Adobe After Effects 2022: The comprehensive A-Z course

1. After Effects Course Preview: Hello and welcome to this comprehensive Adobe After Effects course. My name is Peter. I've been working with After Effects for more than 15 years now. And during all that time, realized many professional projects from very easy to extremely difficult. Of course, we were looking at the fundamentals, the user interface, as well as the functions and tools in the theoretical or kick-off party. But mainly this course is all about experiencing the incredible possibilities of After Effects by means of exciting projects and practical examples. So we're going to animate a video to the beat of the music. Integrates texts into a 3D landscape. Remove objects from existing recordings, or let them fly in space. We're also going to create our very own 3D mobile model without any additional plug-ins. And we even want to create our very own car accident. That's it. I'm gone. The part from a hands-on with the most important hotkeys and expressions, you are going to get access to download the video material that I create with my drone at, let us go through exclusively for this course. In this way, you can actively participate in all life examples and really cement your knowledge. You'll be learning by doing how keying and camera tracking works. How to use keyframes and expressions to create even better animations. We're talking about particle systems, masks, forked, and many, many more tips and tricks to give you an overall picture. We're also going to take a look at ideal workflows to render your videos, as well as useful additional plug-ins and extensions. The main goal of this course is to let you finish with a general understanding of after effects, allowing you to find a solution for whatever individual project you want to realize. What are you waiting for? Start your journey to becoming an After Effects pro right now and I'll see you in the course. 2. Download and Installation: In this video, we'll quickly browse through all the steps necessary to install Adobe After Effects on your PC or laptop. So the first thing we need to do, of course, is to go to their website, adobe.com. And then we want to check out creativity and design and click on View Plans and Pricing. Now here they have different sets. For example, the photography sets containing loud, Lightroom and Photoshop, which will cost you $9.99 per month. Or you can choose the Creative Cloud set. This is the ultimate set containing all Adobe applications and even more than you can see here on this page. For example, Media Encoder, which we'll speak about later in this course. This will cost you $52.99. If you are a regular user, much, much cheaper. It will be if you are a student or teacher, then you can click on this one and you'll see it will cost you only $20 per month. All the prices seem to be a little bit cheaper than in Germany, but still $52.99 is some money to pay. In this case, we want to refer only to Adobe After Effects. So we click here for $20.99, we'll click on Buy Now. And then there are different options. If you want to be built monthly, you will have to pay $31.49. If you want to be built monthly but subscribe for a yearly subscription, then it will be $20.99 per month. And you can even be built yearly, then it will be 239 US dollars in total, which is the cheapest options of those, those three you can see here. So we click on this yearly built monthly and continue. Now I think there will be a little try to upsell this one with another $30 if you want to choose Adobe Stock as well. In this case, we say no, thank you. And then you will enter your email address. And afterwards they will give you permission to download Adobe After Effects, right from your account to your computer to use it and subscribe to this program before, I think, and CSS3, CS4, CS6, which I used, it was possible to buy them for a lifetime license, but right now it's all about subscription settings. So you will have to pay this one yearly or even monthly if you want to be a Adobe After Effects user. So just enter your email address, download Adobe After Effects in the version, you'd like to pay it monthly or yearly. And then in the next video we'll see and really start off inside Adobe After Effects, because the installation program process itself is just a very standard process which you pass on for every software you have ever bought. So just click on your favorite settings there or leave everything as it is. And then we see again in the next video. 3. First opening and our lifesaver: activating auto save: If you have installed Adobe After Effects and opened it up and you see something similar to what you see now on the screen, then I can say, congratulations, you've successfully installed Adobe After Effects and are ready to work with this awesome program. It might be that you won't see such a welcome message, but that doesn't really matter because the only thing we're gonna do with it is click away. So in the upcoming videos, what we'll be speaking about is all you can see right here, the user interface. Starting off with everything you see here on top like the tools. Then we go through the possibilities of your project settings, as well as the preview area with all its buttons here on the bottom. Then we speak about the right side, the information you see here, the effects and presets that can be browsed right here are found here on top. And we have this preview area. We have the characters, the paragraphs. But we'll speak about that later on in different videos. Of course, we'll also talk about our main work area, which you'll see here on the bottom here with the arrangement of your composition, as well as the timeline where you can arrange the different layers. For now, to start it all off, we will just install what I would like to say is my personal life saver and that is the so-called autosave function. So to find this one, you'll click for edit and then preferences. And we want to start off with general. Then you'll see that the front window will open up. And I would highly recommend you to take some time and browse through these different settings. Probably you won't need to make any changes. You can leave everything as it is. But in some cases, depending on your PC and how powerful it is, it might be useful to make some small changes here, for example, in the memory settings or even in media and disk cache. But this will be two individual to speak about right now, in most of the cases, I'd say ninety-five percent of every case. You can leave all the options as they are already set. What we want to do now in this video is go to auto save and enable the autosave function. I have already done so, meaning every 20 minutes there will be saved a copy of what I'm currently working on in the local files. And I have decided to save a maximum of five versions, meaning that if there will be another autosave, then they will start with the sixth version to override my first safe. So this means that no more than 20 minutes of my work can be lost at anytime. And I've decided save a custom location, I would really recommend to do so. While in earlier times, it was much more often the case that After Effects crashed right now, since there is this subscription mode, I feel like it's working much safer, but still I'm a friend of doing so and enabling here this autosave function because it will save you or it can save you a lot of time and stress. If you have your versions saved every, for example, 20 minutes. So just mark this checker and then click Okay. And now we are ready to kick this one off and start with the top area. And that's what we're going to deal with in the next segment. 4. User interface overview: Header area Part 1: Alright, so this is our first video talking about the basis, the foundation inside Adobe After Effects. And in this video, we'll speak about the header area. Before I get to do so, let me just quickly explain and talk about the general hierarchy inside Adobe After Effects. So your top layer, that will be the project. Here we are currently in a new untitled, an empty project. But in general, your project might contain one until basically infinite amount of compositions. Any composition you will find here in this project area. And those compositions will contain different layers. And those layers, they can contain the effects which you want to use on any different layer. On top we have the project, then we have the composition. And any composition contains layers, and those layers will contain different effects. That, to get that straight right at the beginning is your general structure inside Adobe After Effects. But now let's talk about this header area. And we start with clicking here on file and you have the possibility to create a new project. If we do so, we click on File New, new project, you see nothing will happen and that is totally right. So in this case, because we are already working in a new empty project. So if you click on New Empty Project, Oliver, new empty project, that's nothing to say if nothing to override. And that's why we're just getting back to our main window, as you see here, is different. Of course, if you're working in an existing project and you create a new project out of this project, then of course, after Effects will ask you to save your current file before going to create a new project. You can also open up a project, for example, by going and getting to click File Open Project. Or you can use the shortcut Control O to open up existing projects. And of course, you can save your current project by clicking File, Save As. And if you have already taken a location, a directory, then you can use the shortcut Control S or click here on fire safe to say if your project as it is right now. Another thing we need to talk about is the possibility to import sources like for example, videos or audio data. You can go and click on File, Import File. Or you can use the shortcut Control I. And you see there's a new window opening up where you can import files. But we'll talk about that later on when we speak about everything that's going on in this left area here, using File Import is just one of many possibilities to import files, but as I already said, we'll talk about that later on. Alright, so the last thing we'll quickly consider here under this file button are the project settings. While I think it is basically the same as your preferences in 99% of all the cases. You won't need to make any changes here as they are very advanced. But for example, you could change your video rendering and effects and use GPU acceleration. This is activated, in my case, depending on your GPU you are currently using, this will maybe not be activated, but if it's not activated normally, it has done so for a reason. So you can leave everything as it is as well. You could also change the use of expressions or the engine you use to create your expressions. We'll talk about expressions later on in this course. They basically give you the option to code inside after effects. And the standard engine which is used as JavaScript. If you want to change that, you could use it here or do So here. But in general, as I already explained, you won't need to make any changes here as well as with the audio settings and the color settings. You can just leave everything as it is. But if you want to do so, take your time and consider these settings and browse through them if you want to make any changes, of course you are free to do so. The next thing we quickly want to talk about is this drop-down. But as we're still in a very empty project, there's not a lot of choices we can make here. You can, of course, check out your preferences which are already told you. But for now that's just not really much we can do here. So we want to give our project a new composition, and we will do so by clicking on composition, new composition, or using the shortcut Control N. If you're a Windows user or option and if you use a Mac. So let's click on new composition and you'll see a new window will open up. First thing we could change is the name of the composition we want to create. And in this case I will just name it. Welcome. And now we have a lot of settings we can choose from here. In this case, I want to use the preset HDTV 1825 frames per second, meaning that we will create a composition in full HD settings. So