Adobe After Effects CC - Essentials Training

1. Introduction: Hi, I am Daniel Walter Scott, and I have teamed up with the brilliant motion designer Kyle Hamrick for this After Effects Essentials course. Together, we have made the best After Effects course in the world. You're gonna love it. Are you ready to make something totally out of this world? Well, good news because After Effects makes that possible. But don't worry. This isn't rocket science. It's motion graphics, which might be even cooler. Hey, there. I'm Kyle Hamrick, a longtime motion designer, video editor, content creator and instructor. I've been using After Effects for over 20 years to create content for big clients, little clients, and just for myself. I love creating with After Effects, and I love helping other people love it, too. This course is for people new to After Effects and to motion graphics. We'll start at the very beginning and work through the process step by step. In this course, I'll be helping you get comfortable with the After Effects UI and the essential tools and workflows in here. But more importantly, we'll also talk about the why behind what you're clicking on, helping you get a handle on the fundamentals of how to think about motion graphics and work with time as an aspect of your creative toolbox, so that you'll be able to create multimedia projects that are both effective and engaging for your audience. As I said, I'll be guiding you step by step through everything, and we've provided you with assets and links so that you can create your own projects right along with me. You'll be able to use what we've provided or you can find or create your own elements to put your own unique spin on each project. If you're already comfortable designing Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, I'll be showing you how to properly structure your designs for animation and how to smoothly import them into After Effects. If you've already got some experience working with video, After Effects also integrates well with Adobe Premiere. I'll touch on that functionality later as well. So I hope you're excited to explore whether you've never opened After Effects before today, or maybe you've tried it and felt a little overwhelmed. Either way, I'm here to help you feel comfortable and confident in here so that you can make out of this world motion projects that will grab people's attention and open up a whole new universe of possibilities for your work. So buckle up. We are cleared for creative liftoff in three, two, one. 2. Getting Started in After Effects: First of all, welcome to the course. I'm excited that you're ready to learn all this cool new stuff, and I'm looking forward to being your guide on this journey. First things first, make sure you have Adobe After effects installed on your system. This course is designed for a lot of follow along, so you won't get too far without it. You don't need other Adobe apps installed to complete this course, but the class projects do have several opportunities for you to work with your own designs if you'd like. So if you want to take advantage of that, you'll obviously need to use an appropriate app to do so. After effects integrates well with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and also with Adobe Premiere. And I do recommend having at least some of these installed if you're planning to work much in after effects beyond this course. Other apps may also be useful depending on the type of projects that you're doing. To help equip you for success, we've included many of the project files that you'll see me using during the lessons. You'll also be getting my completed examples and several assets that you can use for practice and to complete your own class projects. The files will be downloaded onto your machine as a ZIP file, which you'll need to unzip before you can work with them. One very important note on these downloaded files. You can put these files wherever you like on your own machine, but you should really keep everything together. Don't split things up or mess with the folder structure at all because it's likely that you'll mess with some of the file linking. Any files used in an after effects project are simply links to those files on your computer's hard drive. So if you move them, change their name, or anything else that might alter that link, after effects won't know where that file has gone, and it'll be replaced by these color bars. If this does happen to you or if you need to download any project elements that I might not be able to include directly for licensing reasons, let me show you how to fix that. If you ever open a project and get this message that you have files missing, you'll need to relink them before you can start working. So just press Okay. You'll probably see this crazy color bar version of your animation that you're expecting to see. And over here in your project panel, you'll see assets with the color bar icon. That means those are missing. What you'll need to do is select one of your assets, right click and choose replace footage File. Now you simply need to navigate to the place on your hard drive where that file lives. Tell it which file you want and choose Import. If there are other files missing from the same project in the same location, after effects will actually find them and relink them for you. If they're not grouped together like this, you may need to repeat this process for each element. I also want to point out that I'm recording this using After effects 2026, but almost everything I'm covering should be available in at least the few previous versions. If you're on a much older version, congrats on holding on to that collectible, but you may run into a few places where the UI or the functionality has changed a little bit. You should also know that after effects can be a demanding app. And if you have an older machine or one that was built for more of a static design workflow, you may find times where your system struggles a bit. Generally speaking, you want a decent, relatively modern processor, a decent amount of RAM, an appropriate amount of space on a fast hard drive, and ideally a dedicated video card. Later, I will be giving you some tips on how to maximize whatever you're working with. But since the definition of decent is always changing when it comes to computer hardware, on the Adobe site, you can find recommendations for appropriate and current system specs. These obviously evolve over time, so this can be a good place to start. You'll usually find that the more complex your projects get, the harder your machine will probably have to work. If you're using a lot of layers, creating something at very high resolution, using great big video files or working with three D features, that's when you might start feeling these limitations on older machines. As I said a minute ago, I'm so excited to be your guide as you start your journey with after effects. I love this app, and I've been using it almost every day for over 20 years to create work for clients all over the globe and for personal creative projects. I think of it like a huge creative playground where almost anything is possible. Parts of this app will, of course, have a little bit of a learning curve. But if you're also brand new to animating, keep in mind that it's not just software. You're learning a whole new way of thinking. So be patient with yourself and be ready to learn, and I promise that you'll be creating amazing new things before you know it. 3. After Effects Overview: Before we dive into the lessons, I want to give you a quick overview of what After Effects is and what you can do with it. The answer to both of those things is a lot. You'll often find a description like After Effects is the industry standard software for motion graphics, visual effects, and digital compositing. Okay, but what does that mean? After Effects allows you to combine images, video, audio, two D, three D, digital elements, real world elements. But the key is that it allows you to animate these things over time. While it's not a requirement, pretty much everything that you'll make in After Effects will probably move, change, or evolve in some way. And that in itself may be a new way of thinking for you. Here's a very incomplete list of the kinds of projects you might use After Effects to create. Social media ads. Videos that explain a product or service. The title sequence for a movie or TV show, animated typography, character Animation, removing an unwanted logo or background element from a video. Creating motion backgrounds for a performance or sports event, putting someone into a virtual environment. Creating animated mockups for app development, giving a person superpowers, and using automation to create hundreds of customized versions of a template. After Effects is kind of a combination of several digital design apps you may have used before with a lot of features from a video editing and post production suite, and that's probably half of what it does. You can create 100% of a project directly within After Effects, or it can be purely a place where you assemble pieces you've created in other apps. Because it's part of the Adobe Suite, you'll find that After Effects has good integrations with many other apps, and you should absolutely continue to utilize those apps for the things that they're good at, especially if you're already comfortable with them. If you're cutting out photos or doing digital painting, do that in Photoshop. Create beautiful vector artwork in Illustrator and edit your videos in premiere. And then After Effects might be the place where you combine all of these elements into a single cohesive project. But listen, you don't need to be overwhelmed here. After Effects may be a Swiss Army knife, but that doesn't mean that you need to worry about every tool right away. I would bet that 10% of the program is probably what you'll end up using for about 90% of the work that you do in here. And then there are several specialized tools that you might touch every day or never depending on what you're making. This course is designed to help you get comfortable with the basic functions and the concepts behind those functions and then introduce you to the huge range of what's possible within After Effects, whether that means helping you see ways that can extend the work you're already doing or helping you discover a whole new realm of creative possibilities. Let's get started. 4. Your Design Brief: In addition to the lessons, you'll also be assigned projects that give you a chance to put your new knowledge into practice. To make sure we don't just end up with a ton of the exact same animations, though, we've created this random project generator, which will give you a unique creative brief for you to use as a starting point. You just need to find the name of this course, which is After Effects essentials and click on that, and all you need to do is answer one question. What's your favorite color? I'll type in red and just click Generate My Project. And boom, it's just that easy. You'll get a creative brief, just like this. Your details will be a little bit different than mine, though. Let's look through this and see what we're dealing with. So we've been asked to create motion promotional materials for Sagitta Star Lines. Congrats. You've been chosen as the motion designer for Sajoa Starlines. What an honor. A premier space tourism brand preparing to advertise a new travel offering to Jupiter, the Stormy Gas Giant. The company specializes in luxury orbital travel and interplanetary excursions. That sounds like fun. Your goal is to use After Effects to create multimedia assets centering on the brand's signature color red. You'll be asked to produce a variety of digital assets like motion graphics, videos, composited visual effects scenes, animated infographics, and other marketing collateral. Think you can have these ready in time for the big launch? I'm pretty excited to get started on this, but if for some reason you don't like what you've got, you can click on this retry button down here. But I will warn you that if you retry too many times, say, three or so, bad things might happen. Will it cause the end of the universe? Maybe, maybe not. But I wouldn't test that if I were you. If you are happy with your brief, just click right here to download as a P and G, and now you'll easily be able to reference this as you work through your projects later in the course. I absolutely encourage you to get creative and put your own spin on each of the projects, but this unique brief will give you a great starting point. Good luck. 5. Navigate the Interface: This section is really just meant to be a tour of the After Effects y and some basic functionality. So you can totally just watch these next few lessons and be good to go. But I know some of you like to learn with your hands, so you're free to follow along if you like. I obviously won't explain every single button right up front. So if you do break something, don't worry, we'll get there later on. And as long as you don't save over anything, you really can't do too much damage here anyway. When you open After Effects, you'll see this home screen. And if you have any projects you've previously opened, you'll see them listed right over here. Nice and convenient. Before I open up this project, I do want to call your attention to this learn tab over here. If you click this, you'll get access to tutorials available from Adobe either on their website or directly in the app. So that can be a great way to supplement some of the stuff that I'm teaching you, or that can be a nice little break if you get tired of my voice. I have a project I've prepared specifically as a little tour around this app, so I'll come up here to open project and choose that project, which is called Welcome to AE. And open. The first thing I want to point out is this top right bar. These are the workspaces. I'm currently working in the default workspace. If you're on something else, you can just click on the name to choose that one. Overall, I think you'll find that this UI is actually a little more familiar than you expected it to be. And there are several features here that are not all that different from the other Adobeaps if you're already used to those. We'll start off over here on the left side in what's called the project panel. In short, this is where you put your stuff so that you can work with it. Once you create compositions, which are the things that you work inside, those live over here. And when you import assets like images or video files, those live over here, too. You can also see that I have the ability to organize these assets, and when you select something, you'll get information about it up here in this little thumbnail area. This main area in the center is our viewer, specifically the composition viewer, because there are some other ones. And in short, this is where you look at the things you're creating, either looking at them as designs or previewing them as animation. You can select and manipulate layers directly in here. So again, similar to the design apps where you can just drag things around. I'll just undo that. And one of the biggest things I want to draw your attention to is this little area in the bottom left corner. Now, After Effects is a pixel based program. So if I click here and change the magnification, that's obviously going to have an impact on what this looks like. If I choose a smaller number, I'll be zoomed way out, right? And if I choose a much bigger number like 800%, I'm zoomed way in. And since these are pixels, of course, this looks bad, right? Because I'm zoomed in to 800%. So if you ever get too close or you get lost or you're wondering why things look low quality, this is probably a good place to check. I'm going to leave this set to fit up to 100%, so it will always fit this into the available space I give it, but it won't go over 100% unless I tell it to. Right next to that, you'll see another drop down. This is your quality or resolution because After Effects can get a little heavy when you start having lots of layers and lots of effects. So it gives you the ability to knock down the resolution temporarily so that you don't have to wait so long for previews. Right now, I have this set to full, so it's showing me every single pixel, full resolution. But let's say I'm working on something and I don't need to see every single detail, I'm just focusing more on the movement. Could actually set this down to something lower like quarter. Now I'll be able to work and preview much faster, but just at a lower resolution. It won't export your animation this way. This is just for previewing. But once again, if you're looking at your viewer and wondering why things don't look quite the way you expect, this is a good place to check. I would recommend leaving this one set on auto. That way, it will always keep it set at the resolution that's appropriate for the magnification you're set to. Down at the bottom is our timeline, and this is where you'll do most of your work. The timeline is layers plus time. So we have layers of elements here, both imported things and things we created, and they're stacked in a top to bottom arrangement, just like in the design apps. Then to the right of this, we have a timeline. This particular one is 8 seconds, as you can see over here. And as you move through time, different layers may appear or disappear or move or change in other ways. Let's come up here to about 1 second where I've placed this marker, and we can look at the way this works. I have these three planets here in different colors, and if I take the purple one and move it over the red one, it looks like it's on top of it, because in the layer stack, it is. Let's move this blue one over here and take a look. It's on the bottom because it's below both of these. But if I were to take that layer in the layer stack and drag it above those other two, now it looks like it's on top because it's above them in the layer stack. Let's undo. In this timeline, different things can exist or be visible at different times. You'll see that all of these planets are trimmed off so they don't exist before 1 second. Then each of them has their outpoint trimmed so they vanish at a slightly different time. Up here at the beginning of my timeline, none of them are visible yet, and then poof, all of them at once. And then one, two, three, they disappear. As I move further through time, other layers will disappear, and then eventually, some animation. The last major panel we'll look at is called the Properties panel over here on the right side. What's displayed here will depend on what you have selected because it's contextual. If I select this video layer, it shows me the layer transforms, so I could adjust position, scale, et cetera. But if I select this text layer, now it also shows me all of the type properties that I can adjust. Or if I select this shape, it shows me all kinds of properties that I can adjust or animate for that shape. After Effects can also deal with three D layers, including actual three D models. So this one has several additional properties over here, including a third dimension on the transforms, and then additional options for things like lighting and shadows and even materials. There are plenty of other panels here in After Effects, and we'll get to several of them later in the course. First, I'm actually going to take this time to customize my workspace just a little bit to simplify things for the upcoming lessons. I'll deselect that layer so you can notice that we actually have several other panels over here arranged in this collapsible stack. And I do like that. You can click on any of these, and it exposes that panel. Click it again to close it. But we actually don't need some of these for our lessons, so I'll just hide them to keep things a bit cleaner. If you find the little three bar menu or hamburger menu, if you're feeling hungry, you can click in here and choose Close panel. Bye bye, audio, a line is handy, but we don't really need that one right now, either, so bye bye. And we'll look at preview later. But for now, I'll just close that one, too. Now I just have properties and effects and presets. With only two panels here, I personally don't care for the stacking arrangement, and if you don't either, here's how you can change that. Come back to that Hamburger menu and look under panel group settings. If you don't want them stacked, just uncheck stacked panel group. Makes sense, right? There we go. I would like this a little wider so I can just drag on this divider here. Perfect. Now these are still sharing that space, but with clickable tabs like this. If you don't like that, you're free to leave them stacked. We'll be doing a few other minor works baased customizations as we go, and you're always free to use a layout that works best for your screen and your brain. Though I would recommend keeping yours fairly similar to mine just to make it easier to follow along. If you ever want to save a workspace layout, you can come up here to Window Workspace. In here, you can reset the current workspace, save the changes you've made to this one, though I would not recommend saving over the default, or you can save this layout with a new name that makes sense to you. In future videos, you might notice that I have several custom workspaces in my list, which can be very helpful for different kinds of projects using multiple monitors or just your personal preference. 6. Understanding Compositions & Projects: I Everything you create in After Effects will live inside a composition. Compositions live inside the After Effects project. So if you think of an After Effects project like a magazine, a composition is a page. You can have multiple compositions within a single project, but you could also have just one or literally hundreds. You can create compositions from scratch, and then you'll need to make decisions to determine the size and duration and other specifics of that composition. You can also create compositions from imported assets, and those will simply inherit the properties like the frame size of that asset. You can even nest compositions inside other compositions. Those are called pre compositions. If I were to grab this one named Transform and drop it into my viewer, now it's been added to the layer stack just like any other layer. But if you look here, it has a composition icon. I can manipulate this and move it around, treat it just like any other layer. But I can double click on it, and now I can see all the layers inside that that make up that composition itself. These can be a very helpful way to organize things, or sometimes you need to do this out of necessity. Conceptually, these are similar to grouping or to symbols in Illustrator or components in Figma, where you can create reusable pieces that you can use several times throughout your project. We'll be taking advantage of these in some of our later lessons. 7. Transform Properties: Every visible layer in After Effects has layer transforms that allow you to change the position, size, and so on. Whether you choose to edit them directly in the viewer, in the properties panel or down in the timeline, where you can access them by twirling the layer open like this, these numbers express those values either relative to the composition or to the layer itself. Position, for example, tells you where the layer is located relative to the coordinate system of this compositions. The first value is X horizontal, and the second value is Y, vertical. You can drag layers in the viewer, or you can also click and drag on a value. This can be very handy if you want to only move in one direction, for example. Scale expresses the size of a layer in a percentage relative to its default size. So if I want this to be half the size, I could drag this value down to 50%. Scale is linked by default, but you can unlink it by clicking this little chain icon, and now you can scale these non proportionally. I'll undo. Since this is a pixel based program, if you scale a layer above 100%, you will start seeing quality loss because, again, pixels, right? Because this is an animation program, rotation is expressed in two values. You have both full rotations and then degrees. If I click and drag on this, you'll see that it goes into the positive degrees. Once I get all the way up to 360, it clicks over to one rotation and zero degrees, and then it works its way back up. Eventually, I get to two full rotations and resets again. Anchor point is a bit easier to explain once you understand those other three because anchor point is actually the point around which position, scale, and rotation all happen. And once you're potentially animating those values, this is very important. See this little cross hair in the middle of my layer, that is the anchor point around which it's rotating and scaling. But what if I were to move this over here? Now when I rotate the layer, that's the point that it rotates around. And if I scale the layer, this is where it's scaling from. See what a difference that could make once I start animating. Lastly, we have opacity, which is just how opaque or transparent this layer is. Each of these properties has a keyboard shortcut, as you can see right here, A reveals anchor point, P for position, for scale, R for rotation, and T for opasa If you want to see more than one at once, you can simply hold Shift and then press that letter to reveal another property. Right now I have opacity. I can hold Shift and press P to reveal position. Hold shift and press R to also see rotation. To hide one of these, do the same thing. Hold shift and press T, now it hides opacity. The properties all still exist. They're just not currently revealed. As you start dealing with more layers, vertical space becomes quite precious down here, so it's good to be able to be selective about what's currently visible. 8. Animating with Keyframes: Keyframes are a foundational concept of computer animation. I like to think of them as holding a specific value at a specific time. Once you create two different values at two different times, what happens in between is animation. Let's take this planet layer and move it over here. I'll come up to my properties panel, and right next to the word position, there's this little stopwatch icon. When I click on that, it enables animation for this property. After Effects is now essentially listening for me to give it a different value. I'll come down to my timeline and notice that it created this little diamond shape. That's a keyframe. It's holding that specific position value at this specific time, zero, in this case. And if I click and drag this blue time cursor, it's called a CTI or current time indicator, and I drag it up here to 2 seconds. Now up in the viewer, let's drag this planet somewhere else to give it a different position value. Notice how After Effects created a second keyframe down in the timeline. Now I have two different values at two different times. If I bring my CTI back to the beginning, you'll see that this is moving Animation. I added the preview panel back for this lesson just to point out that it does have a play button that you can use to trigger previews. But there's a much more convenient way to do that. Just hit the Space Bar. So I'll hit Spacebar to do a preview, and we'll see that the planet moves during those first 2 seconds, and then nothing else happens because there's no other value for it to move to after the keyframe at 2 seconds. Once it gets to the end of the timeline, it loops back to the beginning and previews again until I press the spacebar to stop it. If I want to change something about this animation, I can either change one of these values or the time at which it occurs. Let's come back to that second keyframe at 2 seconds and change its position value. I can again just grab the layer in the viewer and move it up here. Now my animation will look more like this. Or I can change the time at which this value occurs. If I drag the keyframe up here, now that same animation is going to happen very quickly. Or I can grab the second keyframe and drag it all the way to the end of the timeline. Now the animation happens much more slowly. Of course, this isn't very exciting, so maybe we could add some more stops along the way. Remember, this property is basically just listening for any new values that I give it. Maybe I'll come up to this time and drag the planet over here. Move up a few more seconds, drag it over here. Position in particular is handy for this because you can actually visualize where it's been and where it's going. Let's do one more preview and check out this slightly more complex animation I created. This is just a start, of course, but these ideas are the basis of almost everything we'll be doing in the rest of the course. 9. Preferences, Shortcuts & Troubleshooting: If you need to make adjustments to the After Effects preferences, on Windows, you'll find these under the Edit menu preferences. On Mac, you'll find that under After Effects settings. If you're on an older version of After Effects, 2025 or earlier, these may be arranged in a slightly different order, but the options are the same. As new users, there aren't too many things that you should probably mess with yet, but there are a few things I want to point out because they potentially affect the way After Effects runs on your machine. Let's check out memory and CPU. This allows you to set how much RAM is used by After Effects and how much is reserved for other apps. This will be something you might need to determine based on your system and how often you're using other apps like Photoshop or Illustrator at the same time. If you look under disk, you can tell After Effects where to put what's called the cache. When After Effects builds previews, it uses both your RAM and hard drive space to hang onto those previews. By default, it just puts this in your systems temp files, which will slowly fill up your hard drive up to the amount that you allow it to use. So if you've been working in After Effects a lot and notice your hard drive is super full, this would be a good place to check, and you can empty it if you need to. Again, you'll need to somewhat navigate this for yourself, depending on the size of the hard drive you have this set to and the types of projects that you work on. You probably don't need to make huge adjustments to either of these yet, but if you start running into issues, these are good places to check. I want to call out that I'm working in the English version of After Effects with an English keyboard. So all of my shortcuts will be based on that. If you're working in a different language install or with a different language keyboard, you may need to customize things. So you can come up to edit keyboard shortcuts, and you'll see this great visual keyboard shortcut Editor, which can both serve as a handy reference and allow you to make any customizations that you might want. If you ever run into problems with After Effects, you can also trigger a safe startup mode as the program is opening. You click on the application and then as it's booting up, hold Control Alt Shift on Windows or Command Option Shift on Mac. You'll then see these startup repair options, allowing you to continue to open normally or open in a safe mode, reset your preferences or manage any third party plugins that you may have installed. 10. Create Your First Composition: For this first project, we'll keep it nice and easy just so you can get used to everything. I'll come up here and click New Project. And now we're presented with an empty interface. Before we can animate anything, we need to make a composition that our stuff can live in. After Effects often has multiple places that you can do the same commands, and that's the case here. You can come up to composition, New Composition, or down here at the bottom of your project panel, you can click on this little composition icon. Or right in the middle of your screen, there's a huge new composition button. So we'll just do that one. Once you click that, you're presented with some settings to choose for your compositions. This first field is the name of the compositions. I'll go ahead and name this one destination Animation. We do need to decide what settings our composition is going to have, and that's usually easiest to do by just choosing from this list of presets. I'm going to choose social media landscape HD 192-010-8030 FPS. So I'll just click on that and it sets everything for me. That means our composition has a width of 1,920 pixels and a height of 1080 pixels. We'll be working at 30 frames per second, and I'll talk more about what all of these settings mean a little bit later. The only other thing we need to worry about right now is our duration or how long this composition is. Let's set that to be 10 seconds. So you can just highlight this text and then type ten, zero, zero. It won't matter too much for this project, but you can choose a background color when you're creating a compositions. So you could just click on this color chip right here and choose a different color if you don't want black. Once you're ready, just click Okay. And now that we have a compositions, we're ready to start creating. 11. Create a Type Layer: We'll start off by just creating a simple type layer. If you look up at the very top of your window, you'll see all of these tools up here. We're looking for this T that's our type tool. So just click on that and then come down to your viewer and click so you'll be able to enter text. I'm going to type out the name of my destination, which is Jupiter. Once you're done typing, you can click somewhere else or you can press Control or Command Enter to confirm that type. With this type layer selected, look over here at your properties panel, and you'll see that you not only have the layer transforms, but you also have all the text properties that you can adjust. I'm going to choose a different typeface. I have a lot installed, so I'm just going to start typing the name of the typeface that I want, which is Museo. I'm looking for Museo slab, and I'm going to go with this big fat version of it here. I would like my text to be a little bit bigger, so I'm just going to click and drag on this value until it gets to be about the size that I'm looking for. I also want to go ahead and change this text to the red color that I picked for my brand. So I'll click on this little fill color chip right here. I do happen to know the hex code of the red that I picked. So instead of searching around in here, which you can do by just clicking and dragging around, I'm going to select this text down here and type in the hex code, which for me is ef3f2 E. I'll just hit Okay to confirm that. Now if I want to make additional adjustments to my text layer, I just need to make sure I have my selection tool back because right now I'm still working with the type tool, which you can see by looking at my cursor. So I could come back up to the toolbar and click on the selection tool, or you can just press V to get that one back. And now you're free to drag this type layer around and reposition it wherever you like until you get it just right. 12. Import Media: For a little bit of visual interest, we're going to add a background image. And if you look in your student files, you'll see that I actually supplied you with a couple. So you're free to just use one of those, but you can also find or create one of your own. After effects will import any of the most common image types like JPEG, PNG, and even PDF files. It will also work with most professional and intermediate formats like Targa, TIF, and Open EXR. You can bring in layered Photoshop and Illustrator documents. Those have some extra functionality that we'll talk about later, and it will also take other vector formats like EPS and SVG, although those work a little differently than normal images. The biggest thing to remember is that any of these assets must be in RGB color mode. To import one of these files, just come up to file, import file, and then navigate to the place on your hard drive, that the file you want is stored. I'll grab this background A right here and just click Import. Once the file is added to your project, you can just grab it from the project panel and drop it right into the viewer. Well, it covered up my type, and that makes sense because remember, these layers work top to bottom. So I can just grab this image and drag it below my type layer so that I can see what I'm doing. I'll come back up to the viewer here and just adjust this visually right here. I think that looks pretty good. You'll see that this particular image is bigger than my canvas. If I use my scroll wheel to zoom out on the viewer, I actually have quite a bit of flexibility here, which is nice to have. I'll just scroll back in and now we're ready to start animating. 