's put that back and unlike Photoshop another layer based software we have a duration if you've used video editing software before you might be familiar with how our timeline works in After Effects we can press spacebar and it will play our video now depending on how much stuff is in our composition this might not play back in real time and you can drop the resolution down here if you're struggling and you want some smoother playback let's put this to auto now let's add some animation to our logo we wanted to do a simple animation fading on and moving upwards let's start with the movement if you click on this arrow over here and then click on the rnf to transform we reveal some properties of this layer and we're going to change these over time to create our animation if we want to adjust the position of our logo we can do that by clicking and dragging these numbers in putting our own values or simply clicking and dragging in our composition window as a professional animator and motion designer I've spent maybe 80% of my career adjusting these transform properties these are the backbone to almost all animation in After Effects now we can move our logo around but that doesn't move it when we play our animation we need to tell After Effects where our logo needs to be at what time and we do that with keyframes at the start of our timeline let's move our logo towards the bottom of our scene and we're gonna set a keyframe by clicking this stopwatch next to the value that we want to change all properties that you can change over time will have this stopwatch next to them now let's move forward to seconds in our timeline and drag our logo upwards and look at that after facts has created another keyframe at that point wonderful keyframes are like markers they tell After Effects at this point in the timeline the position of this layer will be here and at the start it's going to be here and after fixed figures out where it needs to be in between those values so when we play back we have an animation it's simple but it's definitely animated and no one can take that away from you if we want this movement to be a bit faster we can click and drag this keyframe forward so now it's covering the same distance in less time it goes faster if you want it slower we can drag it further away let's move that keyframe to one second now our logos motion comes to a pretty harsh stop when it reaches the top here and that doesn't look very natural in the real world objects accelerate and decelerate when they start and stop moving and that's really easy to add in After Effects we can select these keyframes and press f9 on keyboard which is the shortcut for easy ease you can also find that by going up to animation keyframe assistant and he's easier if it's difficult for you to press f9 on your keyboard and now the symbol for a keyframes has changed they have this hourglass shape now which lets us know that easing has been applied to them so now when we play it back there's an acceleration and deceleration in the movement and it just feels a little more natural easing into its final position and it was easy easy easy you'll be using that a lot in After Effects here's what easy ease keyframes look like compared to the linear ones that we started with both animations last two seconds but the one with easing varies its speed and feels more natural now let's fade on our logo by keyframing its opacity at 100% moving our playhead to the start of our timeline let's drag that down to zero and now it will fade on let's select those and our easing easing with f9 they're wonderful if you want to adjust how much these properties are easing you can select them and click this button here to open up the graph editor and here we can see an easing curve and you can mess around with these to create more or less easing to your animation it's a really powerful technique but maybe not for your first day let's click this again to get back to our Timeline view and when our timeline gets a bit too crowded we've got all this info that we don't need about that scale and rotation what we can do is press u on our keyboard and that will hide every property that isn't keyframes very useful and you can hide these again by pressing u and key pressing you to cycle them on and off you can also open up the transform properties with keyboard shortcuts too when the lay is selected clicking S brings up the scale property R brings up its rotation P is positioned and T its opacity our animation is looking wonderfully competent but like all good motion graphics we need some text to tell whoever's watching our video either what to think or what to buy so let's lick the text tool from up here in that toolbar we've also got some other tools to draw shapes we can draw ellipses rectangles and we even have a hand tools so we can move that composition window around if we need to and with a text all selected we can simply click and start typing I'm going to select the arrow tool and then move that towards the middle and we can see that that creates a new text layer down in our timeline as well now we don't want this text to fade in generally like hello there we want this to have impact so we can select the front of our layer and drag that so it starts a bit after this animation so we have our logo gently fading on and then BAM hit them with the text now over here on the right we have a bunch of panels that we can open and close simply by clicking on them let's open up the character panel and here we can change our text let's make it bold and a bit larger and to make sure it's actually a hundred percent in the middle we can click on our align panel make sure it says align to composition and click align horizontally there now it's dead center we also have effects and presets over here on the right this is where we can apply effects to our layers and there are a lot to look through here so this search bar comes in very handy let's select that footage layer in our timeline and then search for hue and saturation and we can add that effect to our layer by double clicking you'll notice that that opens up our effects control panel over here on the left we can always navigate back to our project panel by clicking it up here and you can swap between them like the here we can make changes to effect we can drag the hue to change the color values of our layer but what we want to do in this situation is drag down the saturation to make it black and white let's also decrease the lightness as well to make this white text just a bit more readable there now we might need to use this logo and text animation on top of some different footage to do that really easily we can pre compose it so let's select both our logo and our text layer go up to layer and select pre compose let's call that logo and type and click OK now you'll see in our timeline that those two layers have become one composition and you'll see that composition is now added into our project panel as well logo and type which is what we've just created we can double click on that and it will open up and we can see that that just contains our logo animation and our type let's go over and create a new comp quickly in our project window and let's call this intro to let's drag in some other footage that we have and then drag in our logo and type on top of that and you can see really quickly that we've got the same animation over some different footage intro want and intro to which both contain our logo and type comp and we can go into our logo and type comp and make some changes to that text and now if we go back and view either of those comps for the footage you can see that our text is changed in both of them that's a great way to repeat animations across multiple compositions and videos and we're also make adjustments to this pre comps transform properties let's open up at scale with s and let's drag this one down a bit smaller so now intro one has this logo and type but it's much smaller than it appears in loco 2 which is still the same size now we're happy with our amazing animations let's render it out so with the composition open that we want to render we can click up in composition and add to render queue and now our timeline is changed to our render queue we can leave render settings set to best settings because I mean they're the best settings output module we do want to change those so let's click on lossless change the format from avi to QuickTime and change the format option to Apple ProRes 40 to HQ and click OK that will give us a high quality render but the file size won't be too unbelievably large like a lossless uncompressed video file would be and we've got options here to resize it as well but there's no need to do that for this render let's click OK now let's click on output 2 and choose where we want to save it let's click here and then it render this might take a moment I mean this bar fills up we're done that when defile is very high quality so that ten-second animation is 200 megabytes if you do want a smaller file size and don't mind a bit more compression you can open up Adobe Media encoder and then simply drag that file into the queue and the default 8.26 for setting will be a great setting for almost any use on the web that's what I use all the time and then we can click the play button to start encoding that that'll happen really fast and now we've got a 12 megabyte version of that animation much better you can also add a composition to Adobe Media encoder directly in after-effects by going up to composition add to Adobe Media encoder cue if you don't need to deliver an extremely high quality render After Effects can be a really intimidating piece of software to start for the first time I hope I've made that a bit less intimidating for you there's so much more to explore but these are the essentials and should serve you well on your first day good luck to discover the best ways to learn motion design I've created a show playlist of videos that'll think you'll enjoy if you made it this far please like the video and consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 1,080,141

Rating: 4.966855 out of 5

Keywords: after effects beginner tutorial, after effects basics, how to use after effects, animating in after effects, adobe after effects tutorial, learn after effects, editing with after effects, basic after effects animation, basic after effects transitions, after effects tutorial, adobe after effects, after effects, starting after effects, after effects for beginners, after effects beginners, after effects for beginners 2020, learning after effects, motion graphics basics

Id: hb2bbfiNBXA

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020