we have 1920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels. Heat, and we will do so by creating square pixels. Of course, you have other choices here. But in all those years, I've been working with After Effects. There was not a single project where I needed to change this one from square pixels. So I think for now we can just leave this as it is. For the frame rate, we'll stick to 25 frames per second, meaning that 25 pictures will make up for 1 second of video material. But of course, depending on your sources, are the kind of project you want to create. It might be useful to change the frame rate, for example, to 30 frames per second, 60 frames per second, or even 120 frames per second. In this case, for the example, I think it's okay if we stick Twenty-five frames per second. You can also change any number individually. For example, if we want to make changes to our width, we can click here and change it to 2 thousand pixels. If we have this aspect ratio locked, then it will always be 16 to nine meeting that. Any change in the width will also also have an impact on the heat. If we unlock this one, we can change any parameter individually. Here under the resolution settings, we can change the resolution we want to have in our preview. This is not The finally rendered video, but the thing we really will see in our preview. You can also change that afterwards at any anytime. So you might want to change it to a quarter quality so that the video will preview faster. But in this case, it's just our example, our stick with full resolution. And then we have the possibility to change the start time code. This will just be your timestamp at 0 inside the new composition. So no need to make any changes there. We want to start at time 0. But what we want to change is the total duration of our composition. For example, if we know we want to create a short video for Instagram, which will have a length of ten seconds. We can of course, type ten seconds duration here. But as with all the other settings, you can change them at any point in time afterwards, after the composition has already been created. If you feel like you need more time in your composition, just open up your composition settings, change the duration afterwards and more time will be edit. So I think we are good to go. What we want to change is get back to our HD preset. So we have a width and heat in full HD, and we can leave the advanced and 3D renderer tabs as they are. But we will speak about the Advanced tab later on in this course, but for now, we just click Okay and create our first composition. Well done, we have added our very first composition inside of Adobe After Effects, and we'll see the welcome composition here on the left inside of our project data, as well as now opened up here at the bottom and ready to be filled with different layers. We will do so in a second. But just before that, let me quickly show you how you can make changes to an existing composition. Therefore, just open up composition, composition settings, or use the shortcut Control K. And you'll see that the very same window we've already seen will open up again. And you can, for example, add some extra two seconds and the duration. Click on okay. And if we zoom out in this timeline, we see that now our composition has a duration of 12th seconds. I'll make a quick cut for this video here. And in the next video, we'll continue talking about the Herat header area and we want to add our very first layer. 5. User interface overview: Header area Part 2: So let's add our first layer to this composition, and we will do so by clicking on Layer new. And in this case, we will begin with a solid, which can also be added by using the shortcut Control Y. A new window will open up and the name will be initialized by what the current color is. So in this case, it would be a dark gray solid. And of course, number one, because our composition is currently empty, this would be the very first dark gray solid. If you will add another dark race solid, then After Effects would initialize it with its name, dark gray solid two. But in this case, I will change the name anyways and write background simply because I like to have a good structure in the project and to see the function of the layer directly in its name. And in this case this should be a background layer and that's why I will type background as the name. Now we want to change the color, click on here, and maybe make it Some our dark blue color. And then we would have the option to change the size of this solid. Nowadays in composition size, you could make it a little smaller, of course, or go back to the comp size by clicking on this button. This is what we will be doing right now and then we hit Okay? And you'll see that this background has been added to our composition. You'll find it here under our welcome composition, or there's a new folder containing all the solids of your project. And in this case, we have only one solid, which is the background solid. Now we want to add a second layer and we click on Layer new. And now this is deactivated and this is because we are currently working in the project data. You see it active here. And now After Effects doesn't really know where to put the new solid. Of course, it's very intuitive that right now we only have one composition, so we want to add it to that composition. But as this composition is not active, After Effects doesn't really know what to do, and that's why we will activate this composition. And now we can click on Layer New and add a text to the existing composition. For now, we'll simply type welcome, and then click anywhere here in this bottom area, or click on the Selection tool to finish the text off. And with the selection tool active, you can now reposition either your text or the background layer. Just grab it. Click your left mouse button and hold it and reposition the layer you'd like to choose. For an hour, I will hit Control Z to undo my last change. And this will bring back my background solid into its original position as we are right now, working only in 2D space, meaning we have an x value and we have a y value. This will mean that if the welcome text area is above our background area, then it will be visible. While we ring the background layer to the top. Then the welcome texts, or it won't be visible anymore simply because we're not working in 3D space. So the text layer is not in front of the background layer, but now it's laying on the bottom of this background area simply because we have a top-down view. And the layer that is displayed here in position number one will be the layer that is displayed first. And as the text is laying behind this background layer, of course we won't be able to see it anymore. We will bring back the text layer right now. One more thing we can speak about, maybe to add an effect to this text layer. So with this welcome layer marked, we hit effect and maybe start off with something like Stylize and Glow. And now you see sort of a glowing effect has been added to this welcome text. Right now I changed my view by hitting the mouse wheel. You can do the same by clicking here and then make it larger or smaller. Or there's another, another option which is clicking View, zoom in or zoom out. But of course, I think the simplest option is to just use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. We could of course change the radius here or other settings in this glow effect. But for now this is just a presentation of how to add an effect. So I think we won't need to speak about the different settings. We will do so later on in this course as we will use the glow effect on some other parts. But right now, with the glow effect marked, I will hit Delete and get rid of that effect. Here it can change back to your project data. And here you will find the Effect Controls right now, of course, with the welcome texts layer selected, there is no effect active and neither is. So in the Effect Controls of our background, background layer. One more thing we can speak about is this tools bar. And I have already shown you the selection tool, which will get active if you click the button V and if you click the button h, you will see that it gets changed to the hand tool. And now you can just move around here in this space. And you could use your zoom tool by clicking. And now you have the chance to zoom in in different parts, but the same can be done with this hand to just go wherever you want and then zoom in by using the mouse wheel. There are many possibilities to zoom in into different areas of your preview. Now, we go back to our selection tool and we won't speak about those camera tools here right now. Simply cost that will be part of the course later on. And it will be much clearer if we have a direct example to use these tools, so we'll speak about those later on. But what we can start off with is using Mask Tools. And here you have, for example, the rectangle tool. If we click on this with our background layer selected, then you will see if we draw a mask in a rectangular shape like this, then it will be edits to our background layer and you'll see that this mask will be active and all the parts outside of this mark mask won't be visible anymore. We could also, of course, draw, for example, in elliptical mask or other forms and shapes. We'll see about that later on in the course as well. And we have the chance to create an individual mass by using the Pen Tool, for example. If I select that and now stay with the background layer selected, draw very simple mask. Then you'll see that this mask is edit to our first mosque. And we could also change and switch the display of our first mass to none. Then now we'll see that only our second mask will be active. Here. You'll see that there's another option to create a new text. You could do so as I've shown you with layer new text. But you can also just click on this horizontal type tool and click anywhere here in this preview area. And you'll see, welcome part two. And then finished this takes off that we've added another text to our composition, which is now laying below our first text, but still above our background. If we change this, then of course, the same as before will happen. And in this case, this means that our texts will be hidden behind the background layer. Here we have some more advanced tools which will also be part of this course later on. So I think for now this is enough for the tools bar. Here you have some more options. Considering the display of After Effects. In this case, we are using the standard view which can also be applied by using Window Workspace Standard. If your view of this place is somehow different than my view, then it might be that the workspace is not switched to standard. Might be that you are here working in the learn view. So I think it would be best if you'd also choose the standard views so that we have the same setting to work on. Or maybe you can go click on Window and check the individual marks you've set here so that we are working with the same settings, but these are just what is selected if you click the standard view. And for now I think you've gotten to know the most important things off the header area. We'll finish off this video and in the next segment, we'll talk about a project area you see here on the left. 6. User interface overview: Project area: Alright, so in this segment we'll talk about everything you see here on the left in the project area of after effects. While you already know some things, you've seen that the welcome composition as well as all the other compositions, were replaced here in this project area, as well as the solids and the layers you add to your composition. We could start off and right-click this project button here and close the panel, then you'll see that the project disappears from our left side. If this accidentally happens to you, no problem, you can bring it back anytime by clicking on window and project. And you've got it back here right now on the right side of the effect controls, but simply hit your left mouse, click it and drag and drop it to the left side again. Or you could right-click here and undock that panel. For example, if you're working on a lot of effects and you still want to see the effects at the same time with your project data, then you could undock the project data for some