13. Introduce Keyframes: Going to add some simple animation right here. Let's start with the type layer. So I will select that layer and you'll see that it opens it up in the properties panel. We can just work right there if we like. I want it to just move up into place here. So I'll just grab my layer and drag it right off the bottom. If you want to keep it going perfectly vertical, you can hold Shift to constrain that. I have my CTI right here at the very beginning of my timeline, frame zero, and I'll come up here to the Properties panel and click on the little stopwatch right here for position to activate that. You'll see it changes the icon there in the properties panel, and it creates a keyframe down here in the timeline. I'll drag my CTI forward a bit to about 1 second, and then just bring this back up into place. You can see it kind of leaves a little line behind where it was going. That's called the motion path, and again, we'll talk more about that later. I'm also going to add some simple animation to my image. In this case, I think left to right kind of makes sense. So let's go ahead and bring the CTI back to the beginning of the timeline. I'll select my background layer and then again come up and create a position keyframe. I think having this move over about 5 seconds maybe make sense. So I'll bring my CTI to there and just move that layer a bit to the side here. So it's just kind of creating a little bit of movement. I'll bring my CTI back to the beginning of the timeline one more time and press the space bar to preview. Alright, we've got some animation happening. Oh, after we get to 5 seconds, there's no more keyframes, so there's no more animation happening. Let me actually hit the minus key at the top of my keyboard to zoom out, show you the whole timeline, and you can see what's happening. So our type layer is moving over the first second and then it stops moving, and the background layer is moving over the first 5 seconds, and then it stops moving. So, you know what? I don't think we actually need the last 5 seconds of this timeline. But this is always flexible. We can always change that. I will bring my CTI back here to 5 seconds. And then this area right here is called your work area, and you can actually change this as you go, whether it's just for previewing or for your eventual export. I will grab this little blue area right here and just drag this over. And again, you can hold Shift to snap that into place. If you are a hot key kind of person, you can actually set this with just hot keys. You could set the Bginning of this area with B. I'll just undo that, or you can set the very end of it with the N key. Now when we do previews, it will only show us this area. I'll prove that real quick by just hitting the space bar. And you'll see when it gets to the end, it will loop Press Space bar again to stop the preview. And if I decide I actually want to trim my composition off to this length, I can actually just right click here in the work area bar and choose trim comp to work area. So you can always change this as you go. Making it longer is a few more steps, but that's possible, too. I'm going to keep my animation pretty simple here because we're going to be adding to this more in the next set of lessons. But I absolutely encourage you to do some experimentation here and feel free to get a little bit creative. This is really just you getting a feel for how this works and just getting used to keyframe. Once you're happy with your work, we're going to make sure we save it. So we'll just come up to file, save, and then just choose a location and a file name that are appropriate for you. 14. Export Your Animation: Last up, we need to export this animation so that we can share it or post it online. If you come up to composition, add two Render Queue, you'll see that there's actually another panel that shares space with your composition viewer, and right here, we are setting up what's called a Render Queue. You can actually put several items in here all at once, and then export them all in one big batch. But we're just doing one for now, and that's fine. There's all kinds of options in here, and we'll go over some of them later. But if yours defaults to this h264 match Render settings 15 MBPS, that's perfect. I just need to come over here where it says, Not yet specified and choose a location for this file to go. So if I click on that, it will open up my file browser. I can just confirm that. You can change the file name right here if you want to and then click Save. Once that's ready, you come up here and press this render button. That chime means it's all done. So now you can find that file, open it up and watch your Animation. We are going to get more complex from here, but if this is the first animation you've ever created, congrats. 15. Class Project 01 - Destination Animation: Alright, folks, it is class project time. These class projects are fun exercises that we've created for you as a good way to reinforce what we just covered, and they really help ensure that the information sticks in your brain. Watching something is good but doing it yourself is even better. This first project is just meant to be a simple warm up exercise, but as we go, you'll be creating nicer stuff that you could even include in your portfolio, if you like. So make sure that you're following along, and I would love to see you put your own spin on each of these. Remember to get your own brief from the random project generator if you didn't already do. I ended up with SaguaStarlines as my client. I'll be using red as my main brand color, and I'm creating materials about traveling to Jupiter. Now, the requirements for this first project, I want you to create a short animation. It should be 1920 by 1080 at 30 frames per second. Make sure you keep it easy on yourself and use those presets. I want you to create your own design with at least one piece of type and one background image. You're free to add more elements if you want to, but we'll be expanding on the same concept in the next section. So it's okay to keep this one pretty simple. The whole point of this first project is just to get you used to working in After Effects before we start throwing too many other elements into the mix. I want you to keyframe and animate the position property of at least one layer to create a short animation. If you want to add more keyframes or keyframe more layers, again, that's totally fine. Feel free to explore and try to have some fun here. I do want you to keep this short so that you stay focused on just what we're trying to do here. 5 seconds is probably a good length for something like this, but if you want to make it a little bit longer or a little bit shorter, that's totally fine, too. Whatever feels right for your animation. As a reminder, here's what I built for this first project. You can feel free to use some of the images that I provided, or this would be a great opportunity to find some of your own cool visuals for your own brief and see what that inspires you to create. I did share some links to sites with tons of free imagery that you can use for your own projects. Now, in terms of the deliverables, I want you to export an MP four of your animation using the render queue. That's exactly what I just showed you, and using that default setting is perfect here. Just make sure that you name your file properly and export it somewhere that you can find it. I would probably recommend making a folder specifically to hold all of the exports for the rest of your class projects, but choose a system that works best for you. Now, we actually can't host your videos directly on the class site. So what we ask is that you upload the videos that you create to a video hosting site. YouTube is a great free solution, but if you already have an account somewhere else and you want to use that, that's totally fine, too. I know that YouTube lets you create multiple accounts. So if you want, you could even create a special account just for this course. So you'll post your video to the video hosting site and then share a link to that video on the projects or assignments section of this website. Just to be clear that link should directly go to a hosted video. Do not link directly to a file sharing site like Dropbox or Google Drive or anything like that, where it would cause someone to have to download the file to view it. If you accidentally do that, it's not going to be the end of the world, but to get credit for the project, you do need to make sure that it's on a hosted video site like one of the options above. On future projects, I will also encourage you to be posting these to your own social media channels just so that you can get feedback there, too. But for this first one, again, it's really just a warm up. So just posting it on the class site is totally fine. Alright, time for you to dive in, have some fun and make some stuff move. 16. Project Setup: I've expanded on that previous design with an updated layout. I've got some additional text layers, including a full tag line and the company name. I brought in an image of my destination, which for me is Jupiter and added some color to the background. I did provide you this start project right here in your project files, looping promo Start. And you'll see the After Effects file right here so you can follow along if you like. I've also imported a texture element that I would like to add to my compositions. So I'll just bring that over from the project panel here. But you'll see when I drag it directly into the viewer like that, it puts it at the very top of the layer stack, which in this case, is not what I want. Of course, I could adjust it, but we could also just save ourselves a click. So I'll just undo or I could press delete since that's already selected. Instead, I'll drag it from the project panel directly down into the timeline. That way, I can put it right where I want it in the layer stack, which for me is right between layers five and six. You'll see that it centers it up in the viewer, as well as putting it right where you want it in the layer stack. For my design, I want to adjust the opacity just a bit, so I'll click on that and set it down to 80. Just so that you can see what we're working with, I'll come over to composition composition settings. And you can always come up here to check or adjust these settings for your composition. You'll see that I'm working in that same preset as the previous project, 1920 by 108030 frames per second, and I set this duration to 6 seconds. If you want yours to be a little different, that's okay. Because we have more layers, I think it's worth taking the time to organize our project a bit so that we don't get lost. Type layers are actually created with a red label by default, which works great most of the time. But here, it's the same color as the text, and that doesn't feel as clear to me as it could be. So I would actually like that to be a different color. If you click on the little color chip next to your layer name, you can set that to whatever you'd like. I'm going to choose yellow. That stands out a lot better in the viewer and down in the timeline, too. I'll go ahead and select two and hold control or command and select Jupiter also and set both of those to yellow as well. I think it's okay for my company name to stay red, so I'll leave that one alone and select this downloaded image. Huh, that's a terrible name. Let's rename that by pressing Enter, and I'll type in Planet. Press Enter again to confirm. And then I'll set this layer to be orange. I think that's a lot clearer for me to keep track of what I'm doing and probably a lot easier for you to follow along as well. Just to make sure we don't accidentally grab the texture or background layers while we're working on the other elements, I'll look right here under this lock column and click click to lock both of those layers. And while this won't really affect our animation, let's look back over at the Project panel. I know we only have four things in this project, but we don't want this to be a messy garbage dump, right? You can actually create folders to put your elements in. There's an icon down here at the bottom of the project panel, or you can right click New folder. I'll just name this assets, then select those elements and put them right inside. You can open it back up or leave it closed if you like. For this project, it won't make a huge difference, but it is a good habit to get into while things are still simple. Now that we have everything nice and organized and color coded, we're ready to animate. 17. Add Keyframes: Before we start animating, let's think through our concept. I want this to be a looping promo, which means I should probably start with none of these main elements on screen, bring them into place, let them sit here for a little bit, and then animate back off screen. So if I were to start animating right now with my cursor here at the beginning of my timeline, I could move everything off, but it's going to be pretty hard to get them back into the correct positions, right? And I spent some time working on this layout. So let's undo that. Instead, you might want to think about doing this backwards if it's easier to think about it that way. I'm going to start by making my key frames at the frame when I want these to land. I'll bring my CTI up to about 1 second here. And for this project, I'm going to work down in the timeline instead of the Properties panel, though, you're free to use that if you'd like. I could twirl this layer open and see all of these transforms right here, but that's already taking up a lot of screen space. I'm only planning to animate position for this layer, so I'll press P, making that the only property visible. I'll click on the Stopwatch to create a position keyframe, and then I want to move back to the very beginning of my timeline, which I could, of course, drag the CTI or just press home to get there. Let's go ahead and drag this left off the side of the screen, again, holding Shift, if you want to keep it perfect and do a quick preview. Not that exciting yet, but it's a start. And we're going to use the same idea with all the other pieces. I think it probably makes sense to have all of these move at about the same speed. So sometimes it's easier to do all of your animations and then offset the timing once you get a sense for how they're moving together. And that's exactly what we're going to do here. I'll bring the CTI back over to 1 second to match with that second keyframe. Go ahead and select two, press P to reveal position, and activate that stopwatch, home to jump back to the beginning, and we'll just drag that one off to the right. Notice how you can still see exactly where these are even when they're outside that visible canvas, pretty handy, right? Come back to 1 second, select our Jupiter layer, press P to reveal position, activate the stopwatch, home to go back to the first frame, and let's take that one, I don't know, off the bottom. I know that's going to overlap with the company name, but we'll figure that out in a minute. Let's come back to 1 second. And I think for that company name, let's use opacity. So I'll press T to reveal that one. Make a keyframe, come back to the beginning, and just drag that down to zero. I think for the planet, let's try something a little different. We'll do both scale and rotation. This might be a good time for the properties panel because remember, when you create keyframes up there, it reveals those properties down in the timeline. So I'll just click click, and both of those are now revealed down in the timeline. Press home to go back to the beginning. I'll scrub this rotation value backwards a little bit, maybe around -50 or so. You probably don't need to be exact. And then click on either scale value and set that to zero. Do a preview and see how that feels. Alright, well, this is the basic idea that I'm after, but everything's kind of happening at once. We'll talk about that in a minute. But this is roughly what I'm looking for. Right now, we are spending a lot of our time looking at parts of the timeline where nothing's animated yet. So let's go ahead and temporarily trim that off, so we're not wasting time. I'll put my cursor right here around 3 seconds and press N so that we trim off that work area. We are going to be using the rest of this timeline, we don't need to watch it right now. 18. Adjust Layer Timing: When you're bringing in several layers at once like this, you want to think about the viewers experience and how they're going to interpret that. Particularly when you're dealing with type layers, you want to think about presenting those to the viewer in the order that they would read them, which in this case, is, of course, journey to Jupiter with Sagitta Starlines. So if we make each word happen just a little bit later than the previous one, it really helps with that presentation. So let's come up here and maybe look at, let's try ten frames. So I'm at frame ten right here, and I'm going to select this two layer and drag this over so that it starts at frame ten instead of frame zero. Now, I do want to point out you don't want to drag from the very beginning here. See how the cursor changed because that would actually be trimming the layer, which is not what we want here. We want to move it over in time, just like that. And now, it starts a little bit later. Let's go ahead and try another ten frames and move Jupiter up here. Let's just see how those feel. These other ones are going to kind of be in the way. But part of working on this is sort of training your eye to look at the pieces you're working on and kind of ignore some of the ones that you're not. That's better. I'm feeling that since journey moves a bit farther than the other ones, it feels a bit faster. So let's actually maybe move that second keyframe a little bit later, select both of these, holding Shift to do that, and just scoot those over a bit more and see how that feels. Yeah, I like that. Now, of course, Saga to Star lines needs to happen quite a bit later. So let's bring that way over here so that it's not getting covered up by Jupiter as it comes up. There we go. That probably works. And let's figure out the timing for this planet. I don't know, maybe about there. A lot of this is kind of ballparking things and then watching it, making adjustments, watching it again, keep tweaking it until you're happy. And I think that feels pretty good. M 19. Create a Loop: Now this is supposed to be a looping promo, which means I need to animate all of these back off screen at the end. So I will press the end key to move to the very last frame of my timeline, and then press N to stretch that work area back out to cover the whole timeline. Since we're focusing on just the end, we could actually bring the beginning of the work area a little bit later, maybe around here, 315. I'll press B, and now we'll only be looking at that second portion of the timeline. We made our earlier animations about 1 second, so that's probably a good estimation for moving them back off. So I'll bring my cursor to right around 5 seconds here. And I could shift select these top three layers, come back over to any of them, and click on the little empty diamond here to create another keyframe. See how it does all three since they're selected. Then I could jump to the end of my timeline. Just click off any of them here and just select each one and move it back off screen wherever you'd like. Let's try maybe moving Jupiter off to the side this time, just for a little variety. Let's see how that feels. Seems a little fast to me. So let's actually grab each of these. Let's just try moving all of them back. Let's say five frames. You can actually use the page up and page down keys to move one frame at a time. So I'll just hit page up, one, two, three, four, five, and then move all three of these keyframes and see how that feels. Not too bad. I'm noticing that two feels quite a bit slower because it's not moving as far, so maybe that one could actually move back to where it was right here. And we could even look at slightly offsetting each of these keyframes. I could drag a box around these top two, move them over a bit like this. So it's creating, again, kind of a top to bottom feel. I think it might be moving in the right direction here. Let's go ahead and make our Sagitta Star lines layer fade back off. We can actually select both of these keyframes by dragging a box, and then I'll come up here, copy or Controller Command C. And then you can actually paste them reversed to fade it back off. Control Shift V or Command Shift V. And so now we've got those same opacity keyframes pasted in reverse to fade back off. Okay, not too bad. Let's make that planet move off with position as well. So I'm going to hold Shift and press P so it reveals position without collapsing scale and rotation. Create a keyframe for position, press N to move to the last frame of my timeline, and maybe just scoot that off to the side. Let's see how all of this feels. Okay, not too bad. Let's press home to jump to the beginning of the timeline. B, to expand that work area. And now we can watch our whole timeline at once. I think that outgoing animation maybe feels just a little bit fast. So I'll drag a box around each of these keyframes here at the beginning of that outgoing move and just drag them backwards a little bit in time, so they happen a little bit more slowly. Press home and do another preview. Okay, I think that's feeling pretty good. If you'd like to offset the timing of these final keyframes a little bit more, you can keep tweaking and previewing until you're happy with it. So I like how this feels, but I'm noticing that there's this chunk in the middle where there's absolutely nothing moving, and that's a little bit boring, but there's an easy way to fix that. 20. Animate the Texture: Let's give ourselves a little bit of room to work here. I'm going to select all my layers by hitting Control or Command A and then just twirl any of them closed over here, and it will collapse everything. We're going to animate this texture, so I'll go ahead and unlock that layer and then press home to jump back to the first frame of our animation. We're going to be animating the position property, so I'll select that layer, press P, and go ahead and create a keyframe. Now, remember this layer is quite a bit bigger than our composition, which was very intentional. Gives us the ability to easily move this around and add some life to this texture itself. Now, remember that you can use page up and page down to move one frame at a time. Well, if you hold Shift, you can move ten frames at a time. So I'll hold Shift and press page down to jump me to frame ten. I'm just going to drag this texture to some new place. It doesn't really matter where I'm just looking for something a bit random. And then shift page down to jump another ten frames and another random position. Just keep doing this until you've filled up the whole timeline and everything looks kind of nice and randomized. You don't have to be too precious with this. Just make sure you don't have the same position into back to back. You actually don't need to make one at the very, very end here because you'll never see that frame anyway. You can see I have a nice randomized position here, so let's zoom in and do a preview. Huh? Well, that's not really what I was going for, but it's actually exactly what I told After Effects to do. Between each of these keyframes, After Effects is moving between those position values. I actually want it to hold those values until it gets a new one, creating more of a low frame rate staccato feel. We want to select all of these position keyframes so you could either drag a box around all of them or click on the word position over here. And then right click on any of these. And in this pop up menu, we're going to choose this command right here, toggle hold keyframe. You'll notice that the shape of the keyframes change, and now it's going to hold that value until it gets a new one. And when you do another preview, you'll see that this, even though it's subtle, actually does a really great job of keeping everything feeling alive even when the main elements aren't moving. 21. Smooth the Motion: Speaking of smoother keyframes, I'm feeling like the main elements are just a little bit clunky with the way that they move and come to a hard stop, but there's an easy way to fix that, too. Let's stop my preview, and to reveal all the keyframes on all the layers, I'll press the U key. Now, I want to select all the keyframes on every layer except the texture. So I can click and drag to make sure that I get all of those. Oops, I missed a you, I'll just hold Shift and make sure that I get those as well. Notice that all of these keyframes are selected, and I can right click on any of them and get that same pop up menu. This time, I want to look in keyframe assistant and find this command, Easy Es, or you can press the F nine key. Again, you'll see that the shape of the keyframes change, and this is going to make all of them come to a smooth stop instead of a hard stop. Let's see what that feels like. See what a different feel that has. Here's a comparison between those linear keyframes that were created by default and the Easy Ease keyframes we just made. Now, this may slightly change the perception of the animation. So if you want to adjust the timing a little bit more, this is the time to do it. I feel pretty happy with this, so I'll go ahead and come up to file, save, save my project, and then just send that to the Render Queue and export my Animation. 22. Class Project 02 - Looping Promo: Alright, class project time again. We're going to turn that first class project into a more designed short looping promo. So you can expand on that first project, or you can create a new design if you'd like, either way. I do want that to still be 1920 by 1080 at 30 frames per second. It's a nice round number that will make some of the animation techniques easier for you. It should prominently feature the primary client color you should have multiple pieces of type, including the client name. You should have a background image of some kind and an animated texture element. You'll find multiple options for both of these in your Downloads folder, but you're, of course, free to go find your own, as well. This should also contain an image or icon of some kind. I obviously used a picture of my destination, but if you wanted to create a logo for your company or use some other image that's relevant to them, then that is just fine, too. I do want you to make use of position, scale, and rotation somewhere in your animation. If you want to do more than that, that's fine. You don't have to have every single element animated, but I do want you to have most of it animated and make sure that you use at least those three properties. Your animation should also loop cleanly. So be thoughtful about how you animate things. Having things start off screen, come on, sit for a minute, and go back off is probably the easiest approach. But if you want to get more ambitious and figure out other ways to loop, that's okay, too. As a reminder, here's what mine looks like. Mostly position animation. We've got some scale and rotation on that planet, and then the animated texture. For your deliverables, this is going to start being a bit repetitive here, but please export your animation as an MP four using that same preset that we did before. Upload your exported video to a video hosting site like Vimeo or YouTube or whatever you like, and share the link to that on the class project or assignment section. As a reminder, do not submit links to Cloud storage sites like Google Drive or Dropbox. Also, since we're starting to create real things and not just simple warm up exercises, we'd love for you to also be sharing this on social media, B that Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera. Your design can look very similar to mine, or you can make something totally your own. Either way, we're really looking forward to seeing your creativity and what you bring to this project. 23. Working with Video: We've been creating video files when we export our animations, but we're going to start using video files as source material for some of the upcoming projects. So I wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page with some of the technical fundamentals from the world of video. First up, video is always measured in pixels. There's no DPI or PPI here, just the actual pixel values that determine the frame size. What you're watching right now is standard HD video, which is 1,920 pixels wide or 1920 by 1080 pixels tall or 1080. You say the horizontal or X value first, so 1920 by 1080. You'll also hear this referred to as 16 by nine or 169, which is referring to the aspect ratio of this rectangle, 16 units wide by nine units tall. Those pixel numbers also correspond to the After Effects coordinate system that we've been using for the position movements in the previous lessons. The top left hand corner of any frame is always zero X, zero Y. This is the same coordinate system used by Photoshop and Illustrator. The bottom right hand corner will be the full width of your composition on X and then the full height of your composition on Y. The middle of any composition is always going to be exactly half of the frame size. So in this case, that's 96540. If we were looking at the standard vertical video format often used on social media, that's the same thing just rotated 90 degrees. In that case, we're looking at 1080 by 1920 or nine by 16. And the middle of that composition is 54960. You may also have projects where you're asked to work in four K or use four K video elements as part of your project. The standard size for that is 38 40 by 21 60. Numbers wise, that's double 1920 by 1080, but because of the way area is calculated, that's actually one, two, three, four times the size. So it's going to be that much more demanding on your machine. You can actually create things at almost any size in After Effects up to 30,000 pixels in either direction. Your only real limits here are your machine and the format you use when exporting. When we're talking about video, we also need to be aware of the frame rate. We've been using 30 so far, but we haven't really talked about what that means. A video file is really just a series of images all packed into one container. When you're talking about film or video, those images are called frames, and the number of them you see every second is called the frame rate. The higher that is, the more visual information you have each second. If you're based in North America, you're probably used to seeing the broadcast standard of 30 frames per second on TV. Although that's technically 29.97 for reasons you probably don't care about. In many other parts of the world, the broadcast standard is 25 frames per second, and the standard for films you see at the movie theater is 24. You might see higher frame rates like 60 when watching sports or video games or other action content or even higher if you're working with slow motion footage. And you might see lower frame rates in animation for either creative or time saving purposes or especially in things like Internet banners and animated gifts, where fewer frames help keep the file small. Here's an example of what these different frame rates look like next to each other. As you can see, 30 and 24 might look pretty similar to your eye. But as you get into the lower frame rates, it gets very choppy very quickly. Even all the way down at two frames per second, with literally nothing in between these two extremes, your brain can still kind of fill in that information and you can still understand what's happening. Cool, huh? You've seen me referring to this little number that indicates when we are in our timelines. This is what's called time code, which is the standard way for video to keep track of time in hours, minutes, seconds and frames. And the point at which it clicks over to the next second depends on which frame rate you're working at. If you're working at 30 frames per second, once you get to frame 29, the next frame will be 1 second and zero frames. Now, while we can work with video and After Effects I do want to point out that it's not really intended to be used as a Video Editing app. That's what Premiere Pro is for, much like how you could cut out an image in After Effects using the tools in here, but it's often much easier and faster to do it in Photoshop, right? Because that's what it's built for. After Effects can absolutely use video files as part of your animation or compositing projects. But if you're mostly doing trimming and it's more than a few clips, you probably want to do that in a dedicated Video Editing app. After Effects will support most video file formats that you can throw at it, both consumer and professional. But you should generally avoid using what I would call delivery formats like the MP four files we created earlier as inputs for your project. Those files are highly compressed to make them a smaller size for uploading or file transfers, so they're not ideal as an input if you can avoid it. You might think about this like working with a raw photo taken with a nice camera. You have tons of editing potential and plenty of pixels to work with versus a much smaller JPEG version of that same photo, which might work great as a thumbnail on a website, but not so great if you want to do any kind of editing. You should also avoid using what's called variable frame rate footage as an input. You'll most often run into these with files recorded on a phone camera or from screen capture software. In either case, when recording, you want to try and make sure that you're actually set to what's called a constant frame rate, not variable. A constant frame rate means exactly what it sounds like. It would stay at exactly 30 frames per second or whatever the whole time, whereas a variable frame rate might actually change frame rate slightly over the life of the clip as another way to save space in that file as it's being recorded. Within After Effects, video files work much like any other asset. When you select them in the project panel, you can see things like the duration, frame rate, and some additional technical info. When you add them to a composition, they work just like any other layer, except that they have a set duration, meaning they have a defined start and defined endpoint. Compare that to this JPEG here. Notice how it doesn't have that little black corner. The video clip has that little black corner to show you that this is the maximum extent of that clip, in this case, the beginning, and you cannot extend it beyond that without special re timing. If I start trimming layers, you'll see that when I trim the image, it's just kind of gone. But the video clip leaves behind this sort of ghosted area showing you that the clip exists there. You've just trimmed that part away, so it's not visible anymore. You can manipulate clips on the timeline, and as you move them forward or backward through time, you'll see those different parts of the clip reflected up in the viewer. If you don't have a composition in your project yet and want to use the settings from an imported video clip, you can simply drop that onto the new composition button, and this new composition will be created with the exact settings and duration of that clip. When you already have a composition existing, you can simply right click on a clip and choose New comp from selection. Video clips often include audio, which you can see indicated by the little speaker icon. If you want to mute a video clip, simply click that to disable the audio. There are also a variety of ways to time stretch and even reverse video clips in both simple and complex ways, and we'll do one of those in just a minute. There we go. Now you're officially up to speed. Hopefully, this helps demystify a few things about video and give you some good tips for future success. Time to start our next project. 24. Choose Assets & Project Setup: For this next project, I'll be using this cutout photo of a rocket chip, as well as this star background. Though you can see I've provided a few more options for you. And then we also have this, which is a clip of some rocket fire and smoke that I created. If you're following along, you're absolutely welcome to use what I've provided, and I'll give you some tips on changing the colors later if you need to. But I would really encourage you to start thinking about finding your own assets as we go forward. There are several websites with good options that are totally free and more importantly, with licensing that allows you to freely use these assets in your own work, even commercially. Unless you're creating everything yourself from scratch, sourcing assets is an important part of this process, and it's good to start developing a sense of what to look for. We will start by creating a brand new project. If you're in the home screen, you can just click on New Project right up here, or if you already have another project open in After Effects, you can go up to File New New Project. We're going to create a new composition from scratch, so I can just click right here on this big button. I'll use one of the presets again. Let's try the social media portrait this time for a vertical layout. We're going to set the duration to 3 seconds. It's a short one. And let's name this rocket flight. I'm going to import those assets that I just showed you. In addition to the other import methods I already showed, you can actually just drag things right in from your file browser. So I will control or command click to grab the rocket, this fire, and I'll use stars A and just drag these right into the project panel. There we go. Again, this is only a few things, but it never hurts to be organized. So while these are still selected, I'll drag them right down to this folder icon and name that assets. Now, let's go ahead and bring these into our composition. I'll start with the background, the stars. Okay. And then I'll bring in the rocket cut out. Let's go ahead and scale that down maybe about 25%. We'll fine tune that in a minute. And then our rocket fire, which is actually going to sit on top of the rocket. I know we can't see this very well, but we'll fix that in a minute. Now that we have everything in the compositions, let's look down at the timeline and see if we need to do any recoloring or renaming. I'll go ahead and change the label on this fire. Orange might make sense here, but I'm thinking ahead and knowing that I probably want a color that I can see compared to the actual color of the fire in this clip. So I'm going to choose purple. My rocket is red, so I'll set that one to red, and I think the default color is fine for the background. I could update the names a bit, so on Stars, I'll press Enter and change that to Stars BG. For the rocket, let's clean that up a little bit by getting rid of cutout and get rid of MOV on the fire. Great. I might as well go ahead and save my project, file, save, and give it a good name like rocket flight. Okay, I'm ready to start working. 