time and bring it on the right side. But for now I want to bring it back here to the Effect Controls. And I do so by left clicking. And then after effects, It's given me some choices where to put this. And I decided to put it here beside the effect controls. And there we are back with our project settings. On this left side. What we could also do hit the left mouse button and click on columns. And you'll see we have some checked here. And these columns are exactly what we see here. Like for example, the name, the type, and other settings, like for example, the frame rate, the end point, the outpoint, and all the things you decide to mark here in this Columns button. For example, we could decide to unmarked here the label. Then we see that these labeled buttons disappear. But I'd like to see those buttons as they give a good hint on what we are talking about. For example, the solids are, the folders are marked in yellow, the compositions are marked in a light brown. And here, if we open our folder and then we see that the solids are marked in red. What we could also do is open up our project settings from here. Then we are back at what we've already seen. You could make some changes here. That's the same as if we'd like to open File project Settings, or we already have here these, this little rocket. If you click on that one, it will also open up the project settings. I've already told you that you have a lot of possibilities to import sources. The first one was clicking on File, Import File. But the same effect happens if you right-click in this area and click on Import file. Or of course, you could also just open up any folder, like for example, the car accident folder from our course resources and import the car file just by drag dropping it here inside of our project data. Now what we can do besides of creating a new composition from scratch is we could start off directly with a source like for example, this car dot mp4 source. So we market and now simply drag it here to this small composition button and leave it there. And you'll see that a new composition is created. You see this here. It is named the same as the MP4 source. And it also has the same data, meaning it is created in full HD just as the source. And the length is also the same, in this case, five seconds and one frame. Now, what we could also do to create the same effect of imported source directly in a new composition. And we do this by clicking File, Import File or by clicking right here, Import File. Now we could, for example, select this beach video and hit Import Options, create composition out of this market, click Import, and you'll see that the beach dot mp4 will be imported and a new composition will be created. Just the same as we did with the car after drag drop in it. Now, the next thing we want to do is create a folder structure here. And we could do so by right-clicking and hitting new folder or simply click the small folder button. For example, we want to name this one media. And now we take our beach dot mp4 head control car. Then drag drop this into our media and you'll see that both of those files will be placed inside this folder. If we'd like to rename, for example, a source or later on maybe a layer. We can do so anytime by marking it, hit an Enter and then writing, for example, Miami Beach. Hit Enter again to save the new name. And you'll see that it will also be changed here in the composition. Now, of course, we can also delete data just by hitting either delete or drag, drop it here into this little bin, or just Bye clicking this bin with the fire marked. Then you will see that if you click Delete again, the phi will be removed from our project sources. Now of course, later on when you are really working in big compositions with a lot of data, a lot of sources. Then you might want to use this search bar and quickly find your data. Like for example, this car dot mp4 source simply by typing car here in the search bar. But I think that's very intuitive to use. So no need to further explain it. Of course, the search bar can be fun. For example, here, considering the project data as well as here, you can search for effects and presets, but we'll talk about that later on. One more thing we could maybe consider is if certain locations and directories change locally on your PC or laptop so that After Effects won't be able to find your sources anymore. For example, if we go back here in this current composition, it might be that after Effects won't show up this little car accident. But if the video has changed its directory, then there will be a very colorful image stating that after effects cannot find your file. And you can relocate this file by clicking the car dot mp4 source data and right-clicking replace footage with fire. And then you will find new location of your car accident, mark the Source, click Import. And afterwards, After Effects will change the source data and go back to the image you want to see. I think that's enough for this left part. We've talked about the most important things the effect controls we will consider later on. They play a big part in this course. But for now, the most important thing was to talk about this project area. You know how to create folders, you know how to import sources. So we are ready to go and speak about this preview area and will do so in the next video. 7. User interface overview: Preview area: In this video, we'll speak about the preview area, and therefore, I'd like to, first of all, switch back to our welcome composition where we have some more layers. And the first thing we want to talk about is the possibility to either work in your composition as you see here. Or if you, for example, a double-click on this background area, you'll see that a new drop-down will open up here. And now we're really working only in the layer. This might be useful if you are working in a very, very big composition with a lot of layers, then you might want to start changing the layer itself given after effects. Some less work to do for now. And if you, for example, adjust this mask and right now you're happy with it, how you produce it in this layer. Then you can switch back to the composition and you'll see that the adjustments will be overwritten here in this complex composition, like you have done so in the layer. So you can either open up the composition or work in different layers. And if you're working in a layer, you could also apply some more effects. But that's what we're going to see later when we are, for example, talking about the Roto Brush function. So I think that's enough to talk about for these, these top options here. What we're going to do now is talk about the most relevant things we see here at the bottom. While you already know that here with this percentage mark, you can change the view. The same effect applies if you're switching with your mouse wheel. Or of course you could go here and click view, zoom in and zoom out. Next in line are the options to show grid and other helping elements. So we click on here and for example, activate the tidal action safe. Then we'll see that here there are some small marks. For example, if you want to adjust your text right to the center, horizontally off your composition, then of course, these two red dots here mark the center of the text and this small line here will mark your center horizontally in the composition. And the same of course, will apply to this slide here, which will mark the vertical center. And here you have some other smaller helping elements. For example, if you want to adjust some elements on the left and on the right, then you could just turn on the title and action safe to have some helping elements. You could also apply the proportional grid if you want to give your composition some elements of the same size and in the same position, then you might want to use this grid and you could also get that one. More details. If you click on the grid check mark here. Also, you could take rulers and apply those that you have some helping numbers here. But to be honest, most of the time, I'm only using the tidal action safe to adjust my text elements. So that might be very useful to apply at some time in your composition. For now, we don't need that anymore. And the next thing we want to talk about here is this Toggle Masks, which this will simply turn on and off the border lines of your mask. Like for example, if I click here right now, of course the mask itself will still be active. If we check it out here. Activated our first mass for demonstration purposes, but our second mask, of course, is still active. The only thing that has changed is that the board has won't show anymore if we click this button. And this might be useful if we are working in a very big composition with a lot of mask, a lot of layers than sometimes those masks borders might disturb the view so you could deactivated. But of course still the mask itself will play an active role. Next thing to talk about is this preview time switch clicking on there you could go and jump to any given point in time in your composition. Of course, in this composition right now, there is no movement at all. So we might want to check this one out in the car composition. And if I click here, and for example, fly two or 3 second mark, click Okay, then you'll see that of course, the marker here in time will fly to that point in time and our composition, the preview, will also change to the point of three seconds and nine frames. On the right side of this one, we find the option to take a snapshot. To be honest, I have never used this option, but I might think of the only use case, which is if you want to create a loop video like for example on TikTok or an Instagram, which will always repeat itself, then you want to make sure that your first frame will be exactly the same as your last frame. So you might want to flight to your first frame. Click on this Take Snapshot option. You will hear the sound, which means that after Effects will save this frame in its cache. And now you could go jump to your last frame of the composition and click on this eye with your left mouse button pressed. So the snapshot will be shown. And if you let go your left mouse button, then you could compare both pictures. And in this case, of course, they are the same. So to maybe show it a little bit better, we jump right in the middle of this composition. If I left-click on this right now, leave my left mouse button pressed, then you'll see. My very first frame that I have saved in the snapshot. Of course, it looks different than the one here in the middle. So if you might want to create a loop video, you could check out this way if your first and last frame are exactly the same, so that the video could be played endlessly without anyone noticing where it originally started and ended. The next thing we want to talk about is this resolution factor here. Right now we are working in full resolution, meaning that our preview will really show up in best quality. While of course, we might want to work a little bit faster inside our composition. So we can change this one, for example, to quarter resolution. And this will really only influenced the preview and doesn't have any effect on the final rendered video there we can of course, change that one back to full resolution. And we could also make these changes here inside our composition settings. Either with opening the shortcut Control K, or just click on Composition composition Settings. And you'll find the resolution right here. As all the settings inside our composition settings. They might be changed at any time. So we could go back here, click on full resolution, and it will be applied to this menu here as well. If you're working in a huge composition, of course, this might be useful to switch, for example, to quarter resolutions simply to get your previews a lot faster. But the disadvantage, of course, is that you'll lose some detail inside your preview area. The next thing we want to talk about is this toggle switch for the transparency. Therefore, I'll go back to our welcome composition. And you'll see that this black area originally is not created by a really black solid, but it's originally transparent. And therefore, if I turn on the transparency, then you'll see that it won't be shown in black anymore, but it will be shown in sort of a transparent mode. And this might be useful to check out, for example, later in this course when we will create a T-shirt design. Then of course, what we want to do is we want to write something like We love Bitcoin or wherever we are going to create this area, we don't want to use and create an a black solid, but of course we want to put this on a gray t-shirt, on a black t-shirt, on a brown T-shirt. So we want to really make sure that we have transparent areas. And what we also need to do in case we don't want this to be rendered in black, we need to change our color settings in the Render adjustments, but we'll check that out later on. I think for now, it's enough to know that you can just turn on the transparency here by clicking this small button. For now, we don't want to talk about the camera settings right here, as they will be part of our 3D options, which we'll talk about later on in this course. And I think the only necessary thing we could maybe consider right now in this preview area is this small option here to change the exposure. If you're working in a very dark composition and you might want to enlighten the areas, then you could give this one a little bit more of exposure so that for example, if we're working in 3D, some layers will be hidden behind other layers, then we want to see the effect better exposure. So we could apply these settings here. And that is also just an adjustment for the preview area which won't have any effect on the finery rendered composition. But for now, I'll just go in there and give this one, get this one back to 0. And I think you now know the most important options here inside this preview area, so we can finish off this video. And the next thing we will talk about is this right area here. So we'll see again in the next video. 8. User interface overview: Right side Info and Audio: Alright, let's continue and now talk about this right area here in After Effects. And this area might have a very individual look depending on how you like your workflow to be in After Effects. What I'm always doing is click on here and activate the essential graphics. Meaning that info, audio preview, effects and presets align paragraph tracker, content aware, fill em, the character categories will be shown here. But of course, you can activate or deactivate any specific category at any point in time by coming up and clicking Window. And for example, clicking here on character. By first clicking it, it will show up this character category and by now click in this one again. The character category will now be hidden here from this right side. But now I want to bring it back. Before we start to speak about all those specific categories. You can of course also choose a different preset. Like for example, only show the motion tracking categories. Then you will only show info, preview and tracker as well as content aware fill here on this right side. But as I already said, I'd like to work with the essential graphics. So those would be the ones that we will consider in the next few minutes. The first thing we want to talk about is that of course, you can drag, drop your single categories and rearrange them like for example, this info category. Simply click your left mouse button and then you can, for example, rearrange this info box and bring it back to the bottom, or bring it back with your left mouse button clicked to the top. Of course, you can also right-click and close the panel and bring it back at any point in time with clicking on window and coming up. Bring the info again, left mouse button clicked and bring it back on top. But let's talk about what the info will show for us. And in this case, on the left, you'll find the color settings. And on the right side you will find the positional settings. If I come over into my preview area and go, for example, to the right side of my composition with the mouse. Then of course the x value will be very close to 1920 as this is our composition size in x. And if I come back here to the bottom, then it will be close in the y. Well, you 21080 as this is our y size of the composition. And you'll see that if get to come over, over our hour like purple layer, then we'll see that the R, G B values are now in the red channel, 57 out of 255. In the green channel, 58 out of 255 N in the blue channel, 83 out of 255, the single-channel colors will be edit up, meaning that if we, for example, create a new layer with red, well you 255, green value 255, and blue value to earn 55, then this layer will be white. Well, of course, for example, if we put all the channel values to 0, then we are working in black space. We are, for example, working in corporate design and you have one color that will always be repeated in different compositions and different layers than your first possibility might be. To just remember the settings we have chosen here, like for example, red, 57, green, and blue, a T3. Or what you can also do is come up and create a new layer, new solid. And now click this picker tool. And you could just simply come into your preview area. Click on the purple area here, and the color will be chosen like exactly the same. And you'll see here red, 57 again, green, and blue 83. If we now change, for example, are blue value here, then you'll see that the final solid will be much more bluish and it will come up, for example, to the red channel. And we switch this one up, then of course, the solid will get more and more reddish. I think that's clear for this step right now. So we cancel creating a new solid. And we have finished talking about the information box here. And what we want to do now is open up our audio box and there is no audio data in this composition will come over to our car composition. And now with this one marked, you will see that I could, for example, switch up the volume of this audio, of this layer here. And I could even change the single channels left and right if you'd only like to turn up the volume, for example, of your left channel if you are listening with earphones or you want to create an effect like flying from the left to the right. And you could of course, also animate those settings, will speak about animations and keyframes later on. But for now I think it's enough to know that you can change the left channel as well as the red channel. And of course, here in the middle, you can change the single channels both at the same time. And you can even click on here and write the number you'd like to have for the volume of your layer in consideration. I think that's enough for the audio box. And the next thing we want to talk about is the preview box. 9. User interface overview: Right side Preview: Alright, so in this segment we'll quickly get to know the preview category. And this category can also, of course be found here on the right side of your After Effects workspace. And talking about the Preview, I have imported another file, another source, in this case it's a drone shot from Mexico. And what she can do now in this preview segment is that you have different shortcuts. And these shortcuts can be mapped to different adjustments of how you want your preview to be played or how you want to hear your preview. In this case, we have the spacebar shortcut. And this shortcut will include both our video as well as our audio in our preview. Before talking about the range and player from options, we quickly come down here and see that this little bracket will be our so-called workspace or work area. And then here on top, we have the option with a navigator to zoom in or zoom out. For example, here towards our work area. Now, this point in time is our current time indicator. And yes, you will see here, the indicator right now is outside of our work area. And if we come back here and select the range to be previewed, is right now the work area extended by current time. Meaning that if I use the shortcut Space-bar right now, you will see that the preview, we'll start at this current point in time, although the point itself is outside of our work area. And you'll see here these little green lines. Those are the indicators of our range that is currently already rendered or saved in the casual After Effects before previewing the final video. By the way, it might be that right now I'm lagging a little bit because I'm pushing After Effects and my PC to its limit. Talking and recording, we're rendering a fork, a video. So please excuse me for that, but I hope that you will still hear me. So coming back here to this range, as I already said, the work area extended by current time just means that the preview, we'll start at the current time indicator, although this one might be outside of our work area. Now, if we come back here to the range and simply select the work area and we hit the spacebar again. Then you'll see that our first frame to be previewed right now is inside the work area. And you'll see the green line is more and more getting built up. If the whole work area has been pre-rendered, then after Effects will begin to play your video, and it will begin from your current timestamp. And the video will be played all over again and again. So the work area will be previewed all over again and again. And this can be changed by clicking this little button here. Then you have the option to change from a loop to only play your preview area once. Now we have some more options to select from. Of course, we could decide to not play it from our current time, but to play it from the beginning of our range. And here at the bottom, we can decide to play in different frame rates as well as skip some single frames. And this means that for example, a hero, my original frame rate is 59 comma 94 frames per second, meaning that 1 second of video material is composed of 59 single images. And if I change the frame rate to be previewed to 15, this will mean that my video preview will slow down by the factor of about four, because right now only 15 frames, we'll make up for 1 second of video material in the preview, where originally we had 59 frames per seconds or 1 second will be enlarged to four seconds in the preview. Here with the skip option, we could, for example, decide to skip two frames and only play every third frame. This means that right now from 59 frames per second, we only would like to play every third frame and therefore have a preview video of about 20 frames per second. And this will of course, make it a little simpler for After Effects to render a little faster. Here in this resolution settings, we could leave this with auto, or we decide to go with quarter quality. And this will of course as well, make After Effects preview our video a little faster. So that's enough for all these different options we have inside our preview category. Of course, there are different shortcuts. The most important ones are the spacebar, which is standard preview for video as well as audio. And then we have the numpad point, and this will only preview our audio. Will also see about that later on. For example, in the flyby titles are other sequences of this course. But for now, I think we can terminate this video of the preview category. And the next video will be about the effects and presets. 