25. Composite & Parent a Video Clip: There are a couple things I need to do to get this fire clip set up how I Want it, starting with moving the anchor point into a better spot. I will come up to my tool bar and find this little cross hair looking thing, which is called the pan behind tool or the anchor point tool. You can also press Y to activate this. Back in the viewer, when I hover over this layer, you'll see that my cursor is a little bit different. And now I can click and drag to move this anchor point. So I'll bring that over here, right where that fire is sort of originating from. Yeah. And now when I rotate this layer or scale the layer, that's the point it happens from. I'll go ahead and rotate this exactly 90 degrees. I can just click and type that one in. I'll press V to get the selection tool back and just scale this down by I. I'm holding Shift to make sure I'm scaling proportionally here, and I think right around 50% is probably good. Of course, we can't really see what we're doing. So we need to use a blending mode to composite this layer properly. I'll come down to my timeline, and by default, you probably won't see your blending modes. But there's a little button right here at the bottom that says toggle switches and modes. If you click on that, you'll see the switches disappear, and now you have two columns of drop down menus, mode and track Mat. The one on the left is your blending modes. And if you click on this dropdown, you get a big list of blending modes, probably more than you've ever seen before. We want screen, which is about a third of the way down. Screen makes all of the black areas transparent, which is exactly what we needed here. I'll go ahead and toggle that back to switches, and now I can zoom in and do any fine tuning on that fire. Okay, I am planning to animate this rocket sort of flying up across the frame like this, and I obviously want the fire layer to move along with it. But it seems kind of silly and messy to have to animate both of them. Fortunately, After Effects has a feature called parenting, which allows you to connect one layer to another layer, and it will follow it anywhere it goes. I think it might be easiest to just do it and show you how it works. So on our rocket fire layer, you come over here under the parent and ink column. Make sure you're all the way over here and not still looking at Track Matt if you do have that open still. I can either use this dropdown menu, which would be easy because there's only a few choices in this one and just select rocket or there's another way to do this, which becomes more helpful in a project with a lot more layers. You also have this little curly cue thing right here. It's called a Pick Whip. You can just click and drag on that to point to the other layer that you want this layer to be parented to. Once I let go, you'll see that it says it's parented to rocket. And now I can select this rocket layer and move it around. And anywhere this goes, the fire follows along. If we rotate, if we scale, if we change position, that fire is going to come along for the ride. 26. Add a Mask: I am noticing that this fire is overlapping the rocket booster in a weird way up here because, of course, the fire layer sits above the rocket in the layer stack, but I did that on purpose because if we put the fire below the rocket, we would have an issue with this back tail fin thing. So we'll be using a mask to clean this up. First, let's take a minute and explain how masks work. I'll grab this star's image and just drop it into a new comp of its own, so I have sort of a safe little playground here. You have a layer selected, you can use the shape tools or Pen tools up in the toolbar to draw a mask on that layer. The shape tool is this one right here and when you long press on it, you can see all the choices. You can choose between rectangles, ellipses, polygons, and stars. I'll choose an ellipse for now. I'll come back down to the viewer and just click and drag. You can see it draws from the corner where I started, though if you want, you can hold down Control or command to draw from the center. In this case, it doesn't really matter because I just need to show you how this works. Once I let go, you'll see that most of the layer has been cut away and down in the timeline, this layer now has something called mask one. If I twirl this open, there are additional options like feathering to soften those edges. You can set the opacity for the mask independent from the layer's opacity, and you can edit the expansion of the mask, so you can push this in or out without having to actually change the mask itself. Notice that these have stopwatches, which means all of them can be animated as can the actual mask path itself. If we come over to the right a little bit, we can check out this dropdown, which is our mask mode. By default, the mask is set to add, meaning it's adding only the mask and cutting away everything else. There's a quick invert button if you want the opposite. But if I click on this drop down menu, you'll see several other options. Setting this to subtract gives us the same thing we just saw. It's the opposite of add. Let's set this back to add and come back up to the viewer. You will see that I still have the mask tool selected, and I can click and drag another mask onto the same layer. This is where those other modes become much more powerful. Right now, both masks are set to add, so we can see both of these areas and everything else is cut away. Also notice that both of these masks are different colors, and those correspond to the little color chips next to the masks down in the timeline. So you can tell which one is which. And also, just like layers, we can change those to be either more visible or less visible, whichever is helpful for what you're doing. Okay, like I said, I have two masks, and they're both set to add. But what if I set the second one to subtract? Now that first mask adds the area inside the mask and cuts everything else away. The second mask subtracts from that result. But if I change the order and put mask two on top, now that's subtracting that mask area from the original image, and then mask one is adding its area back in. Let's put those back the way we had them and change mask two to intersect. Now we only see the areas where both of these masks overlap. Makes sense? Okay, let's actually delete both of these and take a look at drawing a custom mask with the Pen tool. In addition to shapes, you can also use this Pen tool or press G to select it. Again, make sure that your layer is selected, and then Pen tool works just like the one in Illustrator. If you click, it makes a hard corner. If you click and drag, it will create Bezier handles, which you can then adjust. Once you've drawn a custom path, you can press V to get back that selection tool and then click on any of the points to make adjustments. Remember, you can animate the mask paths themselves, but it's important to note that masks will always move with the layer that they're applied to like this. Now that we've completed our little masks side Quest, I'll go ahead and come back to the Project panel. This example comp I made is still selected, so I can just press Delete to get rid of that. And back to our rocket. Alright, I'll select my rocket fire layer, zoom way in, and I bet that I can probably get away with just using a rectangle here. So I'll grab that tool and just draw this on. I'm actually drawing the area I want to cut away because that seems easier in this case, and then I'll come down and either invert or just set that to subtract. I might see how this looks with just a little bit of feathering, so I'll twirl that open and just drag that up a little bit. Yeah. If I want to make any adjustments to the mask, I can come back up to the viewer using my selection tool and double click on the mask. Now you get a little transform box for the mask itself. All right. Lastly, you can hide masks if they're ever getting in your way. Down at the bottom of the viewer panel, you see a couple extra buttons that I didn't talk about yet, and this one right here that kind of looks like a little mask. Clicking on that toggles the visibility of masks up in the viewer. You can still see the results, but this way you can actually see what everything looks like without those masks being in the way. To bring them back, just click it again. I think we are ready to animate. 27. Animate Your Scene: Remember, we've got the fire parented already, so I can animate just the rocket and the fire will follow along. Since this is a short animation, I'm not planning to have it go all the way out of frame. We're just going to have it move across kind of like this, and we'll be animating the background to help sell the overall effect. So I'll start it down here and create a position keyframe. Then press end to jump up to the last frame and bring it up and across like this. I pointed this out earlier. When you animate position, you'll be able to see what's called a motion path, which shows you where the layer has been and or where it's going. We'll get more in depth with these later, but even a simple straight line like this one can be really helpful as a reference. This is going to be a good guide for rotating this rocket. There are ways to make a layer automatically rotate in the direction of travel, but I think for this one, we can just keep it simple. I'll just try to match this pretty closely. And if you ever need to be more precise, when you're adjusting these properties, you can hold control or command to fine tune these. Let's preview and see how that feels. Alright, I think that's pretty good. I think a little bit of subtle scaling would probably be nice here, too. I think the current scale is probably a pretty good ending point. So end and create a keyframe. Hop back to the beginning with home and bring that down just a bit, preview. You know what? Maybe just a little adjustment here. And this is always the process. Adjust, preview, adjust, preview until you're happy with it. Sometimes when you add other things later, it might change how this feels and you'll need to come back and touch this again. Now for the stars, those are really going to be doing most of the work here. Scroll wheel to zoom out. If you need to adjust the placement within the viewer, you can hold the space bar to get a temporary hand tool and just release that. Back to the start. And let's bring this up so the bottom left corner almost matches here, position keyframe, hop to the end, and go for kind of a diagonal movement. But this isn't going to match the movement of the rocket. So this is where we can use that motion path to help make sure that these look like they belong together. It probably won't be perfect, but since we lined up the rockets rotation already, that should be a pretty good guide. Now, I could hop back and forth and adjust the keyframes themselves, but you can also actually do this on the motion path itself. These vertexes represent those keyframes, so I can just drag those in the viewer to get this lined up. Let's check that. Okay, that angle feels right, but I think this is moving way too slowly. I'm planning to add some blur to this background later, so I think that we can actually bend the rules a little bit here and scale this up to 200%. Alright, now I'll go back and adjust these position keyframes for that new size. Zoom back in, preview. Yeah, much better. 28. Find & Add Effects: I think that this background is visually competing with the rocket a bit too much here, so I'm going to use some effects to adjust that. We'll come over here to find the Effects and Presets panel. For me, that's sharing space with properties. If for some reason you don't have this in your interface, you can always come up to Window and find it in the list of panels here, Effects and Presets. After Effects has literally hundreds of effects. It's half the name of the program, after all. And while I've got them pretty well memorized, that's probably not a normal or necessary thing to do. So, fortunately, they gave us a search bar red up here at the top of the panel. I'm just looking to adjust the brightness and overall contrast of the star background. So I think either curves or levels would be a good choice here. They are basically the same effects that you'll find in Photoshop. So if you're familiar with those already, I'm going to use curves, but if you're more comfortable with levels, that's just fine, too. I'll just type in curves. And there it is, under color correction. If I already have the layer selected, I can double click the effect name and it will apply it, or I can drag it over onto that layer in the timeline. And as soon as you apply the effect, look over on the left side of the UI where the project panel was before, and now you'll see effect controls, which exposes all the effect properties for anything applied to the selected layer. Curves works with this little graph interface where the bottom left represents black and the top right represents white. I want to bring down the overall brightness, so I'll drag this top point down. And I'd like to darken the whole thing overall, so I can kind of grab this in the middle here and just make this into a gentle curve. I'm keeping an eye over in the viewer as I'm doing this so I can see the results of what's happening. I'm just using this in a simple way, but if you like, this effect allows you to make the same kind of adjustments on individual color channels. So you're free to explore that if you like. Let's do another preview and see how this feels. Yeah, that helps a lot. Really helps the rocket pop out. If you're using one of my rockets and you need to change the color, of course, you're free to edit these images in Photoshop if you're already comfortable over there. But here in After Effects, you do have several different options. Depending on the image you're working with, it's possible that something like change color or change to color would be good choices. These two are a little more complex than what I'll be using, but I will point out that clicking on this little information icon right here takes you to the Adobe Help site with more info about the selected effect. I'm going for something a bit simpler like tritone. And I can also just drag that directly onto the rocket in my viewer. See the bounding box here? And now that I've applied that, you'll see that I have effect controls again. This time, it looks very different from curves. Here we have color controls for the highlights, midtones and shadows. And for this image, I think this will work just fine. By default, it applies sort of the sepia look, but all we need to do is click on that midtones color control and pick something different, like, I don't know, bright green. Now you can see here that I'm getting a lot of that green in the white parts as well. But since we're just learning about these, I wouldn't fuss about it too much. This might take a little trial and error because, again, it will depend on the image that you're actually working with. So don't be afraid to explore. Worst case, you can always reset an effect back to the default settings right here, or you can toggle an effect on and off with this little FX button. Or if you really don't like it, you can just click on the effect name and press Delete. Next up, I would like to add some blur to my animation to help sell the idea of speed, and there are effects I could use to do this, but there's actually a better approach. 29. Apply Motion Blur: After Effects has another feature called motion blur. You can apply this to a layer, and it calculates the appropriate blur relative to the speed that the layer is moving. You'll often use this if you're trying to match a graphic element to a piece of footage that already has motion blur baked in from the camera. But you can certainly use this on an animated piece like this one, as well. You're going to find this in your switches. Remember that if you don't see these right now, you can use this button to toggle between switches and modes. Or you can also press the Four key on your keyboard to toggle these. Now, I'll look at my switches column and find this one that looks kind of like a little bouncing ball. This switch enables motion blur for these layers. I want all my layers to have this so I can just click the top one and drag downward while still holding that mouse button, and it turns this on for all the layers I drag over. You probably saw the difference immediately, but if you didn't, that's because there's actually another switch that controls whether this is visible for this entire composition. And that is right up here in this little row of buttons. Notice this other motion blur switch up here, clicking that will either enable or disable this for the entire composite. If we have a lot of layers, this can end up being a lot to calculate. So After Effects gives you a quick way to turn it on and off when you want to work faster. Right now, I want it on, so I'll just make sure that it's enabled. The star background is moving a lot faster, so it's blurrier than the rocket, which is not moving as much. Just to make a more direct comparison, here is a rocket that's moving a lot further in that same amount of time, as you can see from these motion paths. That means the pink one is moving faster, so it has a lot more motion blur. Makes sense? 30. Adjust Video Clip Speed: I think this is looking pretty good. Although, now that I'm watching this, especially with that motion blur, the fire feels a little slow by comparison. So we're going to speed up this clip, making it play faster, and hopefully making it match better. I'll stop the preview. To apply this, we can either right click on that clip in the timeline or come up to the layer menu. You're going to get the same options either place and look under time. We're looking for this option here called timestretch. It gives you this little pop up menu with some additional options, and the main one we want to look for is stretch factor. Right now it's playing at 100% normal speed, and we can see that this clip has a duration of 18 seconds. Okay? So if I type in 50 here in the stretch factor, that means it's playing in 50% of the time or double speed. Notice how the duration is now 9 seconds. Alright, that works for me, so I'll just hit Okay. On this short compositions, we really can't see anything different about the layer, but if it were longer, we'd be able to see that that layer is now half the length. Doing a preview, we can see that, yep, it's definitely faster. I think that looks pretty good, but we could totally experiment with this. Even at double speed, this clip is still 9 seconds long, and our composition is only three. So we actually have a lot of leeway here. If you want to adjust it again, sure, you could keep going in and out of that menu, but you can also expose this time stretch property directly in the timeline. If you come over here to this area of your timeline, where the column labels are and right click somewhere in here, there are actually other columns that you can enable and customize which ones are visible. I'll enable stretch, and now I can see that down in my timeline. If I click and drag, now I can edit this super easily. Of course, if I go too low, you will eventually see that this clip is playing so fast that now it's too short for the timeline, probably wouldn't look good anyway. But something like 20% would still be safe. I think that's a little too fast. I'll just undo and leave this at 50, but I wanted you to see this option in case you wanted to experiment. Once you're happy with this, if you don't want that column taking up space anymore, you can just right click up here on the name and choose hide this. Just to point this out, if you're going in the opposite direction and trying to slow down a clip so that it plays slower than its original speed, it's likely that it will start looking choppy because you're actually duplicating frames to make that happen. There are some ways that you can make this look okay, but generally speaking, you want to try to avoid this unless you have to. One more note about using clips in your projects. If you looked closely at the three D rocket, you might have noticed that it has multiple booster cones, which means we probably need multiple instances of our fire clip to make this look right. That's easy enough. With the clip selected, I'll come up to the edit menu and find duplicate or just press Control or Command D. Now we have a second copy of that clip down in the timeline. I'll just move that over into place. Now, ignoring that I haven't made the masks on here, there's another issue in that these clips look, well, identical, and that's not very believable. But since even at this faster speed, this clip is still quite a bit longer than our compositions, that means we have a lot of room to adjust. Note that right now, both of these clips are starting at the exact same time on the timeline. But if I grab this top copy and drag it to the left, now I'm moving that one to a different time just for this clip. Offsetting like this means that while they're ultimately still using the same clip as a source, they'll look just different enough that they don't feel like copies. If you want, you could certainly do a little bit of scale adjustments, maybe even flip one of these, so it's reversed, and this is a really great way to mix things up and create visual variety without needing a ton of assets. 31. Create an Animated Vignette: Let's say that we have an effect that we want to apply to all the layers instead of just one. Sure, you could go through and apply that same effect to every single layer and then keep adjusting the settings back and forth, but that sounds pretty annoying. Fortunately, there's a way to apply one effect to multiple layers. That's called an adjustment layer. It's a different type of layer that doesn't do anything on its own except hold effects. To create one, I will come up to layer, new adjustment layer. You'll see that creates it at the top of my layer stack, and now I can add an effect directly to this, and it affects all the layers below it. Just to quickly demonstrate, I still have tritone over here and my effects and presets panel. So I'll bring that over and apply it to the adjustment layer, and you can see this is now applying that tritone effect to all the other layers. But if I were to take this adjustment layer and drag it below my rocket fire, now that's no longer getting the tritone effect, so it shows in its original color with everything else being tritone. So I guess if you want to make an old timey rocket animation, this is an easy route to do this, huh? But it's not what I'm after, so I'll delete that tritone effect. I'll come back over to Effects and Presets, and I'm looking for one called CC vignette. I'll apply that to the adjustment layer. Alright, nice. And a quick preview. Okay, I think that adds a nice look, but it's a little dark over the rocket at the beginning and the end. You've probably noticed that most of the effect controls we've seen have stopwatches next to them. Of course, that means that we can animate them. I'll press home to make sure I'm at the beginning of my timeline, and then up in the effect controls, I'll find this property called Center. You can move this by dragging the values, or you can just click on this little cross hair control, and now you can click over in the viewer to put that at a specific point. See how that changes the look? I'll come back over and click the stopwatch, and now I'm animating this effect property. Jump up to the end of my composition, grab that little cross hair and drag it up here, so it's over the rocket again. I think this is a little intense, so let's change that amount to maybe 75 and then we'll come down here and rename that layer to vignette. Alright, I think this looks great. That vignette is following my rocket through the scene. Really helps the viewer focus on that hero element. 32. Final Touches: As a final touch, I think it would be nice to add a little bit of shake to this rocket to help play up the power of the rocket engine. And there are a couple different ways that we could do this. The first is a special panel, which is maybe a little more intuitive for beginners, but it's not as flexible. The second way is a lot more flexible, but might feel a little more intimidating. I'll show you both of them, but you don't have to use either of them if you don't want to. Here's the first way. I'll come up to Window wiggler. This opens up a panel called wiggler, and let's just open that up a little bit more so we can see what we're doing. You'll see a lot of this is grade out right now. I actually need to select the property I want this to apply to, so I'll come down and choose the position property for my rocket. Just click on that property name right here. And now those controls up in the wiggler panel are active. Spatial path. Yep, that's fine. Smooth. You know what? Let's try jagged, and all independently is fine. This frequency is how often this property is going to wiggle, and magnitude is how much. This is often a trial and error thing. So let's try, I don't know, 15 and five and click Apply. Notice down in the timeline, it added a bunch of keyframes to that rocket layer. And if you look in the viewer, you can see all those extra keyframes. The motion path now is all jaggedy. Well, did what it said it would, right? Alright, let's see how that looks. Okay, I think that's not too bad. The only issue here is that this is kind of an all or nothing solution. So if I don't like it, I just have to undo, try new numbers and try it again. Once I go forward, I have all of these keyframes in position, so it becomes a lot harder if I want to adjust that motion path again. So that totally works, but I'm going to undo and show you that other route. And I'll go ahead and close that panel. After Effects has another feature called expressions, which are these little pieces of code that you can add to a property to either make changes to the animation you've already added or even make properties animate without adding any keyframes. You can add this to pretty much any property in here by coming over to the stopwatch, holding Alt or option, and then clicking on the stopwatch. Now, if the word code made you freak out, just relax. Expressions are indeed a pretty deep rabbit hole, but this one is very friendly. We don't need the code that's already in here. That's just sort of referring to the property itself. We want to use a wiggle. So if I just start typing the word wiggle, you'll see that auto completes that function for me. Now I can just hit Enter and it adds that into my little code box. And like in the panel before, we just have to add some values to tell us how we want it to work. This takes two numbers. First, you enter a frequency, how many times per second this wiggle happens and an amplitude, how much it gets wiggled. For frequency, let's try 15 again, and then I need to type a comma, and for amplitude, we'll do five again. Just click out of that box and the code has been applied, basically doing this on top of the keyframes that we created. But you'll notice that it does not add other keyframes, and the property itself is still editable. Okay, so that looks the same, which I would expect. Just to prove my point, let's get a little crazy here. I'll click back in here and change this to 30 30. Okay, that's obviously way too much, but hopefully this doesn't feel too scary now that you understand it a little bit, and you can feel free to play around with this and find values that work for you. I think my previous ones were pretty good, so I'll just undo. Or if you decide you don't want this anymore, just come back over and alter option click that Stopwatch again to remove the expression. Alright, I'm considering this one ready for launch, so it's time to save and export my project. 33. Class Project 03 - Rocket Flight: Time for another class project, and this one is pretty exciting, I think. We're asking you to create a short scene of a rocket flying through space towards your destination. This time we're working at 1080 by 1920, so it should be that vertical format, but the frame rate and the overall duration are up to you. We've supplied a couple of different rocket images, but you can also find or create your own if you like. Your rocket should be branded in some way. Color is obviously the easiest thing to modify, but if you want to add some additional client branding to that rocket, go right ahead. We do want you to use a video clip to create that trail of exhaust behind the rocket. We've supplied you with one, but if you want to look through stock sites and try to find your own, again, that is all right. And then for the background, which again, we've supplied you with a few options or you can find your own, you should use that movement to really help create that illusion of speed in this short animation. As a reminder, here's what mine looks like. Pretty fun. And for deliverables, you know the drill by now. Export your Animation as an MP four using that same preset, upload your exported video to a video hosting site and share that link. Please don't submit links from Cloud storage sites, and then make sure to share on social media. Rocket puns Encouraged. 34. How to Think Like After Effects: Hey, hope you're enjoying the course so far. Before we get into the next group of lessons, there's an important concept that I want to cover, which is the way you build or structure something either in After Effects or in a design app before importing it into After Effects is determined by the way that you plan to animate it. Let's say that we're in Photoshop and we wanted to add some texture to this shape. A pretty common workflow would be to control or command click the shape to make a selection, grab the brush tool, and paint this on. So that looks fine. But let's think about what we actually just made. This texture only exists within that shape. So from an animation perspective, this is very limiting. If you want the flexibility to animate the brush strokes individually, you would instead want to approach this by putting each stroke on a completely separate layer and making sure the full stroke exists regardless of that other shape. In After Effects, you'll still have the ability to trim those strokes so they're only visible over the shape. But now you have the flexibility to animate each of those pieces however you like, which makes the final result much more dynamic. See the possibilities here? Or let's say we're creating the arm for an astronaut character. For a static design, you can just do this and be done. But if this is all you have to work with, you won't be able to do much when it comes time to animate. Instead, you want to think about this almost like a paper doll, making sure that each piece has enough coverage for the areas that might be exposed when this moves around later. This kind of thinking can be very important when creating things in After Effects two. You've already seen that there will often be multiple locations for the same command so that you can use whichever one is most convenient for whatever you're currently doing. But often you'll also find that there are multiple ways to set up a particular look or design, which might appear the same before they start moving, but will potentially give you very different capabilities in terms of animation options and overall flexibility. And which one is right may depend on what you're trying to do, whether you need to easily update this thing later, whether you'll be reusing it often and other factors. For this next project, I've created frames in both Photoshop and Illustrator. In the real world, you would likely be getting everything from one place, but it's also not uncommon to combine elements from multiple sources within a single After Effects compositions. And of course, this is all about exposing you to these different workflows. We'll even be recreating some of the main elements directly in After Effects, which you might need to do if you aren't supplied with editable designs or sometimes it just makes them easier to animate. There will often be multiple ways to build a particular piece, so hopefully these examples help prepare you for the future when you aren't animating these exact infographics. Of course, for now, you'll be free to choose whichever way makes the most sense to you. 35. Import a Layered Photoshop File: Let's take a look at a few strategies for creating content in Photoshop that you plan to animate in After Effects. Firstly, anything that you're going to import into After Effects needs to be in RGB color mode. If you're working in Photoshop and need to convert, you can just come up to image, mode, and set it to RGB color. If you're working with a provided design, make sure that you save a copy of the original and don't save over it. That way, you can always look back and make sure that you haven't messed anything up. I like to use a file name that makes it clear which one's which. If you're creating content from scratch, there are some good presets in here. Film and video is usually a good place to go, and you can grab the one that works for you, HDTV, for example. The only thing I would point out is that videos typically aren't going to have a white background, so you might want to choose either black or transparent. And this is created with guides that match what's called the safe zone, making sure that you keep any important content or text within a safe visible area. When creating designs in Photoshop, every Photoshop layer can become an After Effects layer once this is imported later. Any layers that are inside of a group like these grid lines here will get imported as a pre composition in After Effects. So they'll still be individually editable. They'll just be nested away. One important note is that After Effects does not recognize artboards. So if you're designing multiple frames in one place, which is pretty common, you'll need to save them individually to import them to After Effects. And you can do that easily by coming up to file, export artboards, to files. When you're importing a Photoshop file into After Effects, you'll get this pop up giving you some options of how you want to import that. This import kind dropdown lets you choose from footage, which would basically be like importing a flat image like a JPEG. Although if you update your design in Photoshop, it will refresh. I usually like to recommend composition retain layer sizes. So each Photoshop layer will get imported as an After Effects layer, but it will have a bounding box the size of that asset. If you choose this one, each layer will have a bounding box the size of the entire document. And while this does have its uses, that mostly means you're going to spend a lot of time fixing anchor points. So I'll choose composition retain layer sizes, and you can decide whether you want layer options to stay editable or be merged into your footage. I'll just hit Okay. And now After Effects creates a composition for me, which is that document, and then a folder with all of the layers contained inside that document. Let's double click this compositions, and you'll see, indeed, all the layers from my Photoshop document have been transferred over. Those two groups from Photoshop imported as pre compositions, like I said, and I can double click one of those to see all the individual layers inside. Here's one more piece of really useful functionality. Photoshop text layers can be converted directly into editable After Effects text layers. Let's just grab these top four here, and I can right click or choose this from the layer menu. Same options in both places. And you're going to look for create, convert to editable text. Watch the little icon next to each of those layers. It will change from a Photoshop file to a T, meaning it's an active text layer, and now the properties panel shows me text properties that I can change for each of these layers. One last thing to note is that imported designs from either Photoshop or Illustrator will always import with the duration of the last composition that you created. If that was really short, sometimes this won't be a very good fit. But a little trick I like to do is create a new composition with the duration I'll want this incoming file to have and just click Okay. Now when you import that file, choose your options, hit Okay, it will come in with that exact same duration, and you can just delete that dummy compositions. 