10. User interface overview: Right side Effects, Paragraph and Character: Next in line is the effects and presets section. And this section will basically give the same options as we can find them here under effects. For example, if we have this layer selected and we could apply any effect as we've seen with Stylize and Glow and will find the same effect here on the right side. Stylize and Glow. And we could grab this effect and either let go directly on top of the preview area or with our layer selected, let go there and you'll see that the glow effect will be applied to this layer. And we are back here in our effect controls on the left side together with our project settings. Now of course, we can also search for effects here like for example, the glow effect and apply it directly after having searched for those effects. That's basically the same as the search bar here in the project area, and the search bar here at the bottom. So wherever you find the search bar, you can of course, search for effects project data, or for example, different layers here. But now we want to get rid of this low effect again, press Delete. And that's enough, I think for this effects and presets here on the right. And next in line is the line segment. Here. To explain a little better, I'll come back to our welcome composition. And with my welcome text selected, I could for example, arrange these texts to the left of our composition and you'll see the effect or arrange it to the right, arrange it horizontally to its center. This will basically bring up the same effect as I did before with my title and action safe and just pushing the two red dots in the middle, horizontally in the center. And then there is of course, the same effect for aligning vertically. Meaning we can align on top, at the bottom or in the center. Of course, we can not only align texts layers, but for example, with our backgrounds solid selected. Bringing it up maybe here to the upper right corner. Then we could also click to align vertically. And then we'll have the same effect applied to this solid enough for the alignment category. Next would be to talk about the paragraph category. I think you might be familiar with those options because they can be found in any standard text editor. But let's quickly browse through them. For example, with our welcome texts layer, I want to double-click inside this layer. Hit Enter to create a new line and maybe right, welcome to this course. Course. And what we can do now, instead of aligning the text to the left, we could align it to centre or maybe right align the text and you'll see that the effects are applied. I think the other options won't need to be explained right now. Most important thing is that you can of course, a line, a text centered to the left or to the right. And now let's talk about the character category. And of course, with our text layer selected, we could change the font-family, for example, to Times New Roman regular. You can change the way you want to use the font-family by selecting different font styles, for example, the alternate or the bold italic. Also some options you might know from your text editor. You can change the font size. Here you can select the leading of your texts. If you look at the second line right now, it's selected to auto. But if we change it, for example, to 500 pixels, then we have some more space between the single lines. And of course, we could also lower that space to maybe 100 pixels. Then you'll see that there is close to no space between the first, the second, and any other line you want to create in your text. Selecting Auto here just means that depending on the way you want your font size to be, this will also determine the leading size. Then we have some more options here. This color will determine the color of your text. So for example, if we switch this to read it, Okay, you will see the textbook we read. And if we click on here, this will be your color of the stroke. So for example, selecting a wide stroke and enabling the stroke to be visible by enlarging this number here. And you'll see that a white stroke will show up beside your red fill color. Then you have the option like now to select this stroke over the Fill. That means that the stroke will have first priority. If we go to the option failover stroke, then of course, there will be a lot more red areas. The fill color will be the first priority. If we enlarge this pixel number, then of course the stroke will get bigger and bigger. We have some more options here. Of course, we could make it a little more bold as well as typing it in Italia IQ. But I think all those options, you know from your text editor and won't need to be discussed any further right now. As well as the tracker and the Content Aware Fill categories here because those will play a big part in this course later on when, for example, we want to track objects in 3D space as well as content aware of filling and deleting objects from existing scenes. So for now, I think we can check mark this right area. And next thing we want to talk about is this bottom area with the composition settings, with the different layers, all the options you have here, as well as a quick browse through the timeline. While I've already explained some things concerning that one to you, like for example, the work area, as well as the option to zoom in and out with this top bar here. But we'll see about that in the next video. So starting off with this left bottom area in the next one. 11. User interface overview: Composition area Part 1: Stay strong. We are really close to finishing this theoretical basis part now we only need to consider the bottom area here before we really get into practical examples, start working with texts and create our first project example, or sort of cinematic flyby title secrets. But for now, let's begin and start talking about this bottom-left area here. Of course, again, we have a search bar where we can not only search for layers like for example, this background layer, but we could also search for single effects, or for example, with our welcome texts layer selected. Go for signal properties like for example, the position. If we leave all three layers unselected and type again, another property than this property will open up in every layer. How to work with properties, how to select them very quickly, and stuff like that will also be part of this course later on. But for now, I just want to quickly explain to you how you could use the search bar to go for properties, layers, or other things you want to find in your composition area. Now you also have the option to adjust our current time mark by just clicking and dragging this one, for example, to the right. Then you'll see that the current time mark will jump to this place, as well as the possibility to control click inside this area to change from a view depending on seconds to a view depending on frames. And you'll see that for example here, this view has changed as well. So for example, 150 frames in this case, equals the mark of six seconds as we are working with 25 frames per second, control-click in to bring this one back to the second view. And what we want to talk about now is this symbol here, which n or disables the video view of your selected layer. So for example, if I switched off with this layer, then you'll see that the text will disappear from the composition. Of course, the same applies to all different layers, like for example, the background layer. And if you'd work with layers that include audio material, like for example here in our car composition, the Carnot MP4 source. Then in this symbol, we be able to turn on and off our audio signal. So in this case, the car lot MP4 will be displayed in video, but the audio material would not be included in that composition. Coming back to our welcome composition, the next thing we want to talk about is this solo button. Clicking on that one will really just solo this single layer and this layer will be displayed. But of course, you can also enable other solar layers so that working with a lot of compositions and you might want to focus on two or three layers only. There's no need to turn off all the other layers, but you could also solo just those two or three layers you want to consider when you are done. For example, working with one layer and you want to make sure that this layer won't get modified anymore accidentally by just clicking on it without having the purpose to do so, then you could just turn on the lock for that layer, like for example, in this welcome to this course layer. And now you won't be able to click on that layer and modify it any more. Those are the basic four buttons you see here. Turning off the video, turning off the sound, soloing a single layer as well as lock-in a single layer. In the next column we have a label which is then followed up by a simple enumeration of the single layers. The layer name, again can of course be renamed at anytime just by hitting the enter button and typing and new name. And this not only applies to your composition area, but also works the same way here for anything you'd like to rename in the project data. Now of course, these columns again, can be modified by right-clicking and hitting columns. For example, de-selecting the label of view. Then you'll see that those labels won't be displayed anymore. Here in our composition area. Talking about the mode here, I don't want to really go into detail right now in this course simply because we'll talk about that. When, for example, a creating a Bitcoin t-shirt design. By what I can show you. For example, with this welcome part two texts. If we switch, switch the mode from a normal mode to, for example, overlay, that you will see that the text soul of blends into our background. And with the mode, we have a lot of different options to let work together. For example, this text with anything that's laying behind in our composition. To give another quick example of how you might want to use these different modes is that we could introduce very structured texture image and combine our texts layer with the structure of their texture by simply putting the texture behind this text layer and then selecting a mode to combine the structure of that layer with the content of our texts. But again, for that, we'll see later on when we create, for example, our Bitcoin t-shirt design. For now, I want to skip talking about the Track Matte, as this will be better explained later on when we have a direct example. The only thing we might want to consider in this view here is speaking about the parent and linking of different layers. And if I, for example, take my welcome to this course layer and selecting this pick whip tool and pick whip this layer to the first text layer. Then what will happen is that we now have a sort of parent-child relationship where any change that is made to our welcome power to layer will also directly impact our welcome to this course layer. So the welcome part two layers is the parent, Well, welcome to this course layer. As a child still works individually so you can still apply any changes there. These changes won't affect the welcome part two layer. While any changes made on that layer will directly influence the child layer. A similar relation exists, for example, between your head and your eyes. If you move your head to the left or the right, these positional changes will of course, directly influence the position of your eyes while the ice itself can sort of still individually move or blink. Now, I think enough of this view here. If I turn on the toggle switch mode, then you'll see that we have some more options to talk about in this composition area. And that's what we'll do in the next video. 12. User interface overview: Composition area Part 2: So the first thing we want to talk about here is this little elephant hiding behind a wall and an after effects. This is the so-called Shy switch. And this switch does, well, that was really difficult to pronounce for me as a German. But okay, well this switch does, is, if you turn it on, for example, in this welcome to this course layer, then you see that the elephant is now hiding behind the wall, but nothing has really happened. And this is because you need to activate this Shy switch in general for our composition settings. If we do so, then we'll see that this layer is now hidden in our composition area. The effect of this is that if you are, for example, working in a lot of different layers and you're already satisfied with how you have arranged your background or how you have arranged your music, then you could toggle the Shy switch on for those layers and hide them so that they won't disturb you anymore in your composition work. Switching off this general Shy button will of course, bring back all the different layers inside of your composition area. Independent of whether this little elephant here is sitting right on the wall or hides behind the wall. But anyways, this is sort of a way to get a better structure inside your composition area. If you're working with a lot of different layers and you want to arrange yourself a little bit better and make it a little more clear. Or for example, if you are delivering a project to a client of yours and you want to allow your client, or make it easier for your client to only access those areas inside the composition that he should be able to modify it, then you could shut those other layers and make them invisible. Now we want to skip this little button here, which allows us to collapse transformations. Simply because this will play a role in the segment where it's all about creating our own 3D mobile phone out of a 2D videos. So you'll see this button in practice there. Next thing we want to consider is this little fx button here. Right now. It is disabled as there is not a single effect applied to any of these layers. But if we take our welcome to this course texts for example, and again apply the glow effect. Then you will see that if I turn up this radius a little bit to see a little better, that we could disable all effects of this layer by simply disabling this fx switch here. And we have another FX switch here which allows to disable or enable any individual effect about turning this button here will really have an effect on all effects applied to this layer because they are enabled if turning on or off. This fx, which here, the next button we want to consider is this little motion blur switch. And if we turn this one on, for example, in our text layer, then you'll see that it gets directly switched on as well for our general composition. If we switch to this one off right here, it has the same effect as with our Shy button here. So then it doesn't matter anymore if you have motion blur activated or deactivated for every individual layer, if the motion effect is generally disabled, and of course, a single layer in our composition will have motion blur effect. But what the motion bureau does in particular will be shown in the next segment when we create our flyby tight as a sequence. So for now, I'll just leave this as it is. This little switch here sort of marks our adjustment layers inside the composition. So far in this course, we haven't really talked about adjustment layers, but right now, I'll quickly show you what they can do for us by creating a layer, new adjustment layer. And you'll see this new layer here marked with the adjustment layers symbol. And if we now apply an effect to this empty layer here, like for example, Effect, color correction, exposure. And now we increase this value here. Then you'll see that all layers of our composition have been brightened up. And that's because every effect we apply to our adjustment layer will have an impact on all the layers below this adjustment layer. If we now take the adjustment layer and put it below our text area, then you'll see that this welcome part two texts now is no more longer brightened up. If we bring it back one more layer, then you'll see this text here also no longer is brightened up. But in general, if you want to apply an effect to all layers laying below in the composition, then there's no need to apply this effect individually to all layers, but you can create a new adjustment layer and make some general adjustments inside this layer. Last but not least, we have this little cube symbol which enables our 3D layer. So if I generally turn off this adjustment layer for a second to make it better visible, then we could grab our welcome to this course text and enable the 3D switch. And what this will do, it will give us an additional position value. We don't only have our x position and y position, but here in blue, you have your Z position. So we work in 3D space later on. But I can show you here with this text marked, if you click on P, one shortcut to bring up the position value, you see that we have an x value of y. Well you, and now also a zed value. To bring this one up and away from our point of view. We could also switch this active camera, for example, to the left to see that changes in that area were really have an impact on where this text layer is lying in 3D space. So that's it for all these single symbols. Of course, here, at the very bottom we have some different display options. Like for example, you could hide all these small buttons here or bring up the mode or Track Matte like we have talked about before. And here you have some more detailed options. Like for example, the in and out point, the duration of every single layer, as well as the stretching factors. But I'd like to keep it a little bit more simple and maybe just toggle this switches to have different views and leave my timeline a little bit larger to have more possibilities to work inside there. And as already mentioned, this timeline is our last segment of this bass part. And therefore we see again in the next video. 13. User interface overview: Timeline: Alright, so in this last video, we'll finish our theoretical base part of the Adobe After Effects course. And we want to now consider everything that's going on here on the bottom right, inside our timeline area. You already know that of course, clicking here on the left of your work area, you can enlarge the work area to the left side of bringing it back to its original point. And you're clicking on the right, you can of course, adjust the bracket on the right side of the work area. And if you click here on the middle and lift your left mouse button, click it, then you can change the work area total. Here on top, you have the possibility to zoom in from the left side and here on the right, you can, of course, zoom in from the right side of your work area or of your composition. And what you can also do to set your work area is, for example, going here and clicking the button B, then this will mark the beginning of your work area. And if you want to mark the ending of your work area, you might want to click the button n. What we can also do is adjust our composition to the current work area. And this will be done by right-clicking here. And then trim comp to work area. And now you'll see we have a new work area. And this area is now our total composition. And if we check this out in our composition settings, you'll see that what has been the work area right now is the total composition. So the work area before was four seconds and 29 frames long, which is now the length of this composition. And the starting point of the work area before was at second one and frame 11. And this will now mark the start time code of this composition. If I want to undo this, IF always, the possibility to click Control Z to undo my last step or go to edit, undo time change. In this case. You'll see that if I enlarge this bracket here on top, that now my composition is back to where it has been and has a length of about 11 seconds. Now you also have the possibility to zoom in and zoom out with these little mountains here on the button. Either by taking the control and dragging it, for example, to the right side until it on the very right. We see at frame per frame or just clicking the mountains, for example, clicking on the bigger mountains will zoom in for one step and clicking on the smallest mountains. Of course, we'll zoom out again. What might also be useful is creating some timestamps or a marker bins. You can either do so by dragging them into your composition. For example, if you want to mark your 4 second, then you drag this marker towards this position. Or what you could also do with the current time, aka being at about six seconds and ten frames, you could just click on here and the marker will be created at this point in time. And you could easily jump right there to this marker by clicking onto this point here or by right-clicking the marker and then saying go to marker. This might of course be useful to remember relevant points inside of your composition. But for now I want to delete those markers again, and I do so by right-clicking and either deleting this individual marker or in this case, I want to delete all my markers. So I'll just click on here and the markers have been deleted. One last thing we'll talk about at this point in time is the display of each single layer. Right now we see all the layers are displayed at this point in time. But of course, if we take our welcome to this course text and we grab our ending point and pull it before our current point in time. Of course, this layer will end. It's displayed before our current point in time and therefore no longer be displayed. What can also be done to split a layer at the current point in time is to use the shortcut Control Shift D and width are welcome to this course, layer selected. You'll see that at this point in time the layout will be split. With this being said, I think we can now really finished this theoretical part of our Adobe After Effects course. You are ready to go with your first practical example. You now know where to find the basic functions, how to use the project area, import data, as well as how to use the composition area. So in the next segments, we'll speak about texts. And at the end of the next segment, we will create our very first cinematic flyby title sequence. So stick around and we're going to see again in the next video. 14. Create a text: Basic and transformation options: Alright, so this segment will be all about texts. We were learning the basic transformation options, as well as creating our very first animations using keyframes. At the end of this segment, we want to create a flyby title sequence, which will look somewhere similar to this. Alright, so let's get started. Throw everything away we've created here and start from scratch by creating a new project, file, new, New Project. And we want to click New Composition. We want to name this one basic text and leave the preset with HDTV 1025 frames per second. And a duration of ten seconds should be enough for this one. So we hit OK. And of course we want to start with a new text. We can either click here on the Horizontal Type Tool or we just hit Control T, so that a new text will be created. When we click here in this preview area, what we want to write maybe is just example. And I will turn on the full resolution for this one. Won't be too difficult to render out. And we go here into the character settings and we increase the size of this text so that you'll see it better. And we can position this either by hitting and drag drop in this one, or we can click here on Align. And for example, align it horizontally as well as vertically. Now, we want to go through some basic character and paragraph settings. I want to make this one centered, which won't be visible a lot in this case. But if we have more than one line, we want this to be in the center and we have our character settings. Now, for this one, I'll choose RER and make it bold. And now we have our text size here we have set the tracking for this one to be at 0, which means that it will be adjusted to our text size in a normal way. If we want to increase this one, this will be part of our project with the flyby title sequence, you'll see that the text right now will be enlarged to both sides. Whereas if the program would be aligned to the left, and we would now do the same trick again and increase the tracking. Then you'll see that the effect will only take place to the right. Of course we want this to be centered, so that's why I choose Paragraph and center the text. Bring back the Align and align this one horizontally. And now we have some other options here. In this case, we don't even want to use the stroke, so we're just fine with the fill color and make it white. Later on we'll be using a gradient to make this text look a lot better. But for now, we're okay with the vertex here on this black background. What we want to be doing now is talking about the basic transformation options. You'll find those if we see our text layer here on the bottom left in our composition, then we can open up the text and transform options. If we had this arrow and open up the Transform options by clicking this small arrow here again. Now we see options like anchor, point, position, scale, rotation, and opacity. And those options are not dependent or visible only in text layers, but the basic transformation options will be there for every layer. Meaning if you will create a new solid, you can also pose, position this solid of course, or scaling it up or down. Now, we might begin with the anchor point. This is the little cross you see here. And this cross determines from where to do your adjustments. What I mean by this is right now the anchor point is here on the bottom, in the middle of this text. Now, if I scale up this text, you'll see that starting from the anchor point, that text will scale up. Only. Going up. If I position this anchor point, move it, for example, to the left or right, or here as you'll see, we'll position the cross