36. Import a Layered Illustrator File: Now let's look at a few strategies for creating content in Illustrator that you plan to animate in After Effects. Some of this will be a repeat from the Photoshop lesson, but there are also several key differences. The biggest one being that we're adapting vector artwork to be used in a raster or pixel based environment. Some of this will be a little on the technical side, but I'll try to keep it as friendly as I can. Firstly, anything that you're going to import into After Effects needs to be in RGB color mode. If you're working in Illustrator and need to convert an existing document, you can do that under File document color mode. If you're working with a provided design, make sure that you save a copy and don't save over the original. That way, you can always look back and make sure that you're being faithful to the original design. In Illustrator, especially, you're probably going to do some restructuring of the file to get it ready for animation. So I like to use a file name that makes it very clear which one is which. The flexibility of vector artwork means that you can design things at basically any size and then scale them up or down without quality loss. But when you're designing for video, it's best to make sure that you're actually creating at an appropriate size for how you'll be using this thing. Even though AfterVx works with pixels, there is a way to keep your vector graphics crisp when they're scaled above 100%, but that doesn't mean that you should be reckless about it. Sure, you could create a tiny little design while you're zoomed in to 1,600% magnification, and this will technically work, but that means you'll be working at a really crazy scale in After Effects, and it's just not a very smart approach. Since we are designing for pixels, it's also usually a good idea to use this Snap two pixel command under the view menu so that you aren't accidentally creating elements that fall between pixels, which can make it look a little weird. When creating a new file, you will find some appropriate sizes under web, but I do recommend using the film and video presets. This is especially important if you're making a design that extends beyond the edges of the canvas and you want to have access to that full shape. Check these out in After Effects. I created these two similar layouts using the web 1920 by 1080 preset and the film and video 1920 by 1080 preset. On the web version, watch what happens when I move this shape away from the edge. Uh oh. But the film and video version gives me the whole thing. Here's what those two designs look like in Illustrator. First, the web, then the film and video. Those of you with Illustrator experience may have noticed this right away, but the secret is that the film and video preset actually creates an extra artboard, so technically, none of the content is outside of one. Okay, so let's create another new file here with the video preset. Some people don't love these weird green rulers, so you can actually turn these off under view rulers hide Video rulers. We've still got these green guides which mark the safe area. This is a bit of a holdover from older display types, but it's still a good guide to make sure that your important elements stay visible on screen. That said, if you want to turn these off, it's a bit more hidden. In your Properties panel, find this Edit Artboards button, but make sure that you have Artboard one selected before you click it. Now you're looking for artboard options, and then these three checkmarks right here will turn those elements off or back on. Of course, now that you know what's happening behind the scenes, you could just create an extra artboard for yourself using any preset you like. But perhaps somewhat confusingly, if you have a document with separate non overlapping artboards, like how you might design different style frames or different aspect ratios of the same design, After Effects is not going to import these correctly. Instead, you'll again need to save each of these out to a separate file, which is part of the save dialogue. If you've already saved your document, you may need to do a save as to trigger this. In the pop up menu, you're looking for this right here. Save each artboard to a separate file. Once you hit Okay, Illustrator will handle that for you and save these out as multiple files. Alright, so here in Illustrator, you need to be a bit more intentional about how your layers are structured. This time, every top level layer has the ability to become an After Effects layer. So each of these layers that you see will become layers in After Effects. But any objects contained within one of these layers are all grouped together as one thing. So this dot just has one shape inside of it, and that's what I'll get in After Effects. But this bottom line plus ticks has multiple shapes inside, and those will come in as a single layer with all of these shapes treated as one object. Of course, this is not really the way that most designers structure things in here. I've found that it's pretty common for people to work mostly in one or two layers, even if they're good about grouping and naming. So if you inherit a design from someone else, you're probably going to need to do a little bit of surgery before it's ready for animation. And that goes deeper than I can really get into here, but I do have one big time saving tip for. Breaking this out to individual layers would be pretty tedious. But if you select the whole design and then look inside this little hamburger menu at the top of the layers panel and choose release to layers sequence, it drops each of these into its own little layer folder, and you can just drag these out. You'll still want to take the time to rename, but it's definitely saving you a lot of steps here. Switching over to After Effects, I'll import the properly structured version of my line graph, and we'll see that import pop up, though a few details are slightly different from the Photoshop one. Looking under Import kind, again, we could import this as footage, which would give us a single sandwiched Illustrator file, and that might be fine for something simple or where you don't need any of the individual pieces to move. If you make updates to the file in Illustrator, you will see that updated here. What you'll usually want to choose is composition, meaning you'll get full access to all of those top level layers from Illustrator. Then down here on footage dimensions, you'll typically want to choose layer size unless you want every layer to have a bounding box the size of the full document, which usually just means you'll have to fix a lot of anchor points. One quick note that any composition created from still assets like this will actually use the duration of the last composition you created. So a little trick I like to use before importing is to create a dummy comp and set my duration. That looks good. Now when I import my Illustrator file, it will use that same duration and I can just delete this extra comp. Even though we're working in pixels now, remember I said there's a way to scale your Illustrator layers cleanly, but they don't actually do this by default. Let's grab this dot 2016 to demonstrate. Let's scale that up, and I'll make it yellow just so it's easy to keep track of. If you look under switches and find this second one from the left, it looks a bit like a sun. Turning this on enables what's called continuous rasterization, meaning it now stays clean and crisp, no matter how large I scale it. Again, you can do a whole stack by holding down the mouse button as you drag past all of them. Let's bring that scale back down. There's one other bit of functionality in here that will give you even more options. After Effects has its own native vector layers called shape layers, which you can draw directly inside here, but you can also convert imported Illustrator files or layers into shape layers. Let's try this online here. To do this, simply right click on the layer or look under the layer menu uptop. You'll find the same option in both places, and we're looking for create create shapes from vector layer. You'll see that my original Illustrator layer is still here, but it's disabled, and now I have a new layer with this little star icon. That's a shape layer. Now my properties panel gives me additional options. In this case, it knows this was a stroke so I can change the color or even the stroke width. And again, notice that you'll see stopwatches by most of these, which means they can be animated, including the actual path itself. Now, if you convert a more complex layer like bottom line and ticks, it's actually aware of all those individual shapes that were used to create that layer in Illustrator, and it turned all of them into separate little shapes for me, which means I can edit them in here, but they're all contained within a single layer within these individual groups, so it's a lot more to navigate. Long story short, even if you're planning to convert like this, you do want to be intentional about how these files are structured so that you aren't once again wasting a bunch of time trying to dissect your designs in here now. We'll be exploring how to work with and create shape layers more in the next lesson. One last thing before we do that, though. Unfortunately, Illustrator text cannot be converted like Photoshop Text can. But if you have your design open in Illustrator, select your text and copy it. Flip back over to After Effects, select the Text tool and click to create a new text layer. Paste, and now you've got that same bit of text with all the same settings, fully editable. 37. Intro to Shape Layers: Shape layers are one of my favorite After Effects features. They're like a mini version of Adobe Illustrator, but contained within a single layer. That means they can get a little complex, but you can also use them in basic ways, too. We already looked at converting artwork from Illustrator, but sometimes it's easier and gives you better control to create your elements right here in After Effects. I'll come back up to my toolbar and grab the shape tool again and choose a rectangle. Yes, the same shape tool that we used earlier to create a mask. Before I draw, notice the fill and stroke controls right here in the toolbar. You can click on these color chips to change colors. Change the stroke width before you even draw, or you can click on the actual words here to choose between solid, gradient or none. This time, I don't have any layers selected. So when I bring my cursor down into the viewer, you can see this little star icon next to my cursor. That means I'm about to make a shape layer. If I do have a layer selected, this displays as a mask cursor. See the difference? Click and drag to draw that shape. If I want a perfect square, I can hold Shift. If you'd rather be drawing from the center, remember that you can hold control or command to do that, or hold both at once, if you like. But I'm going to keep mine over here for now. Now, I have a shape layer with Rectangle one down in my timeline, and looking over at my properties panel, you can also see that same rectangle one right there. Let's take a look at these shape properties. I just drew what's called a parametric shape, which means that these values determine the way that shape looks. I can click and drag on these to resize it. You can click this little chain to unlink them and change this in just one dimension. You also have corner roundness right here. And, of course, any of these can also be animated. We have settings for stroke and fill, and again, we could change this to a gradient or to none, but I'll just leave this as solid for now. Other shapes will have different properties in here, or you can also create Bezier shapes that are made up of path points. These can be regular shapes like rectangles and ellipses, or we could come back up and grab our friend the Pen tool. Again, click to create a hard corner, click and drag to create a rounded corner. And now I've drawn a totally custom shape. Since this is just a Bezier shape, it only has a single path property over here, but I could still edit or animate this. Now notice that I actually made the second shape on the same layer as that first rectangle I drew. That's right. Shape layers can totally just be a single object or they can hold multiple shapes, which can be grouped together. You can add modifiers to change the way they look and behave, and all of this is totally procedural, super flexible, entirely non destructive, and it can all be animated. Pretty crazy. The secret here is that a shape layer is really just a container. If you have sharp eyes, you probably notice that there are two sets of transform properties visible in the properties panel right now. Layer transforms up top and shape transforms down here. That's right. Each of these shapes I just drew actually has its own set of transforms independent from the layer that it lives on. So if I adjust the layer rotation, both shapes are getting rotated and it's happening from the layer's anchor point right here in the middle of the compositions. But when I select rectangle one, that object has its own shape transforms. So I can adjust the position or scale and rotate and notice that these are happening from the anchor point of that shape itself. Alright, let's take a step back. If you're a less technical person and this is already freaking you out, you can mostly ignore that extra level of complexity. Just draw one thing and then use the layer transforms just like anything else. In fact, if you look under preferences composition, there's even a setting in here that will center the anchor point on the shape you draw no matter where you put it. So if that approach makes more sense to you, you're welcome to use it. I'm going to select shape one and change the fill color. This should help you follow what's happening as we go exploring here. Obviously, you can do a lot of editing and even animating from just the properties panel, but the real power of shape layers is actually hiding down in the timeline. Let's grab this little divider and make the timeline panel bigger so that you can really see what I'm doing here. Again, we have rectangle one and shape one. If I twirl open Rectangle one, you'll see a variety of things inside here. The shape layer is just a container, and Rectangle one is actually just a group, which I could rename if I wanted to. But I don't right now. After Effects was just being helpful. When I drew a shape, it automatically put it into a group for me and named the group for the thing inside. Inside this group is a parametric rectangle path, as well as a stroke and a fill. Twirling those open reveals even more options. And then this group has its own transform properties, which is actually what we were seeing and adjusting over in the properties panel. And just to prove I'm telling the truth, here are the layer transforms totally separate. I'll close those back up so you don't get confused. Let's adjust this position, so our two shapes overlap. Shape one rectangle one. Shape one is on top, so it looks like the top object up in the viewer. But if I grab Rectangle one and bring that to the top, makes sense. Very similar to the layer stack. Well, just wait because there's more. Check out this ad flyout. That's where all the really good stuff is. It's full of these additional modifiers that you can add to the shapes. I'm going to make sure that I have the word contents selected instead of either of those groups and then come back in here and find merge paths. This lets you combine the above shapes in different ways to create a more complex, unified shape with its own stroke and fill. Opening up merge paths, this has different modes. And if I set this to subtract, now it's cutting that second shape away from the first shape. What if I move shape one back to the top? Is this feeling familiar? Let's change that back and then set this to intersect. So while this is similar to the mask modes we saw earlier, this is also just like Illustrator's Pathfinder tool, but totally non destructive. And, of course, this is an animation program, so any of the pieces inside here can move. Okay, before we look at some of these other features, I'm going to simplify a little bit. Let's delete this layer and I'll create just one small square, about 100 by 100. One of my favorite things in this ad menu is the repeater. This gives you a controllable number of copies of whatever object or objects you feed into it. Let's say that we want eight copies, and yes, this thing has its own transforms which apply only to the repeated copies. Let's update this. So each copy is being offset by 130 pixels in X and ten pixels in Y, and maybe rotate each one by five degrees. And let's try setting the scale to 95%. Maybe bump this up to ten copies. Let's get crazy. Select my group, add another repeater, and change that position to 0200. And all of this is referring back to the one parametric rectangle path up here. So if I adjust the size, that affects all the copies. But what if I press Controller Command D to duplicate that rectangle path, change the size, and oh, wow, these have their own internal positions, too, so I'll just adjust that a little bit. Is this super cool or what? Now, I could play around in here all day, but let's get back to the stuff that you're actually going to need for the next project. I'll delete this layer, grab the pen tool, turn off that fill. And click drag, click drag to create a bendy little path. Down in my timeline, I'll twirl that layer open, twirl open contents, open shape one. Right, so we have a path, a stroke, and a fill that's turned off. Makes sense. Let's animate this line so it draws itself on. I'll come back into AD and find trim paths. Inside here, you'll find a start and an end that trim the path I just drew from either side. To animate this, set end to zero and click the stopwatch, move forward a bit, and set that up to 100%. Tara we'll be using almost that exact thing in the upcoming lessons, but one last idea I want to leave you with is that the order of these modifiers matters. Each of them is actually applying itself to the result of everything coming into it. Let's also add a zig zag and then an offset paths, and come back up here where this is about halfway complete. Right now, this path is being trimmed, then being zigzagged. Let's adjust that. Then being offset. Let's adjust that too. So here's what that looks like when it's moving. Kind of a scrunchy French fry thing. But if I move trim paths below both of those, now the path is being zigzagged, then offset, then that is being trimmed. Totally different feel, right? As you can see, Shaplers are full of creative possibilities, and I was barely even animating anything yet. We're going to be leveraging some of the simpler uses in the next project, but I really encourage you to get in here and explore. Play around. You can make some really amazing stuff once you get a handle on how these work. 38. Set Up a Bar Chart: Before we import our first design, I'm going to create that dummy comp like I recommended. I'll just press New composition and set this to 24, set the duration to 10 seconds, and instead of clicking on Okay, I can just press Enter. We can also import elements by just double clicking in the empty area of the project panel, so I'll just do that and grab this bar graph PSD is my first one. Import, and I'll get that same dialogue we saw earlier. I want to make sure that this is composition retain layer sizes. I don't think I need to edit any layer styles on this one, but it never hurts to leave those editable, so I'll press Okay. We see that that is indeed 24 frames per second and 10 seconds just like I wanted, so I can go ahead and delete that dummy comp. Double click this to open it up. Great. There's all my layers from Photoshop. Let's do a little color coding here. I think I'll start with these two title layers up top. Yellow feels pretty good. Those are going to be prominent. And let's go ahead and right click and set those to be editable text. I think the bars are going to be kind of the main pieces. So let's set those to fussia something nice and visible. And then these numbers also seem pretty important. So let's maybe set those to pink so they kind of go along with the fussia. And you know what while we're at it, let's go ahead and move those. 24 goes with Earth and ten goes with Jupiter. That way, they're just kind of with their friends a little bit more. Bottom line, I think, needs to stay on top of these to make sure that everything looks clean at the bottom, so we'll leave it up there. BG color. Let's set that to blue and go ahead and lock that. I don't think we need to do anything with that. And I can see that the two groups from Photoshop became pre compositions when they got imported. I can double click that to look inside and see that, yep, we have all of those individual layers. So we'll be able to animate those separately later if we want to. I'll just close that. Now, when I'm working with something that's a little more precise like a graph, and I want to make sure that I don't accidentally bump anything out of place, I often find it's helpful to bring in a reference image that I can compare this to. So, fortunately, I already exported one of those from Photoshop and Illustrator for the other graphs. So we'll just bring that in. And there are a few different ways that you can work with this, whatever makes sense to you, you could just drop it right on top of your design and turn this on and off to check as you work. Now, sometimes when you're dealing with a lot of layers, it's easy to forget something. So an important step here is right clicking on this layer, or again, you can find this from the layer menu and find this option right here, guide layer. When you enable this, you'll see this little sort of teal hash tag symbol right here, and that means that this layer will not render when you export your animation later. So even if you accidentally leave this turned on when you go to export this, it won't be visible in that export. Very helpful. Maybe you don't want to keep toggling this layer on and off as you work, and I don't blame you. So sometimes it can also be helpful to just scale this down and stick it up in the corner if you're a little less concerned with exact position and more just making sure that you keep the composition the same, or this can be a good way to eyedrop or colors later if you need that. But speaking of colors, I actually exported some color chips. So if that's all we need, we could actually just do those. Let's just delete this layer, import our color chips here. And you could work with those the same way. You could stick them over here on the side of your composition, move them around, rescale them, whatever makes sense. But if you don't want them taking up some of your precious composition space, I'll just delete that. There's another option. When you double click any element over here, be that an image or a piece of video footage, it will open up in what's called the footage viewer. Notice that this is different from the composition viewer. Over here is the footage viewer. This lets you just look at one specific asset. You can't work or animate in here. It's just for reviewing this asset. But that can be a good way to look back and forth and make sure that you're keeping everything in the right spot. A way that I sometimes like to use this is for color chips. If I double click that, someone was smart enough to make this a nice, skinny vertical alignment that works perfectly. If I wanted to adjust this to be a really thin panel that just sits over here, out of the way, and I can eyedrop or these colors from later. Now, if you like to work with CC libraries, you could actually do that, too. I'll come up to window libraries. And that will just open up in your interface. You can grab colors from that and you can mouse over them to see hex codes. So if you already have libraries set up for your projects, this is a great way to do it. If you have a library that includes images, you can actually drag them from that right into your project panel as well. I think this little footage viewer setup is going to be great for this project. So I'll just go ahead and close this panel. Looking at my composition, I think I'm going to be working top to bottom and left to right. That seems to make sense when you're presenting information like words and numbers. And at least in Western cultures, that's how people read, so that makes sense as a way to present these things. Now, the titles up here are going to be important, but I don't think those are the heroes. They feel like kind of second place behind these bars. Those are going to be our main attention focus for our viewers. And I will plan to have all the pieces reveal themselves, maybe over about 3 seconds or so. And then after that, we'll just let the elements sit so that our viewer has time to actually digest this information before we move on to the next graph. So even though most of our work is going to be right up here, I went ahead and made a slightly longer composition just to give us that leeway. A lot of this comp isn't going to have any animation, so we'll probably shorten up our work area to about here. And every one of our previews is going to start at the very beginning of our timeline. So there's actually a setting that we can change in our preview panel to save ourselves from having to press Home every time we want to do a preview. Let's come up here to Window preview. There are actually a lot of settings in here, and we will explore some of them later in the course. But right now I want to look at this play from current time. That's the default setting here, and that means that every time you press the space bar, your animation will preview from wherever your CTI currently is. But if you're working on something where all of it starts at the beginning, every time you want to preview, you'd have to press home and then Spacebar. So instead, let's change this setting right here from current time to start of range. And now my previews will always start from the beginning of the composition as long as I don't move the start of my work area. Go ahead and close that panel, and I think we're ready to start animating. 39. Animate a Bar Chart: Let's take a look at animating these bars. These are a great example of what I was talking about earlier, which is the way that we want them to look kind of determines which approach is going to work best here. I think it makes sense for these bars to grow from the bottom of the graph. That's pretty easy. There's a few different approaches here. What we want to do with the numbers may determine how best to do this. Let's go ahead and check out some examples here. So if I select this blue bar, you'll see that the anchor point is right in the middle of it, which makes sense because I imported these at layer size. Now, one easy way to do this is to press Y to get my anchor point tool and bring this anchor point right down to the very bottom of this layer. You can actually hold Control or command to get it to snap right there. I'll press V to get my selection tool back. And now, if I adjust the Y scale by unlinking these and just adjust the scale, look you there. Perfect, right? Okay, okay. So let's go ahead and create some keyframes here and see how this looks. I think about a second and a half is probably good. I'll press S and reveal this right down here in the timeline since I'm already here. Make that keyframe, come back to the beginning and set the Y value to zero. Okay, there's my bar animation. Perfect. Let's go ahead and parent this 24 right here and Uh oh. Well, yep, that makes sense because I'm scaling the bar, and 24 is parented to the bar. So right now it's only about 27%, and so that number is getting smushed. And, boy, that just doesn't look good at all, which means this approach isn't going to work if I want the numbers to be attached. Now, maybe you don't care about that, and you could have the numbers fade on after the bar grows. If that's the case, then this approach would be great. But let's try a few other things just to show you some options. I'll go ahead and disable that animation by just clicking the stopwatch and deleting all those keyframes. Now this next approach doesn't make as much sense here since we only have 2 bars. But imagine we have a graph with maybe 10 bars. Then it's helpful to think about doing this in a way that's very repeatable and modular. And to me, that means shape layers. Let's come up here and grab our shape tool, a rectangle, which mine is already on. I'll zoom in a bit and making sure that I have no layers selected. Notice I have a shape layer cursor right there. I could try to draw this perfectly from the top of this graph down to the bottom and see if I can match this width. Okay, great. Now, of course, this one's the wrong color, but that's okay for visibility right now. In fact, I'll go ahead and choose this red just so it really stands out against our real one. Now, there's a few different ways that you could animate this, but a pretty easy one would just be to select that layer, grab your anchor point tool again, and use that same strategy. Animate scale here. So again, in this case, attaching the numbers wouldn't work. But if you think about this, now we have this easy modular bar that we could easily duplicate to quickly cover up each of these. So let's make a duplicate and just scrub it over here to cover this other bar and adjust that scale until that's right. So again, here with only 2 bars doesn't make a lot of sense. But in a graph with a whole bunch of these, this might be an easy way to repeat this. Or if this is something where you have to update this graph every single week. This might be a really good way so that these values can be very flexible. And imagine that we had a graph where 100 was the maximum and zero was the bottom. If that were the case, well, scale is just a value 0-100. So this Y value right here would actually be exactly the value on the graph. Of course, that's not the case here, and we already showed why this probably isn't the best approach, but now you've got that in your pocket in case that comes up. So let's go ahead and delete both of these. And try one other approach. I would like for the numbers to come along for the ride with these bars as they move up. So I think the only option here is to animate the bar's position and we can parent the number to it. But we need to figure out how to deal with this area down here because obviously if we select this bar and move it down, well, that doesn't really look right. Let's undo that. Let's go ahead and animate this bar, and then we can figure out that visibility problem. I'll press P to reveal position. And because graphs tend to be kind of precise, I want to make sure that I can't accidentally nudge this left or right, so you can actually right click on the word position, and right here, you can separate dimensions, which will make your X and Y actually function as two separate properties. Now I could drag this and only affect that Y position. Let's make a keyframe, come back to the beginning and drag this all the way down until both the bar and the number are down off the bottom of the graph. But of course, they're still visible. Okay. Well, how might we approach that? Let's come kind of in the middle here. We know that masks can change what's visible on a layer. So I'll come up here and grab my rectangle tool, and I've got the layer selected, so I'll be making a mask. And well, there we go, except masks move with the layer that they're attached to. And sure, you could animate this mask path, but that's not very flexible. So let's undo. Instead, we need something that can restrict that visibility without being attached to this layer, and that is called a track mat. You can actually use a separate layer to determine the visibility of this layer. Let's go ahead and come back up here to where that's all the way up, and I will deselect this layer. I still have my rectangle tool selected, which is going to be perfect here, and I'm actually going to draw a shape that starts up here above the top of my graph and then ends perfectly at that bottom line. There we go. And if I need to, I can just zoom in and use my up and down arrow keys to just nudge that into place. I'm going to turn this just kind of a crazy color for visibility here. So you can really tell what's happening. So I have this big orange rectangle here, and that is going to be the mat through which this other layer is visible. Let's go ahead and rename this to Mt. And I'll just turn off this visibility for a second so that we remember what we're working with here. It's this bar. And then I'll come down to my timeline and toggle my switches and modes. Remember that track mats are right here in between your blending modes and your parenting. This is a whole other column of these dropdowns, and they also have that pick whip again. So for that Earth bar, I have this dropdown menu and I could select MAT up there, or again, you can use the pick whip and point of the layer that you want this to use. As soon as I release my mouse button, you'll see the mat layer has its visibility turned off, and the little track mat menu will update to say MT so now this layer is using that layer that we named mat as a track mat, meaning it's only visible within the boundaries of that layer. You'll notice that the mat layer has its visibility turned off and it now has this extra little icon right here indicating that it is functioning as a track mat. And the layer that's being matted also has a little icon. So now watch what happens as we move through time. This blue bar is only visible within the boundaries of that mat layer. Let's move all the way back to the beginning. Notice that we can still see the 24 right now. Well, sure, we haven't done anything with that. But one of the things that makes really flexible is that multiple layers can all use the same other layer as a mat. So I'll just set this to the same mat. And now both of those layers are being revealed. Great. Let's go ahead and animate the Jupiter bar. We can also use J and K to jump to the previous or next visible keyframe. So I'll press K to jump up to where that second keyframe is. Select my Jupiter rectangle here, press P to reveal position, right click, separate dimensions, create a keyframe for my Y position. I'll go ahead and parent my ten now before I move this bar. And then press either J or home to jump back to this first keyframe or first frame of the composition. They're the same in this case, and just adjust that Y position until these are both off the bottom of the graph. Select both of these layers using control or command to multi select. Click on this dropdown menu and choose Matte and they'll both take that setting. So now all four of these layers are using the same one layer to determine their visibility. Let's go ahead and set this to some other color, maybe just none to kind of clarify that it's doing its job, but we don't really need to touch it again. Let's check out that animation. Hey, not too bad. Now, we're wasting a lot of time on a preview that we don't really need, and press N to trim off that work area at about 4 seconds. Okay, not looking too bad. Let's go ahead and select both of those and press F nine to Easy Ease. Okay, already looking better. And remember, I said, I'm going to work top to bottom and left to right. So I think just offsetting these a little bit would look really nice. I'll press home to jump back to the beginning, press page down to go, let's say six frames, one, two, three, four, five, six, and I can select this number and this bar, and I could drag them over, or you can also press the open bracket key to move any selected layers so they now begin at the current frame. And now we have just a bit of an offset here, which I think works really nicely. If you were to add any additional bars here, they could all use that same mat and all be very flexible. If you start combining some of these techniques, maybe you could have a very modular shape layers bar so that you can easily and quickly change the color or change its final size, and then combine that with this track mat technique to make it very flexible. 