right into the center of our text. And if I scale it up again, now, you'll see that the scale really starts from our anchor point. Now we have another option to position the text itself. And that of course, is the position. Right now as we are working in 2D space, we have our exposition, as well as our y position. Of course, you can always just click into those positions, type any number you like, or you will grab the text and just position it where you want to. Now the scale I've already talked about, we can scale this text up or down. And we can of course, also unlock the proportions, meaning that we can scale in x as well as y, which will, which will look terrible. But of course, that's possible as well. For now, I will lock those positions together again, bring it back to 100. And I'll quickly show you that you can also of course, a rotate the text to the right, to the left. Here. This little 0 means that we haven't done a circulation. But right now, if we circulated more than 360 degrees, of course this will turn to A1. Now, you have seen every option apart from the opacity and that of course, can bring down the opacity of the texts from 100 to 0 per cent. So right now, you know the basic options and what we'd be talking about next is animating those options to create our very first moving text. 15. Create a text: Getting to know keyframes: As already announced in the last video, in this one, we want to use our very first keyframes to start animating and moving this example text. Before I begin to do so, I want to bring back my rotation to 0 degrees. And now we want to focus on the position of x and y data. Right now you see we are at mark 0, so 0 seconds, 0 frames. And what we want to do now is click on this little stopwatch here, that a very first keyframe of our positional data is created in our current point in time. If I go forward now for example, to the 1 second mark and start moving the position to the right. Then you'll see that another keyframe will be created. And in this preview area, we can see the direction that this text will do over time. And if I bring back my work area by either taken it here and bringing it to the 1 second mark, or by clicking n at our current point in time so that this will mark the end of the work area. And now I click Space-bar to see the movement. Then you can see that the text starts to move from left to right according to our both keyframe data. In this data here at 0 we have an x value of 966 and a y value of 470. And this y value is still the same here, so that there's no movement in y space while the x value has changed to 1600, so that the texts will start moving from left to right. So that's basically how to use keyframes. And now what we want to do next is start animating our text a little differently. Starting here outside of our preview area. Then bringing the texts in quiet fast, slowing down here inside this area, and disappearing quite fast again to the right side at the end. So first of all, I want to enlarge this maybe to two seconds for my work area. And now I want to mark both of my keyframes and hit delete so that I start from scratch again and you see the movement has been deleted. At the beginning. I want to take my position at x data now, move it to the left. And this will go very slowly. You can fastness one up if you hit the Shift key while doing so, then you'll see the movement will be a lot faster. And this works not only for x value, y value, but for every where you, you want to choose, if you hit Shift that you can move a little faster in those values. So starting from here outside of my area, I want to again click this stopwatch to create my very first keyframe at our 0. Now we move forward maybe about ten frames. You can either see this here, ten frames or here. And now I want to bring the text In. Hit Shift again. Maybe we stop here that we want to stay inside our composition for maybe about 1 second. Here should be fine. And I want to move a little bit to the right. Maybe here and now, another ten frames forward. We want to leave our preview area and move right outside to the right. Now if I play this one out, you'll see our text flies and pretty fast, then slows down. And at the end flies out very fast again. Now it might be that in your case, the text does a little bounce-back effect right here. Because After Effects wants to interpret this one as kind of an intelligent fly in. And if it flies and very fast and then suddenly slows down, then it might be that after Effects prefers to interpret this one as a little bounced back before, then moving to the right again. And this might be because if we right-click, for example, this keyframe, check out the keyframe interpolation. Then here, this spatial interpolation might be auto best year or it might be linear. In this case here it's auto bezier and still moves from left to right without a bounce-back effect. But I want to show you the difference between auto bezier and linear in another example, which might cause differences. And therefore, I will delete all those keyframes again. And now we want to create a triangular move from the bottom-left to the top, to the bottom right. We start maybe without text here. Hit on the stopwatch, go to the 1 second mark. Bring our texts right to the top center. And then moving to the bottom right. And what you'll see now from the movement of this text is that after effects starts to create an intelligent way of directional movement. So this is not quite linear, but here sort of a parabolic move. And this is because the auto bezier interpolation is used. And of course this is differently. If I click on this keyframe here. Keyframe interpolation, spatial interpolation, and choose linear. And if I add okay, Now, then what you'll see is, right now, the movement will be exactly linear as we did with our keyframes. So this might cause some differences depending on what is your setting. The standard setting for this one is to use auto bezier interpolation, which is in most of the cases, the more intelligent choice. So for now we want to stick with this one, but if there is a little bounce back, then it might be because you have also chosen to auto bezier are some other methods of interpolation. So just for explanation, in this case, right now, I'll hit Control Z to undo what I showed you last. And we want to bring back our texts movement like this. Flying in, slowing down and then flying out. So that's it for the start of learning how to use key frames. And in the next video, we'll start adding some more keyframes to other properties of our text. And what we also want to add in the next video is a motion blur effect to make this movement look a little better and therefore, see you again in the next video. 16. Create a text: More keyframes and motion blur: In this short video, we want to add three more things to our example text. First of all, I'd like to animate another property here of our transform options. Secondly, I'd like to also animate a character option of our texts. And lastly, I would like to add motion blur to our text. So starting off with another property to be animated. And what we'd like to do is we want to fit this text in, in the moment it flies in from the left. And we want to let it fade out in the moment the text disappears to the right. So the right property of course, is the opacity. And we hit the stopwatch, make it a 100 per cent at this moment. Bring it back to the start. Make it 0, and get here to the third keyframe. And now we want to make this also a 100% like in the last keyframe. And for that we have two options. We either quickly change this to a T or something to create the keyframe, bring it back to a 100 and we got another keyframe. Or if I delete this keyframe again, we could also just click here on the left to add another keyframe with the same amount as the key-frame before. And then we wanted to come to the end and bring this down to 0 again. And let's check out the animation right now. Takes us coming in, fading in and flowing out and fading out. Maybe we change this and bring it back a little more insight so that the texts will fly in before and then will be completely visible. Alright? By the way, you could also at anytime, just see the properties with keyframes. If you hit this text layer and hit the shortcut U, this will mean that only those properties, properties with keyframes will be shown you to show the keyframes. And by the way, you could also hit K to jump to the next relevant frame. In this case, the next frame with keyframes. Or you could hit the shortcut E J to go back to your last relevant frame. So this is nice for your navigation to make it a little easier to adjust your keyframes. Now what we also want to add is another animation of one of our character properties we see here on the right. For example, let's say we want to animate our tracking. So here we have no stopwatches, but what we can do is open up our text layer, open the text options, and click on animate, and now choose tracking. And you'll see that some options will pop up. And if we hit the stopwatch here on our tracking amount, and to make it a little more visible again, we hit our text layer, click you only open up those properties with keyframes. Then we'll see keyframes have been set and the trekking amount here is 0. And now we want to enlarge this trekking in the moment the text is visible here in the mid area. So maybe we start at 0 at this point, navigate to this point and make it, for example, let's say 50. Now, what we've done is when the texts has flown in, it will also enlarge it's tracking and then fly out and fade out at the same time. Now one more last thing we want to add in this short video is we want to bring in motion blur. Right now you see the text is flight and quiet fast, but still it's sharp the whole time. And the same effect here at the end, flying out quite fast, but still sharp at any time. So the solution is simple. We just hit this little motion bureau button for our texts. Makes sure that the motion blur effect is enabled for the whole composition. And what will happen is you can see here when the Texas flight and it gets unsharp because it's moving quite fast. So in this video, we've added three things. First of all, we've animated the opacity. Secondly, we've also animated one of our character properties. And thirdly, we've added motion blur to our text effect. Let's render this out and see what we've done looking quite good so far. And in the next video, we want to also add effects to our text. And therefore see you again in the next one. 17. Apply effects to the text and use the mask to create a simple background: In this lecture, we want to add two effects to our text layer. And also we want to add a little color into our background. So with our texts layer selected, we start off with effects, generate gradient ramp. Now, what will happen is we have our start color and an end color. In this case, it's black and white. And we have starting and end positions of the ramp. So here you can see this is our start position where the color black has its origin. And this is the position where the color white has its origin. And this moment ramp shape is a linear ramp, so it will blend from the bottom wide to the top black. If I bring this point into the middle, then you can see that more and more of our texts layer will be black or at least in a darker color. Also, if we switch this from linear ramp to radial ramp, and for example, I take this black color into our middle. Then you can see that right now, the black origin here is in the middle of our texts. Well, this wide area right now is here at the sides of this circle. So if I move this one out, then the white will disappear. And if I bring this One more and more into the middle, and you can see that it starts to get a lot brighter. So what I want to do now is first of all, I want to swap the colors that are brighter areas will be in the middle of this text. And then I'll choose the end color. Click on it and make it maybe a darker blue click. Okay, and now I want to bring the end color more and more out so that the text itself will be a little brighter. That looks like a nice little gradient we have added to our text. Now we want to do the same or at least also add a gradient to our background. So therefore, I will create two more layers. Layer, new solid. We'll