40. Animate Secondary Elements: Now that we have the bars in motion, let's tackle the titles and all the other supporting elements. I'll stop that preview and select this top title there. We're going to apply a text Animation preset to this. So we'll come over to Effects and Presets, and you're free to look through all of these yourself, but I happen to know what I want, so I'm just going to type it into the search bar right here, which is slide down by character. Now, before I apply this, I want to make sure that my CTI is at the correct time because animation presets get applied at the time that you're currently at. In this case, I want to make sure that I'm back at the very beginning of my timeline so that this gets applied correctly. Again, with my layer selected, I could double click this or drag it to the layer. You'll see that text disappear because it's being animated on. So as we move through time, you'll see those letters come on. Perfect. And we'll be able to open this up and adjust these properties. We could twirl this open, but since we're already getting a little crowded down here in the timeline, let's look at some other shortcuts. I could press you to reveal the keyframes on this layer. And that's helpful. It shows me that the timing actually lined up perfectly with the other keyframes. But I'd like to be able to adjust the amount of this movement, which means I need a slightly different command. If you press U twice quickly, it will actually reveal any property on the selected layer that's been changed from its default value, which is perfect here. Looking down here, you'll see that I actually have a separate position value that's kind of inset here. That's on what's called a Text Animator, and we'll learn more about those later on in the course. But right now, we're just going to make a small adjustment to it. I point this out because it is different from the layers position. This is only affecting these text characters here. So this is moving that character by -73. I'm going to change that to positive 20, and let's see how that feels. Okay, I kind of like that. Nice and subtle. I think that same animation would actually work pretty nicely for the other title. So I'll jump back to the beginning of my timeline, select this whole slide down by character and Controller Command C to copy, scroll down, select in hours and Controller Command V to paste. I'll select both of those layers and press to see those keyframes. And let's take a look. Okay. I like that. Again, let's try offsetting the second layer by six frames. You can just drag it. And if you hold Shift, it will actually snap to that other existing layer endpoint, which is very handy here. Alright. I think this is working out really nicely. Let's go ahead and animate all these secondary elements, and then we can do our final timing. I'll stop this preview, and let's start by animating the grid lines. I'll scroll down and find that grid lines pre composition and double click to open that up. This way, we're just looking at these isolated grid lines and each one is its own layer. I'll jump back to the beginning of my timeline, and I'm actually going to create the same keyframes on all of these at once. I'll press T to reveal the opacity, and let's go ahead and move up 12 frames. Just click and drag down all of them to activate all those stopwatches at once. Come back to home, and with all of them still selected, I'll just click and drag any of these down to zero, and it adjusts all of them. Quick preview. They're all just fading up, not that exciting. We'll offset these again, so it creates just a little bit of visual interest. I'll press home to come back to the beginning of my timeline, plus to zoom in a bit so we can see what we're doing. And I think this would look nice if we offset each layer by two frames. So we could press page down, page down, move this over, page down, page down. Remember, you can also press open bracket, page down, page down, open bracket, page down, page down, open bracket. Let's set that work area over here by pressing N and check that out. There we go. It's not that exciting on its own, but as part of the whole, this will be perfect. Before we leave this composition, let's go ahead and grab one set of these keyframes and copy them because we can just paste these onto some of our other layers. We'll close this pre composition and come into side labels. When pasting keyframes, you also want to make sure that your CTI is at the correct place. So I'll press home, select all of these layers, and then control or command V to paste. Let's press U to reveal those. There we go. Again, I'll set my work area sort of over here. And we'll offset these again. Now, the strategy that I just showed you is just fine, and it works great when you only have a few layers. But let's say that you have several layers like this and you don't want to have to keep clicking through in that tedious way. You can actually hold Control or command and Alt or option at the same time and notice my cursor change here. Now I'm doing what's called quick offset, and I can click and drag on any group of layers to offset them progressively like this. Now, you do want to make sure that they're selected in the order that you want them to move in, which I didn't do here. So let's undo that. Deselect, and I'll select the top layer, hold shift, and select the bottom layer. Now I can hold Control and Alt for me, command and option if you're on a Mac, and then start dragging over. Notice that it actually shows you how far each layer is being dragged and the total offset. I want two frames per layer, which is exactly what I'm at right now, so I'll just release. And now I have exactly the same offset as in that other compositions. Perfect. Let's close this up and see how everything feels now. Okay, I like where this is going. Of course, everything's kind of happening at once, so we need to start working through that. I also think we'll need a little more space here. So let's bring this up. And since my viewer magnification is set to fit, it just adapts right along with me. Let's go ahead. Add those same opacity keyframes to this bottom line Earth and Jupiter. I'm just Control or Command clicking to multi select those. And with my CTI up at the beginning, I'll paste those opacity keyframes, so those all come on too. Deselect those, and now if I press U, it will reveal all the keyframes on all the layers. Since I have some open first, it will close them first, press again, and now it reveals all of them. And now we can figure out our timing. So we already did a six frame offset, one, two, three, four, five, six, to get to this first thing. Maybe it would make sense to start grid lines and side lines right there, so I'll press open bracket. And I probably should have paid attention to the timing inside there because I need to base the bottom line timing off of that. So let's come back in here and find that last one. There we go. I'll go ahead and move two frames past that. And when I go back to my main compositions, my CTI stays in the same place, so that is my start time for bottom line. Perfect. Let's maybe move up another six frames, one, two, three, four, five, six. That feels like where the Jupiter bar and its number should start. Maybe six more. For Earth and its bar. And I'm not sure. Is that the time where these labels should begin? Let's try just two frames beyond that and see how it feels. Personally, I think this works pretty well. We see the titles come on, and then the graph lines guide our eye right down to where those bars are going to reveal themselves. Nice. 41. Create a Line Graph: It's time to tackle the second graph, so let's go ahead and import that. That's our line graph here. That is a layered Illustrator file, so I'll make sure I'm importing that as a composition, layer size. Okay. And now that we've gathered a couple of things in here, let's take a minute to organize our project panel. Here's the structure I like to use, one comp for compositions, two pre for pre compositions, which we will be using here, and then three assets. This way, everything sorts in a particular order because alphabetically, they wouldn't quite line up the way that I would like them, but you're free to do whatever you want in here. And I'll take both of these compositions and put them inside pre because we're going to be using these as individual scenes in our final export compositions. I'll just grab all this other stuff and put that into assets. We can open these back up just so we can see everything. Alright, let's take a look at this line graph. Now, a lot of this is very similar to the previous one. So there's a fair amount of copy and paste that we can do, but the lines and dots are unique here. So let's open this back up so that we can see, and let's maybe make those dots pink again. And I would turn the line pink, but we're actually just about to replace that layer, so we could go ahead and do that first. This line is already a stroke from Illustrator, so it will convert perfectly. If it weren't, you could get out the Pen tool and just trace a new one. But fortunately, this was built as a stroke, so I'll just right click Create Shapes from Vector layer. Now we have our outlined version of that. You can glance over at the properties panel and see it recognized that this has a stroke, so it knows that it is a stroked path. Now I'll go ahead and set that to Fuchsia. We could hang on to this other copy for insurance or just press delete to get rid of it. Alright, let's open up our line here. We could twirl this open, and we'll see, Yep, we got a path and a stroke. Great. We're going to have this line draw on from left to right, so that means trim paths. We'll come down here and add a trim paths. And let's go ahead and solo this layer by clicking right here just so that we can focus on this for right now. Open up trim paths, and let's see what happens. Ooh. Sometimes, depending on how the path was drawn in Illustrator, start and end may work backwards from what you'd expect. In this case, we could just animate the start value instead, and that would work just fine. Or right here is a little toggle so that you can change the path direction. If I click this now reverse that path, and will work just the way that I want. Perfect. So let's go ahead and set down to zero, create a keyframe, and I'll bring this up to, I'll say 2 seconds, bring that up to 100%. Let's set our work area to around four, trim that off by pressing N. And yeah, there we go. Great. Let's press U so we can collapse that, but still see the keyframes, and now it's time to tackle these dots. We can go ahead and just drag down here to bring those into the solo group as well. I think just having those scale on probably makes a lot of sense. So let me open one of those up, open up the scale. And I'm going to say maybe eight frames is appropriate. Go ahead and create that scale keyframe, press home to jump back to the beginning, set that to zero. I'll go ahead and highlight those and press F nine to Easy Es. While I have those selected, we can copy, select the rest of them and paste. Let's go ahead and press U to open those up as well. I think we're going to need a little bit of lead time here for the text and some of the other elements to come on. So I think I'll move my line over so it begins at maybe frame ten. So shift and page down to jump right there, select that open bracket to move the layers point right there. And now I can select all these dots. Since I've color coded, I could click right on the color chip and choose Select Label Group. I'll move those over just a little bit. I think it makes sense for the first one to be ending right as the line begins so that the dots kind of visually lead the line on. And then I will use quick offset. So Control plus Alt and drag or Command plus option and drag. And I'll just try to line that up so that it ends right where that finishes up. Let's deselect and take a look. Hey, nice. All right. That's enough of that. We'll go ahead and unsolo these. For the type, remember that Illustrator type unfortunately cannot be made editable in here. Fortunately for us, we just built something with the exact same layout. So I'll grab these two titles, copy them, come back into our line graph composition and paste those in here, maybe press T to knock down the opacity so that we can see what we're doing. And these are editable, so we just need to update the actual text. Uh, Perfect. Yep. All right. We'll bring that opacity back up and turn off that original type layer or delete it. If you're confident you won't need to look back at it. You may have noticed that these text layers did not update their titles when I changed the actual text on them. Because these got converted from Photoshop layers, they're still pulling the layer name from that. But if you select the layer, press Enter to update the name and just delete what's here, and then press Enter. They will pull their name from the text that is actually entered into the layer. All right, let's preview again. Now we just need to tackle these graph elements. So let's stop this preview and take a look at that. Scrolling down, let's solo these graph elements, and it turns out these actually aren't quite grouped in the way that we would want them to be for animation. Well, we could certainly take these back into Illustrator and rearrange them there. It's probably easy enough to just tackle that here in After Effects. And again, sometimes you'll get designs that aren't quite structured the way that you want. You'll need to be able to pivot into some of these strategies directly here in After Effects. So I'm going to select backing lines, bottom line, years and AU numbers, and we're going to group all of them together as a pre composition and then use masks to break those up into individual layers that we can then offset the timing. With all four of these selected, I'll come up to layer, pre compose. The first thing we need to do is give this a name, which I'll call lines and labels. There are a few other options here which right now we don't need to change, and you can directly open this new compositions soon as you create it. But in this case, I don't think that's really necessary. So I'll just press Okay. Now, all those layers have been grouped into one thing. We could double click and see all of them individually, but I don't think we need to. So I'll just close that. Let's unsolo that Au label. That's just that far left title. And if we want to take the same approach as the previous graph, we just need the first number and line to fade on at once, and then each subsequent number and line to fade on two frames later. And while we could do a bunch of back and forth between all those layers, it just seems easier to sort of collapse all of those into one thing and then use masks to carve them into the pieces that we actually want to work with. So while this is already named lines and labels, let's actually rename it into lines and labels one. And then I'm going to hit Control or Command D so that we have five total copies of this layer. Great. Scroll down a little bit. I like my stuff to be in the order that I'll be thinking about it, so I'll just quickly drag these into order. Now lines and labels one is going to be that top line, so I'll just come up and grab my mask tool and just quickly do that. Now we can still see the other elements because they're on the other copies of this layer. But since we're only doing a few, I think we can quickly work through this and not get too confused. We'll select lines and labels two and just draw a quick mask here. Lines and labels three right here, four right here, and five will be this bottom one. There we go. This is a good way to prove that nothing else is copying this anymore. Thinking through this, it might look good to have the years revealing themselves left to right like this, but maybe that's not necessary. Let's get everything else in motion, and we can decide whether that feels like it's needed. Now that those are handled, we could select all of those and close them back up. We can go ahead and unsolo these. And we just need to grab those opacity keyframes from the previous compositions, paste them onto this, as well as AU label, and just do a little offsetting. So let's hop back to that other composition. Find one of those layers that uses those opacity keyframes, select those, Control or Command C to copy, come back to our composition, add Au label into our selection, and jump back to the beginning, Controller Command V to paste. Great. Let's reveal those keyframes by pressing U, and now we just need to offset. I think starting the Au label up at frame eight probably makes sense. So I can open bracket to move all of them right there. I'll control or command click Au label to take it out of my selection. And now I can offset each of these by two frames just like before. And let's see what we've got. Looking at this one more time, I think I would actually like the years to reveal left to right, but we can quickly do that inside the pre compositions. I'll just stop that preview and scroll down. These are all copies of the same single pre composition, so I could double click on any of them. Takes me inside, and I'm just looking for that year's layer. We can just quickly use that same strategy. I just need to make enough copies for what I need. I like to go ahead and add a number one to this first copy. It's just a little easier to keep track of. So I'll rename that. So we've got 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2022. When you do have a stack of layers that you want to quickly reverse the order of, you can actually quickly do that using cut paste. If I select the layer that I want to become the top and then shift select the layer that I want to become the bottom, Controller Command X to cut, and then controller command V to paste now reverses that order. I'll just drag those back down to the bottom, and I'm going to quickly select each one of these. Still have my mask tool, so I will select that first one in mask 2012, 2014. And see while this takes a minute, it's really not so bad. There we go. And now each of those can be selected. We'll close up those masks by pressing M that reveals that and then press it one more time to hide it. Come back to home. I do need to go grab those opacity keys, so let's come back out and get those from any of these layers. Copy, paste, U to open those up, control and alt or command an option to get quick offset and push those until they're two frames off, and that should be exactly what we want. Beautiful. Oh, 42. Create a Ring Chart: All right, now it's time to do the ring graph. So let's get that imported. Composition, Olayer size. Yep, and get those sorted over here in our project panel. Open that up and uh oh, looks like someone did not structure this one properly in Illustrator. Although I don't think that's the worst thing here because we would probably have been rebuilding this ring graph anyway so that we could actually control it the way we want. The background and the titles, we can copy paste from one of the other compositions anyway, and these middle labels shouldn't be much of a problem either. So let's start out by grabbing the titles and background from this other composition. Copy, come back in here and paste. Now we'll move up a bit, and let's turn off this background layer. Select both of these and press T, bring the opacity down so we can see what the words are supposed to be. Quickly update that text. Jupiter and elemental compositions. Great. I'll bring that opacity back up. And those are already animated, so those are done. Perfect. Okay, let's assess this ring graph. Now, we have a circle here, so I think a shape layer is going to be the easiest way to go. I'll come up here and get my ellipse tool. I could certainly try to draw a centered circle. But since our composition is already a square, 1080 by 1080, if I double click this, it will actually create an ellipse at exactly the comp size, which is already a perfect circle. Now I just need to size it down. So I'll come over to my properties panel, bring this size down. We don't need that stroke, so let's turn that off. We can actually see what we're doing here. Looks like I got in the ballpark, and I'm actually glad this is a different color, so I'll be able to see what I'm doing. Let's adjust the layer position to get this lined up. I think right around 674 is probably what I want. I'll just nudge that with my arrow keys. And adjust the size until it feels just right. There we go. There is an effect we could use to get the look that I'm after. So we'll come over to our effects and presets and search for radial wipe and just apply that to my circle. Let's check this out. It has a transition completion 0-100. Okay, well, that looks like the right idea, but the wrong spot. Let's figure that out. Start angle, won't be that. No. Okay, here we go. Wipe center. That looks like Yep, that will adjust where the wipe is happening from. By default, it's happening at 5:45 40, which is the middle of the composition. Okay, well, that makes sense. But our circle isn't centered in the compositions. It's actually located at 5:46 74. So if we update our wipe center to 54674, now it's perfectly centered on that layer. Okay? So let's see if this is what we want. Looking at it, I think this is actually the reverse of what I would like, so we probably need to set this to happen counterclockwise. Okay? Yep. There we go. And then we just need to offset that starting angle. Looks like 90 degrees right there. And perfect. Okay, so I'll just fine tune this. Now, I am noticing that these numbers maybe seem kind of backwards from what I would want them to be. It will animate just fine. It just won't be quite as intuitive. But I think that'll work okay here. I'll create a keyframe, jump back to the beginning, and push this up to 100%. And then as we move through, it wipes on, filling up exactly as much as we want. So here we would just need to update the color and then make duplicates for the other colors. Of course, we do have an issue in that this middle circle needs to be cut out or covered up. That's easy enough. Let's go ahead and name this as radial wipe. And make a duplicate of this circle, I can press E to reveal that effect, and we'll just get rid of the radial wipe on this one. Let's rename this as Blue center. And looking over in the properties panel, we can update that color and bring the size down until we match what the center point is supposed to be. And now we do have a nicely animated ring graph here. However, there is one other issue with this approach. In addition to the fact that the transition completion feels a little backwards, watch this. If I were to move the layer itself, that wipe center actually doesn't move with the circle. By default, any effect that has an internal position like property like this actually doesn't follow the layer when you use layer transforms. There is a way to link this, which I'll quickly show you. Let's go ahead and undo that movement of the layer. So it's back to 54674. And I'm going to twirl a few things open down here in the timeline so that I can see all the things that I want. So here's that wipe center, and here's my layers position. Now, you may have noticed that in the parent and link column, in addition to every layer having the ability to be parented, each property actually has a little pick whip, which means that you can link like properties to one another. So the solution here, if you wanted to be able to move this circle around, is to find this little pick whip right here and link it to the layers position. See how the number turns red. That's actually After Effects having created a little expression for us, just to tell it to look at this layer's position property. And now if I update the layers position, that wipe center travels right along with it. So great solution. I could make duplicates for the other colors, and this would be done. I think I'd like to show you one other approach, though, because I don't love this number being backwards because this is a graph just makes it a little bit harder if we were going to be updating this again later. So let's close that up. I'll go ahead and make one more duplicate of this and turn off my radial wipe. On this new copy, I'll press E and again, delete radio white, and I'll go ahead and name this trim. Just so that I can see what I'm doing, I'll also turn off blue center, and we'll see that we're just back to having a filled circle. But if we were to use a stroked circle and trim paths, that would also be a very easy way to create exactly the effect we're after. So let's see how that works. Let's come back to the properties panel and turn on our stroke. Turn off our fill. Let After Effects do some math for us in here. I'll click on that size value, press my right arrow to get just past the number and then type in divided by two. And if I were to tell the stroke width to be this same value, so 290.9 Hey, look you there. That matches the exact circle that we had. Coming over into our timeline here, I will add a trim paths added right there, and then let's see if this end value, Yep, does exactly what we need. All right. So maybe that's a little more flexible if you prefer to work this way and the numbers are correct. So if I set this to about 80%, it's 80% of that circle, which in my head, since we're doing a graph, this makes a little more sense. We need to offset that start angle again, which is right here, this offset property, 90 degrees. And now we just need to match that end value, which looks like right there, 89%. Et's animate that, jump back to the beginning and set it to zero. Okay, perfect. Now, I certainly could have eyeballed the circle size and created a stroke that was exactly the thickness of the ring, and that would be very effective. I think just to make this a little more dynamic, I'm going to animate this blue center so that we get a little bit of extra motion here. So let's update the name from trim to red and eyedropper that red stroke color. Duplicate this, name it peach. And we can work from the properties panel two. We'll just grab that peach color, press U to reveal those end keyframes, J to jump to the keyframe. This is going to be a little harder to see, but I think that we can find it because it's probably perfectly at 99%. Then we need one more copy of the gray. Grab that color. Press you to open that up and set that up to 100%. Now I just need the red on top, peach in the middle. Let's go ahead and color these so that we know what our hero pieces are and press you to open those up. We'll go ahead and easy ease these and see how that feels really quick. Okay. Let's turn off our reference layer so that we can just focus on that circle. Okay, I think that's feeling pretty good. Maybe a touch fast. So let's select all of these and move these over. Let's go ahead and maybe offset those like our other elements have been. Okay. And let's turn that blue center back on. And I bet if we scale this one on, which could be either the layer scale or the circle's size property, we'll do size because why not? Jump back to the beginning and set that to zero. I'll easy ease those again, and let's see how that feels. Okay. Might be interesting. Let's turn on that background color so we can see that in context. Oh, better set my work area. I think that's happening a little too fast, and maybe that needs to be happening just a little bit already as that comes on. Just kind of tweaking as we go here. You just have to keep adjusting until you're happy with it. I think that feels pretty good. All right. Let's maybe make this a different color than the background. That cyan feels pretty good. We've been starting our other layers a little after the titles. So maybe around, say, frame ten is a good place for all of these to start off. I won't use the bracket here because I don't want all of them to start then. So I'm just dragging them as a group. I'll go ahead and bring that down below the titles just so that we have kind of a nice visual stair step here. Click off of those, and I'm going to press U once so that everything reveals itself. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of my radio white version. You're free to use that approach if you like. I just wanted to show you both of these. So we're pretty close here, I think. We just need to do those labels in the middle. So I'll just bring that up above my blue center and turn that back on. And once we mask this, it won't be covering up anything else of importance anyway. Just to show you a slightly different approach, we can also put multiple masks on one layer and animate the opacity of each of those. So let's try it just to give you options. I'll zoom in and with that layer selected, come up and grab my rectangle tool and draw three masks with each one just getting one of the labels. There we go. Notice they became mask one, two, and three as I drew them. And if you open these up, remember, in the mask properties is an opacity. So we could animate each of these animating on. So let's bring our CTI back to zero and click the stopwatch on all three of these mask opacity properties. This is already using up a lot of space, but if I press U, now we're only looking at those three properties. I actually want those 100% keyframes up here at 12 frames, so I'll just drag all three over, hop back to home and drag them down to zero. Now, quick offset also works on keyframes, but this is just a few, so we could also just move up one, two frames, select these, and bring them over, one, two, and select these and bring them over. And now we have our nice little offset, and all of these are contained in one layer, so it's a little bit less to adjust. I'm not exactly sure where this one needs to go timing wise, maybe somewhere around here. Let's try that out and see how it feels. Zoom back out, bring that up, and do a preview. Maybe just a few frames earlier. Okay, I think this is feeling pretty good. When we see this in context with the other graphs in a minute, we may make timing adjustments on any of them, but I think this is feeling pretty good. 43. Assemble Multiple Scenes: Now it's time to assemble all three of our graphs, which we treat like scenes in one place. Now, we could just create a new composition, but there's an easy way to put them all together. I'll just select all three of them and drag them down to the new composition button. And in this pop up, we can choose whether all the things we've selected go into one compositions, which is what we want or creating multiple compositions with each item in its own. We don't need to mess with any of this other stuff, but notice that you can automatically sequence layers. You can set still durations. So there's a lot of options here. Now I do want to go ahead and rename this compositions, so I'll press Control or Command K to get my composition settings and rename this infographics. And let's go ahead and update this duration because we're going to need room to offset these a bit. 20 seconds should be plenty of time. We can zoom out a bit on our timeline, and let's go ahead and move this. Since this is our main composition that we're going to export, that's what we go up here in the comp folder, and let's make it another color just to really stand out down here in the timeline. Perfect. So now we have our main export composition as well as the individual scenes that make it up. Now coming forward a bit, right, looks like our bar graph is the first one. We'll drag this over just a little bit so we can see the names. I think it will make sense to actually reverse this order, so we'll put bar graph on the bottom, then line graph, then the ring graph. And the idea is that we'll offset each of these just a bit like this in time so that we see the graph reveal itself, sits there for a second to absorb, and then we'll shift over to the next graph. And then the last. I'm planning to make each of these shift to the left to reveal the next oncoming graph, so we'll use some position keyframes for that. Let's go ahead and look at about 4 seconds here and see how this feels. I'll start with bar graph, since that's the first one. I'm actually going to reveal all three of these, and with those selected, I could come to my properties panel, right click and separate dimensions. We're only going to be using the position on these, so that just seems a little easier. E to reveal those position properties down here in the timeline. I'll go ahead and make a keyframe here and then move forward 1 second, which since I'm working at 24 frames per second is 24 frames. So I'll hold Shift and press page down, page down, let go of shift, and page down one, two, three, four. That's 1 second. I want to make sure that my movement is precise and goes exactly the right distance. Remember that After Effects can do that math for us. Now, I know that this composition is 1080 wide, so I could just tell After Effects to move this 1080 pixels to the left, which is negative, so minus 1080, hey, look you there. See the bounding box. Perfect. Now, we were covering this up with the other layer here, but there we go. That's moving exactly how we want. Perfect. Let's turn that back on. Now, we know that we're going to want to parent these together so that this one slides in with the other layer here. But you want to make sure that when you do parenting, you do it at the proper time because if I parent this layer right here, for example, it's just going to kind of ride right on top of the first one as it slides off screen. So I'll press K to make sure that that move is complete, so that bar graph is over here, line graph is right here, and I'll go ahead and parent it. Now, we'll need to figure out our timing here. Probably want to line this up with that first keyframe. We'll go ahead and easy ease these and just see how this feels. Okay, so I see a couple little adjustments that I want to make. I think for starters, I'm going to bump these keyframes over 12 frames, just half a second, but it will give us just a little more time to absorb this, and then we can kind of establish that as our pacing. So I'll select both of these. And you can actually nudge keyframes by holding Alt or option and then using the left and right arrow keys. So I'll hold Alt and nudge them one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12. Press K to jump up there, select our line graph and open bracket to move that over. Okay, now I'm noticing one other issue here, and it's that this graph is already halfway animated before we see it. So there's a couple of different approaches. We could just start this later, but then we're going to have kind of this gap here. So, you know, that could work. We could just put a blue layer at the bottom and make it so that this one starts around here, or I'll just undo the other approach is to quickly jump back into this precomp and just nudge everything over about 12 frames so that it's a little bit offset. Let's just do that. You'll come in here, lock my background color so that it stays in place, I'll select everything else, and just drag those over so that they start at frame 12. So all of our existing timing is still in place. We just moved it a little bit later. Let's see if that is enough to make this work. Yeah, that looks much better. Obviously, the ring graph is happening a bit too early, but now we have our general timing figured out, so we can just make those updates. Let's scoot this over so we can see what we're doing. If we had our other move happen at 4.5 seconds, that means 9 seconds is where the next move should happen. I'll select the line graph, make a keyframe and move up 1 second, 24 frames. And we can use that same approach, even though this is a different number here because it's parented, and so the position values become relative. It's a little more complex than you probably want to think about right now, but the math still works the same. We can just type in minus 1080, and it will move perfectly off screen. Easy ease those keyframes, move this one over, hold shift so it snaps and make sure that we're lined up with that second keyframe or later and then parent that. Again, we'll need to hop into this ring graph. Let's lock that background, select all the rest, get our CTI at frame 12 and just bring these over so that that's where they start. And let's watch this whole thing and see if everything feels like it's pasted out properly. If we want to go for a perfect loop, we could do that same idea one more time. I think actually 13.5 seconds seems about right. So we could create some more keyframes here. And this time, we could actually just enter the value manually because it would be the same as the line graph. So 540 should move it perfectly off the left side. Select those easy Es. Now I will move back one frame, press end, and that is the end of my work area. And this should create a perfect loop. We just need a little bit of buffer here at the end. So let's grab our rectangle tool, double click that to create a rectangle exactly the size of the compositions. Get rid of that stroke, add a fill eyedrop or that dark blue color. We'll just update this to BG color. Move that down to the bottom and close it up. Let's watch the preview one more time. Ah, perfect. We just need to add a little bit of branding, and then I think we're good. Let's zoom in a bit, and I'll be adding the name of my company, which for me is Saget to Starlines. So I will grab my type tool and click right here. Select that text. Let's go ahead and set it to red, and then I need to make sure I find my Museo slab. I'll try a nice thick one here. I think 36 feels fine. I'll just kind of bring that right down into the corner here. I believe that will be out of the way of all of my graph elements. Yep, that looks good. And then maybe let's just draw a quick little box for that to sit on top of just about like that. Hard to see, obviously. We'll stick that below the type and maybe grab, I don't know, this gray color. No. Let's just try darkening that up a bit. See how that feels. Yeah, that looks like it'll do the trick. All right. Let's make this bigger. Make sure this is set to fit and do one final preview. Great. I think this is ready to export and get posted on the company's social media channels. 