name this one background, one. In the size of our composition. The color will make it. Also. Let's choose the same color as here, the end color of our gradients. So therefore, choose this picker tool, click inside this blue area. Hit Okay. And now we could either create another solid or we just hit Control D with the solid selected. And then we have duplication of our first background. Hit Enter, name this one background too, and open the solid settings and make it black. Of course, the texts layer should be on top. Then we have our background one and our background too. And what we want to do now is sort of blend this background one into our background too. And we'll do so by clicking on this mask tool here or by using the shortcut queue to make it active. And if we had Q again, you'll see that it will switch to a rounded rectangle tool hit Q again, it will be an elliptical mask. And in this way we can navigate through a lot of different shapes to use. And for now, we want to stick with the elliptical tool and with our back 11 layer selected, start here in this upper left corner, hit the left mouse button and let go here on the bottom right. And in this way, we've added our mask one to this background. So what you see here at the sites, of course, is the background to Layer. And now we want to sort of blend this background one a little smoother into our background to layer. And therefore will open up the mask options by hitting this little error. And maybe we start with the mask expansion. Now, if we make this a positive value, this will enlarge our mask. And if we make this a negative value, of course this will shrink our mask. So for now we want to shrink this a little, maybe sort of like this, and then bring the mask feather up so that it will look a lot smoother and blend our background one into our background to this is one way of how to create a gradient for the background shape. But of course, as always an After Effects, There's a lot of ways to get to your target. And we could have done the very same that we've done with our texts layer, meaning that no need to create two background layers, but with only one background layer, we choose Effect, Generate and add a gradient. Choose the start codon, maybe again, a dark blue. The end color will be black. And we make the ramp shape radial and bring the starting points here right to the middle. And then maybe bring the endpoint a little more to the outside. Some this way. Of course, we will also add a gradient to our background. I bought, I wanted to show you with the two layers, was how to start using masks. And of course, mask will also play a role later on in this course. So I think we've got all the tools ready to go to create our very first project example. This would be the flyby title sequence, and we will do so in the next video, and of course, also add a sound effect to go along with this flying effect of the text. So see you again in the next video. 18. Practical example: Create a Fly-By title sequence: So at the end of this section where it's all about texts, we want to realize our first project example, which will be the flyby title sequence. Just as a quick reminder, this is what we're going to create together. By the way, it might be that on the first preview the audio is a little offset, but that's just a little trouble inside of After Effects and won't affect or finally rendered video. Because of course, we have made sure that the audio is perfectly suited to offline texts effect. So for now, I'd like to invite you to maybe stop this video in a second and try to create this flyby title sequence by yourself. Because to be honest, you've already learned everything that's necessary to create this effect. You know how to put effect on the text layer. You know how to create this gradient background. And you also know how to use keyframes to, for example, animate the position data. Maybe as a little hint in advance, these texts layers you see here 3D layers, meaning that apart from the x and the y values. If I, for example, choose this now text layer and hit P to open the positional data. You see that there's also that value. And this value will make sure that we can fly sort of like towards our view and more and more away from our view. So what I've animated here is the zed value as well as the opacity. And then the second text in and the third text theaters Solve is just like a replication of the first text. So make sure that your first text is perfect. Sync it with the audio source that you'll find in the course materials. And then you can just reproduce, reproduce those texts and reposition them here in time. And you're ready with this fly by title sequence. So you either stop this video and we will see again later on, or we just continued together and open up a new empty project. So file new, new project. And we start of course, with a new composition. Name it flyby titles. Choose HDTV, 1025 frames per second, ten seconds, just as before and we click, Okay. And maybe this time we'll start with a background. So Layer, New Solid, name it BG. And the color doesn't really matter because what we're going to do is Effect, Generate and add a gradient just as before. So I'll quickly do that, make it dark blue here. Swap the colors. That's a little too light. Okay, make it radial and bring the blue to the middle and then move the black area a little more to the outside, just like this should be okay. Next in line, of course, we want to add a text. So what we're going to write is now make it a lot larger, like for example, 350. And we want to do it bold. Maybe even larger. Or let's check out with the largest word. Theaters and align this one horizontally as well as vertically. Okay, so make it a little smaller. Choose the paragraph, make it centered. And 320 should be okay, and we align it back to the center. Now, bring it back to now. As that's the texts that we're going to start with. And what we're going to add is just as with our background and other radiant gradient. So we click on Generate gradient and again make it radial. Swap the colors, make this one dark blue as well. And bring the white area to the middle of our text. And I'll take the origin of this end color and move it a little more to the outside so that the text will get a brighter. Maybe one more time. We want to check with the longest word, which will be theaters to see you. It's a little dark here on the outside. And then take the gradient, move the end color even more away from the center. And like this, it should be fine. What we could do is maybe also change the start color to a little light blue. Maybe like this. And now we can really finally get back to our texts, which will. In the first place B now, and we want to add another effect, which will be Effect Stylize glow. So let's first of all increase the radius. Sort of like this may be. Then decrease the intensity to about maybe 0.5. And let's play around with the threshold. And I think like this, it looks quite nice. So we are ready with the effects of this text. Let's see, before and after we can turn on and off this fx switch, this was all takes before. Then we added the ramp, the gradient, and then finally we added our glow effect. What we want to do now, of course, is to animate this flying in and out of our tech sequence. So therefore we need the positional data as well as the opacity in the first place. We want to turn on the 3D switch so that we have an additional positional data, which will be the z axis. And we want to open up our positional as well as our opacity data. We could either click this button and then open the Transform options. And we have the position and the opacity here. Or we can just use the shortcut P to open the position and then T to open the opacity or hit P for position, and then Shift T to add the opacity to our visible options here. Now we want to start off by bringing this z value to the negative so far that this text will come as close to us and leave the visible composition area. Therefore, we just hit our left mouse button and move it to the left. And this will cause a very slow movement. But if we hit the Shift button while doing so, it will go much, much faster. So use the Shift button and we'll see at this moment, the texts has left the visible area. So about 2660 should be fine for this positional data. Now we activate our stopwatch. Maybe move forward about, let's say eight frames. Bring it to about 0. Then we want to stay there for, let's say 2.5th to second. Bring it a little bit farther away from our view. Maybe to about, let's say 450. And then another eight frames later. This should disappear quite fast. So with the Shift button pressed again, we want this to move very far away from our view to maybe about 7,500 should be fine like this. And of course, we also want to add a change in opacity so that the text finally disappears when moving away from our view. Therefore, we can go to this moment about here and activate the stopwatch, meaning that all the moments before this keyframe, it will be 100% opacity. And then when it starts to move away from our view, we want this to decrease to 0. So if I let our work area end in this moment by hitting the shortcut N. And now play this out. This is what we created so far. And what do you see now is what I've mentioned before when speaking about the First Tee frames. And we see this little bounce-back effect. And this is caused by the Bezier interpolation. Now, I think it doesn't even look quite bad, but still we want this to move linear. So therefore, I choose this keyframe here, right-click Keyframe Interpolation, and choose the spatial interpolation to be linear. It okay? And the same effect could occur in this keyframe. So we hit right again, keyframe interpolation and the spatial interpolation should be linear. Hit, Okay, play this one again. We see that now this bounce-back effect has disappeared, or text arrives, flies in, slows down a little bit and then finally moves out quite fast. But remember, as you see here, this is not played in real time as it is just 15 frames per seconds. So the final animation will move a little faster. Nonetheless, what we want to add next is of course, our sound. Therefore, I'll go to the project data here, bring up my folder with the course materials and just drag and drop this swoosh audio source into our project and bring it into our composition maybe right below our text. Now, we open up the arrows here, see the audio data, and bring up the waveform here in this moment, this should be where our texts will fly in. So let's see where this moment is. I think probably in this frame. So let's bring back our view and move this maybe one frame to the right. Now let's hit the spacebar again. Because remember, the shortcut spacebar will include the video as well as audio preview. So let's see what we've created so far. Alright, so I think that fits quite well. And now what we want to do, taking this text, which will disappear at about this moment here. We want to let this layer and there, and therefore just grab it here and move it to this moment. And let the text layer and about where the keyframe Briggs this one to 0 opacity or a little later. Now, all we need to do is just take this text layer together with the sync audio material. Mark both layers by hitting Control and clicking on those layers. And then hitting Control D to duplicate those layers. Move them to the top. Double-click on this now to texts layer and right in. And then we want to open up our key framed properties by hitting you. And we want to also mark the second audio material and now take the first keyframes of our second text to be just about at the same moment with the keyframe of the ending area in the first text. Zoom out a little bit. Make or work area a little larger. Do this one more time. So take the second layer, duplicate them again, bring them to the top. Double-click on the new texts and read theaters. One are too much. Okay? And then again, hit you with our texts layer to bring up the keyframes and move this together with the sound at about this moment. And then we want a work area to end about here. And let's preview what we've created for this project as being our very first project example, I feel like this is looking quite good. You could ofcourse at other properties in your animation, like for example, the tracking like we've do