44. Class Project 04 - Animated Infographics: Class Project time again and this time we're getting all infographicsy. The social media team for your client would love to have a few short animated infographics to help educate the public about the benefits of the destination. We're looking for at least two different scenes here and making sure that you give the viewer appropriate time to read some of that information. This time, you can customize the composition size and frame rate, if you like, as long as it's something that's relatively social friendly. And we would like you to create at least two different infographics with different kinds of graphs that you will then animate. If you want to do a little bit of research and come up with some completely accurate information about your destination, that's super cool, but that's not required here. It can also just look nice. You can create your designs in Photoshop or Illustrator, if you're comfortable in one of those, or you can work entirely in After Effects if you prefer. Or, of course, you can do a combination of all three. We do want to make sure that you incorporate your primary brand color and the client name in some way. And while the individual graphics should have some animation, I also want you to create a smooth transition between the scenes. Yours doesn't have to be a perfect loop, but if you want to do that, go right ahead. And most importantly, this is a little squishy for a requirement, but I really want you to think about using motion to help guide your viewer's eye through your designs in a meaningful and thoughtful way. As a reminder, here's what mine looks like. We've got these three different types of graphs, really thinking about those hero elements, those secondary elements, and then the way that the motion flows through to kind of direct people's attention. Again, you know what to expect here on the deliverables, export your Animation as an MP four file using that same preset, upload to a video hosting site and share the link with us. Please do not use any Cloud storage sites. And make sure to share this on social media. Especially if you used actual facts about your destination, somebody else might learn something. 45. Create the Planet: For this next project, we're changing gears, moving away from the precision of those graphs to something much looser and more artistic. So far, we've mostly been importing assets, but this project actually involves zero imported elements. In fact, we'll be creating 100% of this one right here in After Effects using solid layers, a tiny bit of shape layers, and several different combinations of effects to create a space scene. Let's get started. Before we create anything, I'm actually going to rearrange my workspace just a bit. You can see I have my library's panel open for some color chips, and I'm going to take properties and just drag it over right here. So that I can keep my effects and presets panel exposed all the time, but also work in properties without having to keep clicking back and forth. We'll start off by creating a new composition. I'll name this planet scene. And I'm just using this HD 24 frame per second preset. If you want a different frame rate, that is just fine. And 10 seconds feels fine to me. The next thing we'll do is actually create another empty composition to build something that will go into this one. I'll click on that new comp icon. And name this one planet. This time, I want to change the size of this composition. I actually want this one to be twice as wide as it is tall, so I will uncheck this little checkbox that locks the aspect ratio, and then let After Effects do the math for me. I'll just type in 1080 and then use the asterisk for multiplication 1080 times two. And then once I click anywhere else, that does the math for me, 21 60. Perfect. We may need to zoom out just a bit to see the whole thing. There we go. Now, we could be using shape layers for most of the stuff we'll do in this project, but they actually have more functionality than we need in most cases. So I'm going to be using what's called a solid layer, which is just a flat layer of color at a specific size, and it's great for holding effects. I'll come up to layer, new, solid, or you can press Control or Command Y. I'll name this one planet base, and you'll see that it gets created at composition size, and you get to choose the color, which for this first one actually doesn't matter. So I'll press. Okay. And while it doesn't look any different, you can see a bounding box now and see the layer down in my timeline. We're going to add an effect to it called fractal noise, so we can come over. You can search for it if you like, or you can find it under noise and grain fractal noise. This effect allows you to generate noise patterns in all kinds of interesting combinations, just to give you a really quick overview here. Up at the top, you have a fractal type, which changing this creates all kinds of crazy different combinations here. Maybe choose strings, for example. See, already a vastly different look. And you can change the noise type to be different. We'll say blocks. And without even touching any of the other properties, you'll see this is already pretty different than it started out, right? I'll just reset this. We're going to be using this to create a land texture that will then wrap around a sphere to create a planet. And we'll just be using the basic fractal type, but usually good place to start out is the contrast in brightness. We might crank that up a little bit here. It will actually be easier to see what we're doing once we apply another effect to recolor this. And I'm going for tritone. So let's grab that and apply it to the layer. First, the fractal noise is happening and then the tritone. If this were the other way around, we wouldn't see the effects of the tritone because the fractal noise is covering that up. Let's set the mid tones to this kind of medium blue and the shadows to this deep blue, and then the highlight to maybe this kind of peachy color. That kind of looks like land with oceans, but you're, of course, free to use any colors you like. And now I can actually see this result. Now I can play with the contrast and brightness to kind of decide how chunky I want this to be. The lower you go with brightness, the more oceans I have, the higher I go, the more land I have. Somewhere right in the middle is probably fine here, and I might open up this transform and just change the scale a bit make this feel a little more like larger land masses. If you're following along, I don't feel like you need to worry too much about using my exact values. Just figure out the things that work well for your example and go with that. Now, I'm not going to try to create a realistic version of my planet, which is Jupiter. I'm just going for a fantasy planet vibe right now. I'm going to create another solid that I'll use as a layer of clouds. So layer new solid. Name this clouds and black is fine for this one again. We'll be using fractal noise again for this one. We're going to use it a lot in this project. I think in this case, just cranking up the contrast a bit and maybe changing the brightness down a little bit, that's probably going to be good. And I'll come down here and change my blending mode. Remember, if you don't see that right now, you can toggle switches and modes. I'm going to set this blending mode to screen so that all the dark areas become transparent, and now I have a layer of clouds over my landmass. I'll maybe bring that brightness down just a bit more so they're not quite so intense. And just to give this a little bit of life, let's look at some of the settings in here. Under Transform, you have the ability to not only re scale this, but actually offset this layer as well. Now, if we were changing the layer's position, this would, of course, have edges, but you can use this to keep generating new texture as it scrolls. So I'll just keyframe this, jump up to the end, and just move it a bit this way. So it kind of creates some slight cloud movement. Nice. Jump back to the beginning, and I will also animate this evolution control, which makes the noise pattern itself change over time. Really useful for bringing this effect to life. I'll create a keyframe, jump up to the end, and just turn this a little bit here. I don't know, maybe about 1:20. Let's reveal those keyframes. Alright. I think that's going to be pretty subtle, but I would rather have it be subtle. I can always come back and adjust this if I decide that I want to. We're actually done for now in this composition, so we can either close it or just click back to the other tab and make sure that my project panel is here so that I can grab what I just built. So I have that planet compositions, and I'll just drop that into planet CN, and then we're going to use another effect to turn this into a planet. I'm looking for CC sphere. And as soon as I apply this, you'll see Poof instant planet. This has a radius control. Let's turn that up a little bit to make the planet larger. And we could use either this offset right here or just move the layer itself. In this case, it won't really change our eventual outcome. I want my planet to be kind of over here about a third of the way from the right. I think that'll create a nice dynamic layout once we get more of our elements in. 46. Create the Background: A we need a background for our planet. You can also create solids by just right clicking in the empty area of your timeline here. You'll get this pop up and we can go New Solid. We'll just name this one BG, and I think black is fine here. Okay, put that below our planet. And then we're going to make yet another one. So new solid, and we'll name this one stars. But this time, we need to make sure that the color is white. And we're going back to our Effects panel and looking for CC starburst. H just drop that red on my layer and you can see what it does. If you preview, it's actually pretty intense. We're going to dial that back a wee bit. We can come up here and maybe bring that size down quite a bit. I definitely want to bring the speed down. I don't want it to be all the way to zero, but maybe 0.01, it's just barely something. I feel like these are pretty dense, I might try, the scatter and just loosen those up. Hopefully, you're already seeing several other cool possibilities here if you animate this property. That feels pretty good to me. Let's go ahead and move that below my planet. You know, white is fine, but I'm going to try one other effect just to give these a little kiss of color. There's an effect called color ama. Notice I don't need to type in the full name. I'll add that to my stars layer. By default, it's going to turn everything red, not what I want. But if I go into output cycle and choose one of these preset palettes for fire, it's actually going to go back to almost everything being white. But I've found that if I crank up this shading value of CC Starburs just a little bit, Colama actually works on the white and black values of whatever it's getting fed, which right now is all white. So if we give it a little bit of shading, it will start putting a bit of color into that. And it might be a little subtle on your recording, but you can see just little kisses of yellow and orange in here, so the stars aren't just pure white. Let me maybe toggle that. It's beefing them up a little bit and giving them just a little bit of personality, which I really like. So this is not going to be a heavily animated piece, but again, with a preview, we can see just a little bit of creep on those stars. And with that little bit of movement here and the cloud movement, we're already bringing the scene to life with very little work. 47. Add 3D Rings: Whether it's scientifically accurate or not, everybody loves a planet with rings, so let's add a few of those. I'm going to create another new solid and name this one rings. And in this case, the color doesn't matter again. I'll hit Okay. This one will have a whole stack of effects to get the end result, starting with our friend fractal noise again. And I'll kind of give you a hint at where this is going. But again, this is one where we won't really see the result until we stack up some of the other effects. Now, in this case, we're going to use the transform properties of fractal noise, and you can actually make it so that the scaling is not uniform. By default, it scales uniformly like layers do, but you can uncheck that and now you can scale the width and height separately. So if I make this width very large and the height very small, you start getting kind of this streaky line pattern, okay? Now let's come over here and look for polar coordinates. Check this out. We add this to our layer and I'm going to change this to rect to polar, so it's going to change it from a rectangle to polar. And then as I crank this value up, it sort of folds in on itself until it becomes a circle. And I bet you can already see where this is going. Now, this does have a seam. In this case, that's not going to be a problem. We'll just hide it behind the planet, but there are ways to fix that when you need to. Of course, right now, we have a big solid disc of streaks, which is not quite what we want. So I'm going to use another effect called linear wipe. Get where we want to go, we'll just drop that onto that same layer. And just like we've seen with some other features, the order in which things are applied makes a huge difference to the end result. Linear wipe is intended to be a transition, kind of like the radial one we saw before. So if I crank this up, it will slowly wipe across like this, just kind of a standard wipe across the scene, right? But if I put this higher in the layer stack, say, before the polar coordinates, it's going to have a very different effect. Because remember, the polar coordinates are wrapping that rectangle into a circle. So if I change this transition completion and change the wipe angle, look at this. Kind of wacky, huh? Hopefully, you're already going to start seeing interesting ideas that you could use for other abstract things. But if I set this to exactly 180 degrees, then I can turn that transition completion up until I get just perfectly the amount of rings that I like. There's a little feather property here, if I want to kind of soften that interior edge, which I think looks nice. And now we just need to actually place this properly on the planet. So we can move this layer around, but we have a bit of a perspective problem, right? But After Effects can fix that for us using three D. Now, don't get freaked out. We're just going to use a very simple version of three D. We'll come down and toggle our switches and modes so that we can see the layer switches and look for this one right here under this little cube. Clicking this for a layer will enable three D. Let me select this layer so that you can see it in the properties panel, and then when I enable three D, watch what happens in the properties panel. Suddenly, we have a third dimension on several of the properties, and rotation goes from one property to four. Now you can absolutely adjust these in the properties panel if you like. You'll also see in the viewer that we now have this three D Gizmo control, which gives you three axis control over this layer. Now, this can move still in X and Y, but now in Z, which is towards and away from us, but we don't need to do that right now. More importantly, it enables you to rotate this in three dimensions. I'm going to take this red one right here and just sort of click and drag that upwards until I find the right angle, which is probably somewhere around 65 ish. And notice as I'm dragging this, this is actually changing the first value, the X value of the orientation property over in my properties panel. Now, in this case, the rotation would actually be doing the same thing. You kind of have two different ways to rotate things, whether you are just setting it or actually animating it. I'll just undo that. For this project, we just want it rotated so it looks right, and then I can just kind of drag this over into place, maybe tweak that a little bit more that feels pretty good. Of course, we have a bit of a layering problem because those rings should sit behind the planet. Well, we could try to drag this layer down below the planet, but that's not right either. What we actually need is for the planet itself to also be three D. Even though this is a flat layer that isn't going to be rotated at all, enabling three D for this layer lets After Effects know that we want it to think about this perspective properly. So let's enable that and now that fixes that layering problem. Let me just quickly give you an example of how After Effects sees this. Notice that planet is just a flat layer. It's kind of like you're holding up a postcard, and then the ring is actually in three D space around it. Even though it's flat, it helps it actually look correct. We'll talk more about three D towards the end of the course. That's a whole other can of worms. So for now, just know that it's another option to help adjust the perspective of something. I do want to adjust the color on these rings, so let's grab Tritone again. And it looks like I have my planet layer selected. So I'll just make sure I put that on the rings instead. And let's set this midtones to my main red and maybe get a little wacky with this. Let's grab this dark blue and set the shadows to be, I don't know, purple. Maybe we can zoom in a little bit. This would be a good time now that we can really see the result. We can crank up this contrast if we want to get kind of wacky with the colors because the more contrast you create here, the more tritone has to work with. 48. Draw a Background Nebula: I think our background is a little bit plain, so we can create sort of a background gas cloud nebula thing back there to give it some personality. You could absolutely use a solid layer and masks to get the same effect, but I'm going to draw a shape layer. That's just a little more flexible for this case. I'll zoom out just a bit, grab my pen tool. I'm going to set my fill to maybe this purple that I have lined up here. I might adjust that later and just draw kind of a big sort of almost bow tie kind of shape. Doesn't have to be super perfect here, creating a colored object that can live in the background. Let's go ahead and rename this gas cloud and I'll move that down just below the stars. We're going to break this up a bit with another fractal noise. So let's find that again. And, huh? Well, that kind of took away the color that I just made. We could use a coloring effect to get there. But also, fractal noise actually has a blending mode built right into the effect itself, which enables all kinds of interesting things. But right now, we'll just set that to multiply so we can see that original color, but also get the interesting pattern of the fractal noise, too. Let's open up Transform and just kind of play with that scale a bit. I'm just sort of looking for this to break this up. I might crank up the contrast some, but, you know, this is abstract. I want to soften this whole thing. So let's come over and find a blur effect like fast box blur. And we'll apply that to my gas cloud and just crank this up a bit until I feel pretty good about that. Let's deselect that layer. Okay. I like that, but I feel like it might be a little too strong in the middle. So I'll select that layer again and come up to my shape tool and grab an ellipse. You can actually draw a mask on a shape layers. You just have to make sure to tell After Effects that's what you want to do. There's a little selector right here. When you're already working on a shape layer, you can tell it that you instead want to be creating a mask. And I'll just create kind of a loose ellipse here in the center. I actually want this set to subtract, so we'll do that, open this up, and crank that feather way up, just kind of looking to knock down that center so it's not so intense. Maybe I want that to be a bit bigger so I can play with the expansion and just decide when I'm happy there. I think that looks pretty good. Still maybe a bit too prominent. Let's bring down that opacity. Just maybe around 50% or so. There we go. Just helps break up all the black but isn't drawing too much focus. 49. Add a Sun: All right. A good space scene needs a sun and everybody loves a lens flare, right? So we need another solid new solid. We'll name this one sun. And we do need to make sure that our layer is black this time. That will be important for blending modes in a minute. Let's go ahead and set that to be yellow for the sun. And I'm looking for another effect called lens flare. Okay, let's drop that on here, and there we go. Now, these default lens flares are showing their age a bit, but you can still pull something nice out of this. Let's come over here and choose a 105 millimeter prime lens type. Okay. I think that already looks better. And let's maybe add a levels effect to this so that we can tweak a little bit. Might need to adjust this just to touch so we can see the top of that. Now, you could kind of change the contrast on this, maybe sink this down so that that's not such a hard edge around some of those lens artifacts. We can take this flare center and move that over just a bit, but of course, we can't see our planet right now. So let's come down to our timeline and set the blending mode for this layer so that it composites properly. Toggle back to our modes and set this one to screen. So all that black will become transparent, and now we can see our sun. Let's nudge that flare center over so that it's kind of right about there, that's feeling pretty good. I'm going to lean into the red that is my color. So on levels, I'll actually set this to my red channel and just play with that a little bit to give that a little bit more of a reddish vibe. Now, I could go super over the top if I wanted to, but I think just a little bit of it would probably go a long way here. If I want to, I can change that flare brightness. You know what? I actually like that a little more subtle. It's not quite as overwhelming. Yeah, that feels good. 50. Adjust the Lighting: Now that we have a sun, the lighting of our planet doesn't feel very realistic anymore. So let's check out some of the additional options on the effects for this planet. Up here we actually have light and shading for this sphere. Okay? Let's check that out. So you can change the intensity of the light on it. I think 100 is probably good. I don't want to blow this out too much, but being able to change the color and the height and direction makes a huge difference. So let's change that direction. There we go. See? Where is the light coming from on this sphere? Try to match up that sun position here and then change the height until I think I like this where we're getting a nice cinematic backlighting on the planet. Let's maybe zoom in a bit. That feels pretty good. We can also open up this shading and decide how much of each particular light type we want. You can go much deeper with this. I'm just going to adjust the ambient a bit. We could bring that up to see more of the planet or bring it down. So that it could actually be totally black if we want. I think maybe somewhere around seven or eight is good. We can still see what's going on, but we're getting a nice cinematic backlighting here. Okay, now the rings we're going to have to deal with a little bit differently because they're built in a different way. Let's see what we can do there. We might be able to do something with masking, maybe, but once you've rotated a layer in three D, the masks are a little less intuitive to use. I think we could actually use this linear wipe to create a dark side of our rings. Check this out. Let's close some of these other effects down. And then duplicate this linear wipe by pressing Control or Command D, drag this new copy of it to the bottom and reset it. Now I'll crank this completion back up until Okay, okay. There we go. And then play with this angle. Look at that. Now, think about what's happening. We're generating a noise pattern, wiping part of it off. The polar coordinates are wrapping that result from a rectangle into a circle, and then the whole thing is rotated in three D. We're adding some color and then wiping away that final result, but still with that three D perspective. If that blew your mind a little bit, you know what? We're just trying to make it look right. It's okay if you don't fully understand exactly how all this stuff works yet. The more you play with it, the more experience you have, the more intuitive this will become. So I'm going to crank up this feathering quite a bit here, and then just keep playing with this completion until it feels good. I think having a nice sort of hot spot on my rings feels good. But of course, I don't want them to disappear over here. I just want them to be darker. You can also adjust the opacity for just a specific effect, which I think here will probably get us the look that I'm after. Down in the timeline, let's press E to reveal all the effects on this layer and look at that second linear wipe. If I twirl that open, you'll see I have all the same controls that you can see up above in the effect controls. But there's also something called compositing options. And if you twirl that open, you get a control called effect opacity. So you can turn down this effect opacity a bit so that now that linear wipe effect is only being applied at 78% opacity, meaning now we get back a little bit of what we had before the wipe. So we just need to kind of dial this in. I think something in the 80s gives a nice darkness without too much transparency here, and that feels pretty good to me. We have a nice cinematic back lighting. Our rings are nice and hot on the front side, but dark back here. Our planet is nice and hot over here, but dark back here. Yeah, that feels pretty good. 51. Animate the Scene: We do have a bit of subtle animation happening here, but I think there's room to just add a little bit more. Let's stop that preview. Let's start off by checking out our planet again, and up near the top of this effect, there's actually controls for rotation. So you can rotate this in all three dimensions, just like we did with our ring layer. But now, since this is a sphere, it actually rotates all the way around for us. Now, when you go too far, you will start seeing some weirdness where the pattern kind of converges or has a seam in the back. But as long as you only rotate a little bit, see, there's the seam here. As long as we only rotate a little bit on Y, we can actually make the planet spin. Which I think will look good. So let's come up to the beginning of our timeline, create a keyframe, jump to the end and just crank it up a bit. I don't know. 13%. Let's see what that feels like. Just enough to bring it to life along with those clouds. Okay. Let's see about maybe the rings. Okay, well, again, we don't have those same types of controls here, but up in fractal noise, I think we could offset the turbulence, which we saw earlier. Let's zoom in and see what that actually looks like. Hey, that's kind of interesting. Okay, I think that's the way to go the X value of this offset turbulence. So I'll create a keyframe, jump to the end, and just scrub that a bit. I'm not sure how much is too much, so you just need to kind of trial and error this a little bit. Okay, I think that's just enough to give it some life. I like that. Now, our nebula, realistically, would those clouds evolve in a way that we could see? No, but hey, we're making this up as we go, so we can do whatever we like, right? Maybe that ooh, evolution slider. Hey, there we go. Okay. So let's come back to the beginning, make a keyframe for evolution. I can set that back to zero. Doesn't matter. It's all abstract anyway. Pop up to the end and just crank this up. I don't know, 114? Sure. Let's see how that feels. It's slow enough that you really can't even tell, but I do think it just adds a nice little bit of life to the scene. Those stars are already animating themselves from that setting we did back when we first created them, so I think those are good to go. And I don't think the sun really needs any attention. So I think this one's good to go. It has some nice life, but keeps it subtle, just barely animated enough to keep your attention. 52. Finishing Touches: Just a few final touches we'll really bring this thing over the finish line. Let's create an adjustment layer to just add some final polish here. So I'll right click New Adjustment layer, and I'll name this look to this, let's add levels would work fine, but just to mix it up, let's add curves. And maybe just add a little touch of contrast. I'll kind of click here and drag down a little bit, click here and drag up a little bit, adds a subtle little S curve. Let's just toggle that on and off. There we go. Just kind of makes everything pop a little bit there. I like that. Let's try a vignette again. If I can spell it right, there we go. CC vignette. Now, by default, that's just at the center. Might play around with this amount and kind of see how much of that we want to add. Depends on how dark you want your scene to be. I think just right around 100 is probably fine for me. We could adjust the center maybe around the sun here or maybe on the planet, kind of up to you. I'll put mine on the sun. And just for a little bit of stylization and just to make sure some of the gradients look nice, if we were posting this online, I'm going to add a little bit of noise here. So I'm searching for an effect called noise HLS. Which allows me to put noise into different channels by hue, lightness or saturation. I'm going to add just a few percent into the lightness, maybe about four or five here. And if I zoom in close, you can kind of see what that's doing. Let me toggle that on and off for you. I think for this scene, that will look nice, give everything just a little bit of texture so it doesn't feel quite so artificial. And honestly, I think the scene is ready to go, so we can save and export this. Of course, if you're doing this yourself, I really encourage you to explore, try out some other effects, try some different settings. This is just a little appetizer of what's possible with all of the hundreds of effects in this program. 53. Class Project 05 - Planetary Scene: Class Project Time again, I think this is a really fun one. We want to help our customers imagine the wonders of the cosmos by creating a stylized space scene. You can try to be accurate if you want. I know that will be easier with some destinations than others. So if you want, you can just make something fun and colorful. Obviously, I didn't try too hard to be realistic. I was just kind of enjoying myself here. Your composition size and frame rate are up to you. You can customize that a little bit to make sense for your scene. Do want you to create a stylized space scene with at least one planet, a starry background, and a sun. If you want to add background things like a nebula, if you want to add rings to your planet, those are all nice bonuses. If you'd like, you could try to add even more details, whatever you can imagine. But the biggest requirement is that all of these elements should be created directly in After Effects. We want you to try to do this without using any imported images or videos. Build everything using either effects on solids or shape layers. I really want you to explore some of these various effects and other capabilities here and see what you can create just using those. Do make sure to include your primary brand color, and if you have any other additional branding cues that you find opportunities for, those would be great. And this one is a lot more about using After Effects as a design tool. So you can keep any animation a little more subtle and minimal here. As a reminder, here's what mine looks like. I've got that big planet I created with fractal noise. We've got some rings. We've got some cool cinematic lighting. We've got a sun, star background, a nebula, the whole thing. On deliverables, as usual, export your animation as an MP four using that preset. Upload your video to a video hosting site and share that link with us so that we can see it and make sure to share this on social media so that people can follow along and see what you've been up to. Good luck. Have some fun with this one, and hopefully fractal noise will be your new best friend. 54. The Text Animator Explained: You already know that we can move text layers around like any other layer, but After effects has a special text animator system that lets you do so much more. We've already applied a text animation preset in an earlier lesson. Here's that slide down by character that we used earlier. Now that we've applied that, let's twirl this all the way open and take a look at what's actually happening. Within the layer, you'll find a heading named text, and inside that, you'll find an animator, which after effects already named as part of applying the preset. Inside that a range selector, which contains an advanced section, and just below, we have an internal position and opacity value that specifically affect only this text animator. Kind of like shape layers. These are separate from the actual layer transform properties. If we move forward in time, you'll see the letters are being revealed. Each letter is moving downward while it fades on. This is those internal position and opacity changes in action. Of course, those can be changed, so let's adjust this to a larger negative value, which would move it higher in Y. Now each letter is moving much further before it lands. If we change that to a positive value, now each letter will move up into place. And that is all being handled by just two keyframes on this offset property. Interesting. With the knowledge you already have, you could certainly make some basic adjustments to position and opacity and retime these keyframes until you're happy with the result. But let's take a deeper look at how this text animator system actually works. We're going to build a few things from scratch, and even if you eventually decide not to go that deep, this will give you a much better understanding of what the presets are actually doing. We'll start simple, though. Let's delete that entire preset from my layer. You can add text animators from this little flyout in the timeline or from this button at the bottom of your properties panel when you have any text layer selected. For this first example, I'm planning to animate tracking. You can adjust that here in the text properties, which changes the spacing between all the characters, but this is just a static change that I'm making to the layout. To animate that property over time, I'll come down to that add animator button, which gives me a big flyout with a lot of properties to choose from. Here we are. Ing. Once I select that, let's look over in the timeline and see that our layer now has something called animator one, range selector one, and those tracking properties. For tracking, you can get good results by just animating the property directly. Let's add a keyframe for tracking at zero, move up a bit and set that to a higher number. There we go. Our tracking is changing over time, and already you can see how useful this is compared to the amount of work it would take to animate all these characters if they were individual layers. And the cool thing is that this text is still fully editable. I'll double click my text layer and just type in some other characters. Kind of a game changer, right? Let's take a look at some other properties and get a better understanding of how the rest of the system works. I'm going to start fresh in this other composition, where I have my main text layer and a couple other supporting layers to help you better understand what's going on under the hood. I'll add a new animator this time for position. Again, you can see we have animator one and range selector one, and then a position property within this animator. This is telling After effects how we want to change this text from its original settings. If I set the Y value of this position property to about minus 360, you'll see that we've moved all of our characters up to this new area, but the layer's anchor point is still sitting down here where it was before. And if I toggle this animator on and off, everything goes back to that original position. Okay, so I guess we could animate this position property, but right now that's not much different than just animating the layer itself. That's where the range selector comes in. Let's open that up and see what we're doing. Inside here, we have a start and end property. To should be feeling a little familiar at this point. If I change the end value, there we go. Now we have some characters receiving that position change, and others are still at their original settings. So the start and end are actually determining which portions of this text layer are being changed. If we instead change the start value to about 60%, now we have the first 60% of this line not being affected while the remaining 40% is being changed. You can also see the start and end values directly up here in the viewer. You can actually click and drag on them right in the viewer window, and those values down in the timeline will adjust themselves as I'm doing this. Let's use this to just isolate a couple characters here. We also have this offset property that actually allows you to move that affected portion back and forth through the line of text. Let's undo that. Let's reset these and quickly add some key frames to the start property, zero to 100. Here's what that looks like. These start end and offset properties are actually animating that change to and from the original settings. So I can easily add other properties into this animator, and whether I'm changing one property or several, they can all be changed using that same set of keyframes. Very similar to what you saw with shape layers, we have a little ad flyout that gives us additional properties that can be included in this animator. Let's add property, scale, and I'll bring that down to about 30%. Now every one of those letters is having its Y position changed and being scaled down, and then they're changing back to their original values for both of those properties. Let's add property rotation and change that a bit. Let's add property opacity and bring that down some. I'll leave it a little bit visible so you can see what's happening. And again, we have this one set of keyframes changing every single letters position, scale, rotation, and opacity, and we could keep tweaking these values until we're happy with exactly the look that it creates. Let's simplify by stripping this back to just position again and then open up this advanced section. So far, we've been thinking about this in terms of a percentage, zero to 100, which makes it easier to visualize and keeps it aligned with some of the other features we've seen earlier. Either none of the things are back at their original value, all of them are or somewhere in between. But you can also change these to an index, which means it's actually counting the units, characters in this case, and allows you to be very precise when you want to. Notice, I was careful to say that this isn't only characters because the next control allows you to choose whether the animator works with characters, words or lines. When you're set to index, those are obviously going to be very different values, but percentage works the same no matter which is being counted. If I set this to words, watch how that changes the animation. Now it's treating each word as a unit, but each character is individually being affected by the changes that we set up down here. But even that functionality can be changed if you want to. Another call back to earlier things you've seen, these animators actually have a mode. By default, it's set to add, but you can actually subtract this whole animator instead and reverse the entire process. You can also use multiple animators or multiple selectors, and then you could use these other modes to start intersecting those in even more complex ways. We also have an amount, which is more or less an on off switch for the entire animator, but you could key frame this or you can actually set this negative to reverse the whole thing, or just animate this property instead of the other ones above. Next up is shape, which is usually the trickiest for people to wrap their heads around. To help you visualize better, I'll replace this text with a bunch of this vertical pipe character. Get rid of those keyframes and I'll get start and end dialed in so we don't have any partially changed characters here. Shape is a little more abstract, but you can actually visualize it directly by using position like this. Right now, shape is set to square, and looking up in the viewer, it kind of looks like there's a square or at least a rectangle pushing its way through this line of text characters. Let's adjust offset and you'll see that square being pushed back and forth through the line. Amp up creates a gradual change from the original value to the changed value. Start and end are essentially deciding over how many characters that change occurs. I could change this to create a wider ramp or make it really tight, so it happens over just a few characters. Again, offset allows you to move that change through the text. So if you're using a ramp shape, you're typically going to be animating this offset property and using start and end in a more static way to determine how sharp that change is. Amp down is just the opposite, of course, we're ramping down from the changed value back to the original value. These next three shapes all take you from the original values to the changed ones, and then back again. Triangle pushes, yep, a triangle of change through your line of text. And again, start and end, kind of determine how wide this is while offset moves it through the line. Round does very much the same thing. It's just more circular. And smooth gives you a very similar result, but more smoothed out like a Bezier curve. So basically, for any shape other than square, you're probably mostly going to be animating the offset property. To explore Es high and Es low, let's set this back to ramp up. Similar to the way that we've been easing keyframes, you can apply easing here to these changes. Es high eases into that changed value. Es low eases out of the original value. You can crank these way up to make them super smooth, or you can actually set them negative to create a really abrupt change. Let's just zero both of those back out for now. And of course, if you really want to spice things up, you can randomize this whole thing. You're still changing how the characters are being affected, but now it's not just in a simple left to right arrangement anymore. Notice that this entire range selector actually has its own eyeball switch, so we can disable this whole thing. And let's try adding another selector, wiggly. That already does a lot. So let's open this up. This automatically wiggles the property that I've added by the amount that I've established, both positively and negatively, and then all these other settings determine exactly how that wiggle works. Oh, and using the mode dropdown, you now get to determine how this intersects with any other selectors that you've already added. Okay, I know this is probably getting a little intense, so let's take a step back. I'll undo a few times until we get back to those actual words. And just delete this entire animator. In addition to these animators, you can also make your text follow a path. I'll grab my pen tool, and I have this layer selected, so I'll start drawing a mask on this layer. But instead of using the mask to cut away part of the layer, I can actually just use it as a path. Looking back down in the timeline, you'll see that this text layer now has path options. And if I open this up, I can choose one of the masks on this layer to which the text will be applied. Once you've done that, you get additional properties, including being able to easily animate the text along this path. And all the animators that we saw before can actually be stacked right on top of this. Let's finish up by creating a few practical everyday text animations. I'll just remove that mask. Let's say that we wanted to create a simple typewriter look. So I would add an animator for opacity and set that to zero. We'll open up the range selector, and here we would just animate the start value. But you're probably noticing that these letters are actually fading on instead of just appearing like a typewriter would. We actually have all these spots where it's kind of halfway between characters, and it assumes that we want everything to be smooth, which we probably would for most other properties. To make the letters go from completely hidden to completely revealed all at once, we can look inside advanced and find this smoothness property, which actually only exists for the square shape. Set that to zero and yeah, perfect. Of course, there's a typewriter preset that we could have just used, but now you understand how it works. Let's push this a little further. I'd like to change this into a smoother fadon, so I'll remove those start keyframes, change this to ramp up, and we'll instead use the offset property. See how it's kind of halfway revealed here? If I bring this all the way to -100, now the entire line is hidden. Let's keyframe that, move forward a bit, and bring it all the way up to positive 100. There we go. Not bad. Let's add a little bit of position movement into this two. Looking better, but this feels a little chunky, stair steppi. Let's see what we can do about that. Since I'm using ramp up, I'll want to use Es low to smooth this out. If you have trouble remembering which is which, you can also just play with them until it looks right. Nice. That gives a much smoother landing. And you know what? I like this, but I kind of wish that it was moving in full words instead of characters. Let's update that. Yeah, look at this smooth, snappy little reveal that we just made. And remember, this is still fully editable. I could type in a few new words. And all my existing animation still works, making this extremely flexible and customizable. We're really just scratching the surface here. You can actually also use three D properties for individual characters, animate the properties of variable fonts, and much more. If this interests you even a little bit, I highly recommend getting in here to explore. Just play around with this system and see what you can make. Of course, we are about to go through a step by step example in the next couple of lessons. If you didn't fully follow everything in this lesson, that's okay. The system is pretty deep and even a lot of experienced users don't use it to the full potential. Just remember that you have tons of text animation presets waiting for you. Over and effects and presets, just look under animation presets, text, and animate in is a great place to start if you're just looking to reveal some type like we just did. Try applying some of these presets, then open them up and make some adjustments. Even if you're just adjusting the timing and modifying the values, that can take you a long way toward creating your own custom text animations. 55. Animate a Title Card: Let's put these ideas into practice by creating an animated title card. You can see that I've already set up this project, and if you're looking to follow along, you'll find it right here as Animated Title Start. I'm working in an HD 24 frame per second comp that is 7 seconds long. Background color black. As you can see here, I already have a couple of type layers laid out. I have a video clip that I've already trimmed to the proper length, and we have an audio file which has some nice orchestral music. Let's do a quick preview to get a feel for everything. This is the first time that we've worked with music, which is a very common way to help pace your animation. Aligning your animation, timing, and overall feel with that music is a big part of making everything feel cohesive. Let's start out by finding and marking a few of the key moments in this short piece of music so that we'll be able to more easily work along with it. If I twirl this layer open, you'll find that we only have an audio heading in here. Inside that, we have a place to set our levels, which we don't actually need to do this time, but you can change and even keyframe those if you want. That said, I don't really recommend After Effects as a place to do any kind of serious audio editing. You can also view the waveform, which is the visual representation of the sound in this file. The higher these little waves are, the louder the sound is at that particular time. So even just glancing at this, you can already see a couple big moments in the track here. With or without this twirled open, you can actually preview just the audio by pressing the period key on your number pad. But especially as your projects get more complex, it can be nice to refresh yourself on the audio without having to wait for a heavier visual preview to also be built. I'm going to use this to help me find and mark those key moments in the music track. You can create markers in After Effects, either on specific layers or for your composition overall. These are a great way to leave little reminders for yourself or to mark a place that you want to align other layers or keyframes to as you work. With no layers selected, if I press the asterisk key on my number pad, it will create a marker right here on my composition. When I double click that, I can actually add a name or description. You can also color code these, and they can be a single frame or actually have a duration if you want to mark a short range of time. I love these markers, and I use them all the time. To get rid of an existing marker, you can just right click and delete it right here. I'm going to place a couple markers directly on this music track so I can easily reference those couple important spots in the music. On this track, I could probably do this by looking at the waveform, but you can also drop markers while you're previewing. I'll select that music layer, then press the period key and then press asterisk when I want to drop those markers. Let's see how I do. Mm hm. Pretty close. On such a short piece of music, it's pretty tricky to have enough time to actually catch this totally accurately. Normally, you would just listen to this a couple times and fine tune until you feel like they're definitely in the right spots. But I did already work this out earlier. I want this first one at frame 12 and the second one right at 5:07. All right, perfect. Now, even without having that waveform taking up a bunch of space in my timeline, I can easily reference those exact frames. Also remember that we were using J and K to jump between keyframes earlier. These stop at markers, too. Now that we've got those markers made, let's add some animation to the type layers. Starting with this big Jupiter layer, I'm going to add an animator for tracking. I don't actually need the range selector on this one, so I'll go ahead and just delete that. I'll make sure my CTI is at zero and keyframe that tracking amount. Then I'll come up to 5.5 seconds, five, 12, and set that tracking up to five. I already know that I'll be trimming off the very end of this layer later, so it's okay that we have a little bit at the end without movement. This music is lovely, but for the purposes of this lesson, I'll just disable that for now by clicking the little speaker icon. We'll turn that back on after we get our text animation dialed in. Okay, looks good. Pretty straightforward. I think I can just copy paste this to the other layer. But first, let's rename this animator, since I'll be adding some others to both of these layers. Like anything else, just press Enter and then type in a new name tracking. With that still selected, I will control or command C to copy and making sure that my CTI is at zero, control or command V to paste that onto King of planets. I'll press U to confirm that pasted. Yep, let's go ahead and zoom in a bit so that we can see this better. Looking good, it stays fairly subtle, but it adds a nice little bit of movement just enough to keep it alive and keep it visually interesting. I think I'll also add a little bit of scaling to complement this. Again, keeping it subtle. Let's parent King of planets to Jupiter. Then select Jupiter and check the anchor point. Yep, that looks like a good spot already. I'll press S to reveal my scale. Create a keyframe here at the beginning. Press K a couple times to jump up to that other keyframe we already created at 5:12. Notice that I did have to jump past the markers here, and I'll set that up to 104%. Nice. Keeps it subtle, but feels effective and kind of plays up Jupiter's size and presence, I think. I'm also looking to bring in my brand red on this one. I think what I'll do is reveal this second line of text left to right and smoothly, but then also have a little bit of red sort of sweeping across as that's being revealed. And I don't think I'll do a reveal like that on the main Jupiter title, but I can still bring in a little bit of that same flavor. So let's select that second line and create an opacity animator, either from the timeline or the properties panel. I'll rename this opacity on because that's what it's doing. If you want to leave the word animator in these, you're, of course, welcome to do that, too. I'll open this up and set the opacity down to zero. I'm going to use a ramp up for this one to make it nice and smooth. Yeah, that's exactly the vibe I'm going for. As we saw in the previous lesson, I just need to animate the offset from -100 to 100. So we'll create that first keyframe. And I think a little over 2 seconds is good for the other one. Yeah, that feels right. Let's add some color into the mix. For the Jupiter layer, I'll create an animator for fill color RGB. You can see that you actually get a couple of different choices in here if you wanted to modify an existing color. But I want to be able to fully override this with a little color control, which is what RGB will give me. That creates a new animator. I'll go ahead and rename that to color. And this one again doesn't need the range selector, so I'll just delete that. I'll eyedropper that peachy red color for this one. Let's keyframe that right at eight frames, move up to 2 seconds, and then grab that brand white. I'll go ahead and easy ease these, and let's see how that feels. Yeah. Now, I'm also planning to trim a little bit off the beginning. So as that second line is being revealed, I think we'll just be getting a little hint of that color before it lands on white. Let's press U to collapse this to just the keyframes. You'll see that a keyframed color control actually shows you those colors over time, which can be really helpful, or you can just twirl that closed if you don't need it taking up that space. For the color on this second line, I'm actually just going to reuse that animator I already built for opacity and just swap out the properties. Select that opacity on animator and Control or Command D to duplicate. I'll go ahead and name this new one color. Let's open this up, add property, fill color, RGB, and just select opacity and delete that. Yeah, so that's not the right red yet, but that's the right vibe. Let's eyedropper the correct brand red. And I think we could play this up by just offsetting those keyframes a little bit, maybe six frames. Remember that we can select these and nudge the keyframes themselves by holding Alt or option and then using the arrow keys. So one, two, three, four, five, six, Yeah, that feels good. 56. Refine the Title Animation: We've got the text animation taken care of. Now we need to fine tune the timing and do a little bit of compositing to get this finished up. Let's start off by tweaking the contrast on our clip. I'll grab a curves effect over here and just create a subtle S curve to make that pop. Okay. I would really like to mimic this lighting onto the text and add a few effects to help unify the look, and I think that the best way to deal with that will be to precompose my text layers. So let's select both of them. Come up to layer, precompose, or you can also press Control or Command plus Shift plus C. I'll just name that title Pre. And yes, let's go ahead and open that after I create. Okay. And over in my project panel, I'll just move that down into the pre folder. There are a couple different ways to add shading to these letters, but I think I'll get a lot of flexibility by using a shape layers. I'll just grab my rectangle tool and draw a box that will definitely cover both of these, even when they're fully expanded. I'll go ahead and set that to be a linear gradient. Click on the little color chip here and make sure that is set to a black to white gradient. Okay. I'll change back to my selection tool, and making sure that I have the shape group selected, you'll see I now have these two little handles that let me customize this gradient. I'll just click and drag these to get in the right ballpark. I obviously can't see the text right now. Let's rename this to shading and then use a blending mode to make it apply to both of the type layers underneath. I'll make sure we can see our blending modes and then set this layer to multiply. And right in between our blending modes and track mats, there's actually another little button here that's a carryover from Photoshop called Preserve Transparency. When you click this, it will actually look at the transparency of everything below this layer and use that for its own visibility. There we go. And even though we can't really see the layer as directly anymore, you can still select the name of that shape group and see those little gradient handles to make adjustments. Just a little bit of that shading on the edge I think is going to look really nice. Of course, because I precompose this, I don't have that clip as a reference in here. Let's check how that looks out in the main comp. Okay. We can always click back and forth to get that dialed in, and that is the flip side of precomposing. You'll find things that are harder or sometimes even impossible if you don't precompose like this, but it can make it trickier to see your full context. This is just something that you have to navigate as you go and make the decisions that are right for your project. I think this gradient looks pretty good. I just want to back that opacity off a little bit, maybe around 80%. One of Jupiter's key features is how massive it is, and I'd love to give a little nod to that in our title treatment. To do that, I'm going to add an effect called bulge, which will allow us to distort the text a little bit in a way that can be very subtle, but gives just a hint about our subject matter. When you first apply bulge, it only applies to a very small area. I'll use that bulge center to move this up just a little bit, and then I'll increase these radius settings until they cover the whole thing. And while this looks kind of interesting, it's pretty over the top, so let's dial that height back to maybe 0.2. Toggling this on and off, you can see that it actually does make a pretty big difference, but it's not so in your face as the default height setting was. It feels just a little bit like the text is actually wrapping around the planet, which I like. While we're doing effects, I'm noticing the shadows that the moons are casting, and I bet that we can mimic that a little bit on the text. So let's add a drop shadow. Set the distance to eight, bring our softness up quite a bit, maybe around 85, and let's bring up the opacity to about 65. Yeah, that feels good. Similar feel, but actually makes it feel like the text is closer to the planet than those moons are. However, I'm noticing that this smaller text isn't casting much of a shadow. I think there's just not that much there for the drop shadow to work with, but we can add an extra custom shadow to help beef that up a little bit. I'll create a black solid by pressing Control or Command Y. We'll go ahead and name this shadow and make sure the color is set to full black. Let's move that layer underneath the title and then add an elliptical mask. Twirl open those mask properties. Let's feather that way out and see how that looks, maybe around 130 or so. Now I can use my selection tool and grab these vertexes and just move these around until that shape feels right. Over to the Properties panel, and let's bring this opacity down to about 25% or so. Toggle this on and off. Yeah. You don't really even feel that it's there, but it adds some nice separation. Let's add a quick fade on. I'll come up to about 2:06. Keyframe back to home and down to zero. There we go. That feels pretty natural. And now that we've got this all set up, let's turn that music back on so that we can tie everything together. This first marker is that big orchestral hit, and I think having our text just dramatically appear there would feel really nice. So let's select both the title and the shadow, and I'm going to trim those layers so that they start right at that marker. If you hover over the very beginning of a layer like this, see how my cursor changes. You can just click and drag these to trim. And since this is a pre compositions, it does have a duration. So this area here is showing me that this layer exists, but it's just not visible right there. Or if you prefer, there's also a shortcut that you can use to do this. Remember that you can move layers by using the open bracket keys. But if you hold Alt or option and press the open bracket, it will trim the endpoint of any selected layers to that current frame. Okay, let's see if this feels as good as I imagine. Yeah, nice. There's also that big finish at the end, and I think that it would be nice and dramatic to just have the whole thing go black here. So let's jump up to that marker. And I actually want the black to hit right on that marker, so I'll move back one frame, then select all three of our visible layers, and then I can press all tour option and the close bracket to trim those out points. Yes, love it. We are so close. There's just one other little touch I'd like to add. Let's select our title precomp and make sure I can see my blending modes, set this one to overlay, which gives us this nice look where you can actually kind of see through it a little bit. That looks cool, but it's maybe a little more see through than I want. So let's make a duplicate of this layer with Controller Command D. I'll set this upper copy back to normal. Let's go ahead and disable the drop shadow on this one so we aren't getting double the shadow, and then I'll open up my opacity and bring this one down around 70% feels good. We're still getting some of that see through flavor, but also keeping everything nice and readable. Let's watch this final preview in its full massive Jupiter glory. You can actually maximize any single panel by just having your cursor over it and pressing the accent or Tilda key up in the top left of your keyboard. I'll make sure that this is set to fit so we can see it super big. Beautiful. I think we're done. 57. Class Project 06 - Animated Title: Alright, I hope you enjoyed learning about text animation, and now it's time to put that into practice with another class project. Your client's marketing team has asked for an animated intro to a short video that they have been working on. That should include the name of your destination and some kind of tag line to help excite the viewers. And we really want the text to be the star here. So make sure to include some engaging text animation. The composition size and frame rate can again be up to you. But since you're going to be using a video clip of some kind as the background, that may help determine that. But since the text is the star, think about that when you're laying things out, and if you want to crop in closer on your clip and change the aspect ratio, that's okay, too. So do make sure that you include a video clip as the background of your scene. Once again, we've included a few options for you, or you can go find your own. I know some destinations may be a little easier to find material than others. So if you want to just use a star background, for example, that is just fine. In your text, make sure to include your destination name and then some kind of secondary line with a subtitle or a short tag line or something like that. And we want you to animate that text to make the scene dynamic and interesting. That text is the hero, and it should be doing something cool. Ideally, one that kind of helps really unify the scene in a conceptual. If you're feeling a little intimidated by the text animation system, it's okay to use presets, make sure you customize it to make it your own. And I do want you to think about using some additional effects and compositing techniques like blending modes or extra shadows or anything like that, just to kind of make everything come together and feel like it belongs. If you want to use some music, that's great. Obviously, the track that I used got included in the project file that you've downloaded. But I've included a few links to other places that you can find good free options. It will just take a little work to go through and find one that works for you. If you do use music, make sure that you time things out so that it all makes sense together. I really recommend using markers and looking at those waveforms to kind of find those good moments in the music. But this assignment is not about music editing, so don't feel like you need to spend a bunch of time making a perfect music edit. Again, here's my example. Lots of fun there, and I'm looking forward to seeing your interpretation of this assignment. For deliverables, once again, you know how this goes, export your animation as an MP four, upload your video to a video hosting site and share that link with us in the class projects or assignment section. Don't link to Cloud storage sites and make sure that you share that export on social media. You're starting to build up a good collection of projects. So hopefully your online followers are getting excited to see the next one. As always, good luck and have fun with this one. 58. Motion is Meaning: We've been learning a lot of functionality, and I would like to take just a few minutes for us to step back and think about the why behind the buttons we're clicking on. So let me throw a couple of concepts at you. If you're creating a static design, right, all the elements are fixed in place, and you kind of have to negotiate the sizing and placement of those because everything is visible at once and it can't move around. So you have to use design concepts to help your viewer understand which things are the most important for them to look at. But your viewers can take a little bit longer to look at things, analyze and explore that themselves. When you're working in motion and in time, right, elements can move in and out, and you can change that layout over time to emphasize different elements at different times. This gives you the ability to direct a viewer's attention to different things at different moments. So the focus can change and it doesn't need to just be a static thing the whole time. You also start getting access to sort of other powers here, like the amount of time that something is on screen could help communicate to your viewer how important that thing is, in addition to the obvious visual cues, like how big it is or how bright it is. Often, like you saw in one of our previous lessons, you might be able to use audio to help communicate extra information or emotion, whether that's a voiceover or music. Then the thing that I'm going to be spending the rest of this video talking about is that movement itself actually is another form of communication. You can use motion to create a pace, timing. You can create tone, feel and emotion by the way that something moves, how fast or slow something moves, how rigid or smooth it is. These all communicate a tremendous amount to your viewer. And what this really boils down to is that motion is meaning. Of course, the way that things look is very important, but the way that they move can be just as important. If I show you these two circles and ask you to find the difference between them, I'm not going to wait very long because they're actually identical. But if I play this video right here, now it's quite easy to see what the difference is. Most people would say that one is heavier. But of course, these are just pixels on a screen, and they don't really have weight, but the way that I've moved these circles communicates that relationship. And it provides a lot of additional context, as well. Both of these circles are obviously rigid objects because they don't deform at all when they bounce off of that surface at the bottom. And yes, that shape at the bottom is now also a rigid surface instead of just a box of color. And this scene is taking place somewhere with semi realistic physics. So we would expect to see that carried through the rest of this animation. And just to get you thinking about some other concepts here, a pretty basic design principle is contrast. That helps people know where to look. An area with high contrast is going to tend to draw someone's attention. You probably didn't even notice this down here, right? Now, when we're talking about contrast, there's a lot of different things that that means, even just in static design. That could be a contrast in value, so light to dark, but that can also mean colors. Things can be contrasting in size, and it tells you which one is more important. Talking about text, you can have contrast in weight. And again, one of these things feels more important than the other. And of course, you can combine these things to really help emphasize what is the most important takeaway piece from a design. Now, when we're talking about contrast in motion, all of those visual ideas still apply. But now you also have to think about, well, if this thing moves, will I have appropriate contrast everywhere that it goes? If not, maybe you need to think about changing things up. But you can also think about contrast in the movement itself. Here, one of these planets is really drawing your attention. It's basically waving at you, right? But if you look at this example, they're both waving at you. And so you really don't have any cues as to which one is supposed to be more important. It's actually a little distracting, isn't it? You can actually also use these ideas to create tension where something might visually be giving you a cue that is less important, but the way it moves says the opposite. Ultimately, this is all about the context of what you're creating. If something's meant to be very serious in tone, you're probably not going to have things bouncing around all over the place. They're going to move more slowly and smoothly. But if you're creating something with a more playful feel, you can move those elements in a very different way. The next few videos will give you some more concepts and how to execute them. But as we go on, I want you to be thinking about why you're making the choices that you are. Which elements are you choosing to move and how are you choosing to move them? And what is that communicating to your viewer? 59. Add Anticipation & Overshoot: Anticipation and overshoot are two animation principles that can really help give your movement a lot more personality. Essentially, these are ways to give your movement a more organic feel versus being so mechanical and perfect. These three objects are just scaling up and scaling down, and now they're scaling up with a little bit of overshoot. That little bit of bounce really adds a lot of energy, right? Here's a position based example, just a straight movement with a little bit of overshoot, see how it just goes a little bit past its landing spot and then comes to rest. Anticipation is the opposite of that. It's like a little charge up right before the movement. Here we have both anticipation and overshoot, giving this a much more natural feel. And here's all three to compare them. In the real world, most objects do this to some degree. Animation, especially cartoons, tends to exaggerate this a lot. But if you think about the kinds of movements that you do all day, every one of them has a little bit of anticipation and overshoot, and adding those into your animations make them feel a lot more real and grounded. Let's hop over to after effects and take a look at how you can add this to your projects. So here's a simple layer just scaling up. Not very exciting. I'll select those and press F nine to Easy Es. A little bit better, but adding a little bit of overshoot to this movement can make a huge difference. I find with scale, it usually feels pretty good to go about two thirds of the way through the move. Let's select that last keyframe at 100%, and I'll just copy and paste that right here. So now that same move is going to happen, but actually quite a bit faster. And then, of course, these two keyframes are the same, so we're not seeing any movement there. But what if we take this keyframe and actually push that up a bit higher, maybe around 110. Now you get this nice energetic pop as the layer scales up, and that was pretty easy, right? We can turn that into anticipation just as easily. For scale, I think it would make sense to just add a little anticipation as that scales back down. Now, I could keyframe my way back through this 100%, move up a little bit, 110, and then back to zero. But check this out. If I select all three keyframes, I can come up to the edit menu and copy, and then you can actually paste those same keyframes, but in reverse. So now we're scaling from zero up to 110 and then down to 100. And then it sits there at 100 until it gets to this second keyframe where it scales back up to 110 and then down to zero. Let's take a look. See what a difference those two extra keyframes can make? Let's take a look at this on position. Here's another equally exciting example. Wow. Okay, it's moving left to right. Let's select those keyframes and easy ease those. Okay, feels a little better, right? Let's try adding a little overshoot again. Somewhere around two thirds, maybe a little closer to the end on this one. Let's select that keyframe and copy paste it right here, and then just take this layer a little bit further to the right. I could do this with my mouse or just using my arrows, a hold shift to make them nudge even further. So now I have my original keyframe. It moves across a little bit beyond its landing spot and then back into place. And once again, what a difference that makes, right? What if we do the same thing at the beginning to add a little bit of anticipation to this move? We'll come about the same distance, copy and paste this keyframe, and then nudge that over to the left. See how much more energetic that move feels when it charges up a little bit and then overshoots just a bit. Of course, we could take this even further by refining the speed of these movements, but we'll do that in just a minute. And again, these won't be appropriate for every project, but when they are, they make a huge difference. 60. Adjust a Motion Path: Another way to add more visual interest and more realism to your animations is by giving your movements a slight arc. In the real world, most things don't move in a perfectly straight line. They're affected by gravity and physics, and unless it's a machine, a perfectly straight line just doesn't really occur in nature. Creating this actually doesn't require any extra key frames. Let's hop into after effects and check this out. I've created some simple position keyframes on this layer. Once again, nothing too special. Let's jump back to the beginning here, and you can see both of these keyframes and the line in between them, which is called a motion path. By default, that's just going to be a straight line. But if I take my pen tool, I can click and drag on either of these squares, which are actually just vertexes on this motion path. So let's watch this animation now. And I created a totally different feel. There's now an arc as part of this animation, but you'll notice I didn't add any additional keyframes. I actually changed what's called the spatial interpolation between these two keyframes. Same two values, but I've changed how after effects is moving between them. This is actually only possible with position. I could also edit this second keyframe. And now, once again, I've created a very different feel just by editing that motion path itself. For a really complex move with several corners, of course, you're going to need multiple keyframes, but you might be really surprised what you can actually do just by editing motion paths. This is going to be a pretty extreme example, but if I pull both of these tangent handles way out, I can actually create a loop right in the middle. Now, does that look great? Not necessarily, but I just wanted to illustrate the point that you actually have a tremendous amount of flexibility here if you're willing to experiment. 61. Ease & Adjust Keyframes: Back at the beginning of the course, we learned that a keyframe is a value at a time, and once you create more than one value, After Effects will move between them. We just learned that at least when you're dealing with position, you can change the spatial interpolation, meaning how After Effects moves through space between those two values. But we also have the ability to change the temporal interpolation or how After Effects moves between those values in time. In normal speak, that means that we can change the speed of this movement. Before we get too far away from the concept of motion paths, I want to point out that when you're looking at this, every dot on this line is actually the position of this layer on a particular frame. If I move the keyframes closer together, fewer dots on the line because it takes fewer frames to travel that distance. I'll just undo that. Right now, every dot is evenly spaced because the layer is traveling a consistent distance every single frame. If I easy ease these keyframes, you'll see that the dots in the middle are a little further spaced and then there's clustering around the ends. If I customize both of these keyframes, watch what happens to the dots. First, I'll apply additional easing to the second. And then to the first. See how far apart the dots are in the middle now and how heavily clustered they are at the ends. This movement is going to start and end very slowly and have a very snappy movement in the middle. Let's take a look at what's happening here. When you create keyframes, they default to being what's called linear. They have the little diamond shape icons on the timeline. They move between values at a constant speed, and they stop in kind of an abrupt mechanical way. We know that we can easy ease those keyframes, which gives them that little hourglass shape, and that smooths out their landings a bit. But using something called the graph editor, you can actually customize that even more and drastically change the speed at which After Effects moves between the values that you've set. Here's all three of those side by side. These have exactly the same X values, so they're moving the same distance in the same amount of time, along with some graphs on the far right that depict that change through time. If a flat horizontal line is no change, looking at the linear movement here, we see that it's a constant movement, so that would be a straight line between those two values. Whereas the Easy Ease has a little bit of an S curve because it's slightly slowed at the beginning and the end of the movement. On the highly customized movement at the bottom, notice how the graph at the beginning and end is almost horizontal and then has a much steeper angle in the middle, indicating that it's moving much faster. If you were viewing the location of these layers at every frame, very similar to what we just saw with the motion path, you'd see something like this. With the linear example, every frame is a consistent distance from the previous one. With the Easy Ease, you'll see that there's a slight clustering at the ends, but it's fairly consistent across the middle. But with that heavily customized example, you'll see it's very clustered at the ends, and it's moving so fast in the middle that some of those frames don't even overlap. Once again, let's hop into After Effects and explore how to do this for yourself. Here we have two squares. Both of them have their rotation being animated from zero degrees to 90 degrees over the course of exactly 1 second. The red square on the left is using linear keyframes while the purple one on the right has had Easy Ease applied. Here's what that looks like. As you can see, they're pretty similar, but the purple one is a little bit smoother. Let's select the rotation property for the red layer and then open our graph editor by clicking on this little graph icon right here above the timeline. We're currently looking at the value graph, which is a depiction of the change of that value over time. So from the beginning of the compositions, there's no change, which means a horizontal line. As soon as we get to that first keyframe, this is a linear keyframe so it immediately starts moving at a consistent speed and changes from zero degrees up to 90 degrees at this second keyframe here. After which point, it has no additional values to move to, so it stays unchanged. Let's select the purple square and see what those look like. Very similar, but now there's a slight S curve to the change because these have been eased, and so they're changing from no movement smoothly into their movement. They'll hit their fastest point here in the middle and then slow back down as they come to a stop. But this graph editor isn't just for looking at this, you can actually edit things. If I click on either of the keyframes, you'll see now I have handles that I can manipulate. If I grab this handle, I can now freely edit the way that After Effects interprets this change of value over time. Dragging it far to the left like this creates a much more extreme ease. So in this case, this move will slow very gradually to a stop. If I were to apply similar easing at the beginning, now you can see that almost all of the change is happening in a very narrow strip in the center, while both the start and end points of this movement are going to be extremely close to zero for as long as they can. Here's what that looks like. And now you can see how vastly different that looks from the red square. But remember, these both have the same values. We can actually view both of them here, and you'll see the start and end points of these movements are the same. The only thing that's different is the way that After Effects moves between those values. You can also view this graph in terms of speed, if you'd prefer. Down here at the bottom, there's a little menu that allows you to change between the value or speed graph. Looking at the linear example and the speed of its change, from the beginning of the compositions, there's no change. And then as soon as we hit that first keyframe, that layer is now consistently changing at exactly 90 degrees per second, because it's going 0-90 over the course of 1 second. As soon as it hits that second keyframe, now it's not changing anymore, so the speed immediately drops back to zero. If we look at the speed of the eased, you can see it's very extreme. Let me select those keyframes and press F nine to set those back to the standard easy es, and this is a little more what we would expect. Again, no change, gradually speeding up until it finds its fastest point. Here halfway through the move and then slowing back down until the speed reaches zero. As before, you can select these points and modify the way After Effects moves in and out of these values. The further you drag one of these handles, the more eased it will be. Right now, since I've only eased the second keyframe, the first one remains slightly eased while the second one has a very gradual change. So the fastest part of this movement is now quite a bit earlier. And here's what that looks like. I could adjust the beginning, as well. Now, as before, we have an extremely fast movement in the middle and then very gradual in and out. Let's take a look at using this for position. Again, here I have two layers moving the same distance over the same amount of time with the top one being linear and the lower one being easy ease. It's a bit easier to see the difference between them with position. Let's stop this preview and take a look at the graph editor. You do need to have a property selected to view it in here. Here's what the linear version looks like. You can see the gradual change of the X value, that's the red line, while the Y value isn't changing at all, so it remains completely horizontal. Selecting the eased version as before, you'll see that there's a slight S curve to the X value, that red line, while the Y value again, remains unchanged. Because the X and Y value of position are linked together, you actually can't directly edit them in the value graph. However, you can change them in the speed graph. Let's take a look at what that looks like. Changing this to the speed graph, and I have the purple layer, the lower one selected right now. And as expected, this looks very similar to what we saw a minute ago. We have no movement happening and then slowly accelerating until we hit our fastest point and then slowing back down until we hit a stop. As before, we can edit these points. So if I drag the first one far to the right, again, we'll have a very snappy movement with the fastest part happening almost three quarters of the way through the move. Let's just undo that. And just for reference, here's the linear, which again is just a flat horizontal line at a particular speed. In this case, about 937 pixels per second. Because the X and Y values of position are unified as one property, in order to adjust them in the value graph, you need to separate the dimensions like we did earlier. If I right click on the word position and choose separate dimensions, now X and Y are treated as two separate properties. Switching back to the value graph, I can now freely edit either of these. Let's select just the position because the Y value actually isn't changing at all. This did get reset to linear when I separated the dimensions, so I'll press F nine to ease these values. And again, we get that subtle S curve. Let's select this first keyframe, and this time, I'm actually going to drag the handle upward. Now what I've created is no movement, extremely abrupt change that will accelerate very quickly and then very slowly coming to a stop. Completely different feel. If I want, I could actually drag the second keyframe to something very similar. I'll also adjust that first one down just a bit, but here now I have an extremely abrupt start. In the middle, it's almost going to stop moving and then an extremely abrupt ending. To smooth that out, I'll just adjust these holding shift to keep these handles perfectly horizontal. And now, once again, I've created a very smooth start and stop with a snappy movement in the middle. Mastering the graph editor does take some time and practice, but it mostly boils down to being willing to experiment, watch the results, and keep adjusting until you're happy with it. 62. Looping Promo Revisited: I've reopened my earlier looping promo project to try out some of these techniques. As a reminder, here's what the previous version looks like. Not bad at all, but definitely has some room for improvement, especially with these new techniques in mind. I'll start out by coming to my project panel and pressing Control or Command D to duplicate that existing compositions. I'll go ahead and rename that to looping promo refined and then make sure that I open that compositions. I'll go ahead and close the original one. We'll just hang on to that as a reference. I'm not planning to change anything about that looping texture, so I've locked that layer already, but I'll select the others and press you to reveal those keyframes. I think we have good opportunities here for adding some overshoot, some anticipation, modifying some motion paths, and making some tweaks in the Graph Editor. Let's start by focusing on the incoming animation, so I'll bring my CTI up here and press to trim off that work area so that we're just focusing on this section. I'll add a little bit of overshoot to each of these incoming words. I'll just go ten frames and copy paste that previous keyframe, up five more, copy paste that, up five more, copy paste that one. And then on each of these, I'll just give them one nudge while holding Shift. So this layer came in from the left, so I'll just nudge it to the right so that it overshoots a little bit. This layer comes in from the right, moving left, so I'll nudge it to the left. And this layers coming up from the bottom, so I'll give it one good nudge up. Let's see what that does for us. Yeah, adds a nice little bit of energy. I would bet that our planet could use a little bit of that, too. So we'll again move up ten frames, copy paste both of these keyframes. Use J to jump back to those earlier keyframes. Let's set our scale up just a bit to about 105 and bring our rotation just a little over zero. So in both cases, we're going a little bit past the value and then back down to our landing. Okay, not too bad at all. Okay, let's adjust these curves a little bit. I think that these values for our Jupiter icon will be a good place to start. I'll go ahead and select a few before I open the graph editor, and that way, they'll actually already be selected when I transition over there. Opening this up, you can see I'm currently looking at the value graph, and both of these line colors correspond with the properties right here. I do already have those second keyframes selected. You can see that these are full squares instead of the open squares. So I could drag on these tangent handles a little bit. I'm holding shift to keep these horizontal right now, and I could do both of these, if I like. You can select keyframes directly in here as well. If I wanted to pull these really hard, I could. I think I'm actually just going to back those off a little bit. And let's see what that feels like. I feel like that could be a bit snappier. So let's actually select both of these first keyframes and maybe I'll push these a little bit to the right to make this move just a little snappier. Yeah, I think that feels pretty good. Now, remember that I can't adjust position here in the value graph, but let's select the position property for all three of these layers, and that's kind of a lot to look at anyway. But if I change this over to the speed graph, it makes a little more sense. We can see the changes in all three of these layers. Some of them are moving more than others, so they're moving quite a bit faster. I do think it would be tricky to select these because they're offset in time. So this is when it makes a lot more sense to select your keyframes in the normal timeline view. I'll just select this keyframe, hold Shift, select this keyframe and still holding Shift, select that one right there, and now those will all be selected when I go over to the Graph Editor. Again, you can see those keyframes being highlighted right there, and I could just pull all of them a bit to the left, again, holding shift. Yeah, I don't think they needed a big adjustment. It just gave them a little bit more snap on their way in and helped them ease into their landings quite a bit more, too. You don't always need to go crazy with this. Often just a little adjustment makes a big difference. Okay, I feel pretty good about that. Let's close this up. I can actually just drag my work area over to the back half of our animation and maybe just bring this start point in a little bit so that we're focusing on the outgoing animation. Let's remind ourselves what that looks like. Okay, not too bad. I think our planet might be a good candidate for changing up the motion path just a little bit. On this animation, most of the things are moving on fairly straight lines, which is okay because it's text and it doesn't need to feel as organic. I think if we got too carried away with big curvy motion paths that actually might feel a little silly. But for this planet, I think it would be nice to have even just a little bit of an arc here. There are a few different options. We can actually change the motion path directly here in the viewer by dragging the other keyframe. I'll just undo that. Or as I showed earlier, I can select my pen tool and drag on either of these keyframes to create a tangent handle that allows me to adjust this. I think I'll create just a little bit of an arc there, press V to get back to my selection tool and actually drag that down just a touch, then maybe adjust that handle back up. As I keep saying, a lot of this is kind of experimenting, watching and adjusting. I like that. It's subtle, but it gives just a little bit of a different feel as opposed to the planet just moving straight horizontally. I think we could add a little bit of anticipation to these text moves. From those keyframes, let's maybe move back six frames, maybe eight. I can actually select all three of these and copy, paste those, and it will paste the appropriate values for each layer, press K to jump back up, and then again, I'll give each of these a little nudge to give them a bit of anticipation before that move. Let's see how that feels. Oops. I went the wrong way on Jupiter. Let's fix that and instead nudge that to the left. See, even pros make mistakes, too. That's not too bad. Let's maybe bring these keyframes over just a bit. And since I still have these selected, I'll open up my graph editor and just drag those out a bit. We'll see how that feels. I like that. It gives them a slower start and then they really build up momentum. Watching this, I'm noticing how much slower two is moving. So let's close this up and maybe grab the second keyframe of two and just bring that up a bit earlier. So it's moving a little bit closer to the same speed as the other layers. Though that makes me want to offset these just a little bit just as an experiment. So I will hold Alt or option and press my arrow key a few times. Select these. Mm. With all the anticipation, that feels a little jostly, so I'll just undo that. But it never hurts to try, right? With that in mind, I think it might make sense to bring these other keyframes back in line with their friends here. Maybe copy paste these, press K to jump up, give Saga to Star lines a little bit of a nudge, and maybe use the arrow keys without shift for our planet to give it a little bit of anticipation here. I'm going to press up and right, up and right, up and right, just to nudge it a little bit in that direction away from where it's about to move. Yeah, not too bad. We have a whole lot of position keyframes here. I'll again select those. Looking at this graph, I think it can actually deselect all my red text layers, so I'll hold Control and click on the position for each of those. But I still have Saget of Sar lines and my planet selected, and I'll just bring those over a bit. That should be pretty much in line with the others. Yeah. Alright, I think that feels pretty good. So I'll close this up, press home, B to expand my work area, and let's watch the whole thing. And just as a reminder, here's what the original looked like. Of course, this is a fairly simple example, and if I had done a slightly different layout or changed the direction that any of these were moving, it could have had a huge impact on the way that I ended up adjusting these. The biggest thing that I want you to take away from this lesson is to start developing your eye to see these different kinds of movement and be thinking about the way that different elements should move in different contexts. That will help guide you through the actual cliques that you need to do, and the biggest thing to remember there is that you really can't break anything. You can always undo. You can always create a duplicate of your work. You could even save a whole separate project. Please don't be afraid to get in here and experiment, get your hands a little dirty because the best way to learn this stuff is practice. 63. Class Project 07 - Refined Promo: Hey, class project time yet again, our creative director has asked if you can revisit that looping promo that you created earlier. They really like what you did, but they think you might be able to push it just a little bit further, and lucky you, you just learned how. So what we're asking you to do is reopen your earlier looping promo project that you already did. If you decide you want to update the design, that's okay, but you can absolutely use the one that you already made. I certainly recommend that you make a duplicate of your original composition so that you can always look at it as a reference or even start over if you really mess things up. Try to incorporate some customized easing, get in the graph editor, get a feel for it, modify some motion paths where it feels appropriate, try to add some overshoot, some anticipation, again, where it feels appropriate. I would really love for you to try to do at least one of each of these, if you can, but only if it feels appropriate for your project. Don't force it. And of course, sometimes the goal is just making it look nicer. But if you can, try to be thoughtful about what this refined motion says about those elements and your project as a whole. How does that represent your client or your destination? As a reminder, here's what my example looked like compared to the earlier versions. And, of course, for deliverables, we're asking you to export your animation as an MP four file, upload your exported video to a video hosting site like Vimeo, YouTube, Behance or similar, and, of course, share that link with us on your class projects or assignment section. Once again, don't submit from Cloud storage sites. And, of course, share this on social media. I think this one in particular would be a great one to maybe even post your original and your updated version. And you can talk about how much you've learned and the difference that this makes in your work. It's very easy to see all the work on social media and compare yourself to that, but I think a much better measure of your own progress is to look back at your earlier work and see how much you've improved, even just in our short time together. So, good luck. Have some fun with it. Once again, get your hands a little dirty, and I can't wait to see what you make. 64. Animate with the Puppet Tool: Earlier we saw this Illustrated arm example, and if you were looking to animate a character built like this, there are, of course, a few different approaches you can take. This particular piece of art has been properly prepared, so we have separated pieces and each one has an appropriate amount of overlap. For animation, we could think about this like a paper doll, where we connect each of the layers together using parenting, make sure their anchor points are in the right spot, and then create rotation keyframes to animate each of them. I'll undo that and let's quickly set that up. We would want the hand to be parented to the forearm and the forearm would be parented to the bicep. We'll want to make sure the anchor points are set properly, so I'll press Y to get the anchor point to select my bicep and then we'll move that anchor point up towards the shoulder. We'll select the forearm and move that probably to the interior of the elbow here, and then we'll select the hand and move that anchor point about where the wrist should be. Let's go back to the selection tool by pressing V. Then I'll select all my layers and press R to expose the rotation properties. And you could sit here and animate each of these rotations individually. Or if you're looking for a slightly more intuitive approach, there is a rotation tool that you can use to click and drag these up in the viewer. In the toolbar, let's find this little roundy arrow that's your rotation tool, which you can also get by pressing W for rotate, I guess. With this rotation tool, simply click and drag the layers in your viewer to rotate them. From here, you can simply make keyframes and animate this however you'd like. Of course, not every piece of art can be prepared this way, and sometimes you'll want a more organic feel that's a little less rigid. That's where the Puppet Tool comes in. So let's take a look at how that one works. The Puppet Tool allows you to create a distortion mesh on a layer and works very much like the Puppet or Puppet Warp tools you'll find in Illustrator and Photoshop. Of course, this being After Effects, we can animate these. To use the Puppet Tool, you'll come to the right side of your toolbar and find this little pushpin icon right here. You can click on that to create the standard position pins, or you can long click to see a list of other pin types, which I'll cover in the next few minutes. You can also press Control or Command P to select this tool without coming up to the toolbar. Once you have the tool selected, you simply click on your layer to create pins at the locations where you'd like them to be. Once the pins exist, you can click and drag on one of them to start distorting your layer. Let's do a quick animation. I'll press U to expose the keyframes, which are created when you make the pins at the frame your CTI was on when you created them. For this example, I'll just move forward a little bit in time, grab this middle one and bring it down, and then move up here. Like any other keyframes, I can copy paste that first one. I'll press N to trim off my work area and create a quick little loop. Easy enough, right? And even with this very basic example, hopefully you can already see some really cool possibilities. Let's jump back to home and delete those extra keyframes to take a closer look at what's happening. You may have noticed this looking just a little bit chunky up here at the top, where I've bent this the most. To understand and fix that, we'll need to take a look at the mesh. Up here in this contextual area of the toolbar, we currently have some additional puppet properties like this checkbox that allows you to see the mesh that's been created on the layer. Basically, this tool creates a whole bunch of triangles and then allows you to just stretch those around. Hence, the corners because it's actually the corners where those triangles meet. If you want to smooth this out, there's a density setting right here where you can turn this up to create more triangles and thus a smoother distortion. Or if you want this to look really chunky and primitive, you could turn this all the way down and create a really low fidelity distortion, which might be interesting for certain looks. I'll just reset that. We also have an expansion property which allows you to push the mesh further out. This is especially helpful if you ever find that a little piece gets left behind when you start moving your pins around. But sometimes expanding this a little bit in combination with the density can also help smooth things out. Looking down here in the timeline, we can see that each of these pins has its own position property. When I have more than one keyframe on any of these, we actually get a visible motion path. Although, unfortunately, these motion paths are not directly editable the way that standard ones are. There are ways to link them to other layers when you need that, but that's a little more advanced. Sometimes you'll find that these basic position pins just don't get the job done. Even after adjusting the density, sometimes they can be a little too pinchy or too noodly. When you need better control over the way this layer is being distorted, that's when we'll want to explore the other types of pins. We saw that we have other pin types available in that toolbar menu, but you can also change existing pins down in the timeline. Let's twirl this layer closed and then open it fully back up to see what we're working with. When you create puppet pins on a layer, it actually creates an effect called Puppet, which you'll see has a few options here. Inside that is something called mesh one with the density and expansion properties that we adjusted above, and inside that is a group called deform, which holds each of the pins that we've created. Each of those pins has a position property which is adjustable or animate. You'll see that each pin also has this little drop down menu, which you can use to alter the pin type after it's already been created. Let's say that I wanted to change the central pin from position to bend. That now removes the position property and gives me scale and rotation instead. So if I were to move one of the other pins at the end, that center one kind of comes along for the ride instead of being stuck in place like it would have before. But it's creating a different sort of bend in the middle now. You can change the scale and rotation down here. Adjusting rotation already gives us a pretty interesting effect, which is quite a bit different than what the position pins were doing. Or changing the scale creates kind of a pucker and bloat effect, which could be used for some fun cartoony distortion. One of my favorite ways to use this is by creating a subtle, slow up and down scale, which is a great way to make a character's torso look like it's breathing. Let's say that I'd like pin one to have those scale and rotation properties, but not lose position. That's when you want the advanced pin. You'll see that this has all three properties, and notice up in the viewer that these are also color coded, yellow for position, brown for bend, and green for advanced. You can control each of these directly in the viewer, too. Grab the pin to move around the position, click and drag on this little box to scale up or down, or when you hover in just the right spot, you'll get that little roundy arrow for rotation. And of course, all of these properties can be keyframed as much or as little as you like. Let's undo back to our start point. Sometimes you'll find that you need additional levels of control at specific places in your mesh. Let's say that this was a character's forearm and you didn't want it to bend so much in the middle like this because it's probably supposed to have bones, or you might just find a place that's pinching strangely, and you want to make some additional fidelity at that spot in the mesh. This is where starch pins come in. You can use that timeline drop down to set an existing pin to a starch pin, but I usually find that it works best to figure out the places where you need them and then create them at those spots. So I'll come back up to my tool bar, long click and select the Puppet Starch Pin tool. If you're doing this on something like a character's arm, it often makes sense to create that pin pretty close to your other existing pins, kind of just inside them. Notice that this is actually creating spots with a much denser mesh. And while these inner segments won't stay perfectly straight, it's really constraining all that bending into those specific areas that we chose. Nice, right? Okay, let's undo again, back to our start point. And I'm just going to quickly bend this thing into kind of a pretzel shape so that the ends overlap. You'll often run into something like this where maybe a character's hand ends up being behind the body, but you'd obviously like it to be in front. Up in the Puppet Tool menu in the toolbar, the bottom option is the overlap pin. This allows you to create specific overlap points and control what's on top at any specific spot in the mesh. This one can be a little confusing because you have to create these points on the original layout of the layer, not the distorted result that you can see. So if I want this end of the arrow to sit on top, I need to create this overlap pin over here where the original layer was. I'll create a pin right here, but often you may find that it doesn't actually change anything right away. But I can move this around and start finding spots where it kind of lights up areas of the mesh like this. That's me actually finding the intersections of those little triangles that make up the mesh, which is what this is looking for. I'll find a spot kind of right in the middle here, and you'll see that I am creating an overlap, but not really enough of one, right? Your inclination might be to start creating a whole bunch of these pins, but you actually don't need to do that. If you again, look up in the toolbar, or you can also do this down in the timeline by opening up the overlap properties, you'll have an extent property, which allows you to push this out further and occupy more and more of the mesh until it creates enough overlap to do what you need it to do. Now, if I wiggle this arrow end around, I could probably find a spot where that expansion wasn't enough to cover everything. So you'll kind of need to figure out how much of this you actually need compared to the movement you're doing with the other pins and get that dialed in accordingly. Okay, I'll undo all of that again one last time and go back to my selection tool. As I pointed out earlier, these properties are keyframe by default when you create them. You can, of course, change those default values or delete these keyframes if you don't want that particular pen to be animated. But all you have to do is move through time and make adjustments, and they'll create new keyframes for you. Of course, having a bunch of these pins on a single layer can be kind of a lot to keep track of, and trying to make organic looking animation can sometimes be a challenge. So they've given us another way to animate these pins. This only works on the position property of either position or advanced pins, but I'll press Control or Command on Mac while dragging this around, and it's actually going to record my movements. See that. Let's do it for the other side, too. And let's give a little bit of wobble in the middle here. Okay, let's deselect that layer and watch this back. Pretty wild, right? Look, does this still need some fine tuning? Absolutely. But for a first pass, I was able to actually get a pretty good look with only a few spots that need some individual attention, and they're all just keyframes, so I can still make any adjustments that I need. Let's quickly take a look at some of these techniques on a more realistic example. Here's that arm from before on a transparent background. I think we can probably do this with just position pins for this one, so I'll grab that position pin tool. Let's try three pins at the wrist, the elbow, and near the shoulder. Sometimes you may need to try out a couple places until you find the right spots. Now I can just drag this wrist pin around. You do want to make sure you're maintaining about the same distance from the other pin. If you get too close or too far, that's when it starts getting either pinchy or too stretchy. But I think this looks pretty good. It's maybe just a little bit squishy in the bicep here. So I could try adding a couple starch pins. And then adjust that wrist pin again. Maybe not a huge difference on this example, but I think it firmed things up a little bit. And honestly, this is feeling pretty good. So let's try animating this. I'll hold Control or Command on Mac and do a simple wave here. And let's watch that back. You know, not bad. Definitely some spots I would want to smooth out, but for a first pass, I'll take it. And since this is an effect contained within the layer itself, I can still animate the layer, the traditional way, too. Though, I'll point out that you probably want to do your puppet work before you do this part just because it gets a little confusing. So I'll press Y to get my anchor point tool and move that over here by the shoulder where it would normally connect to the body. Press W to get my rotation tool, and I'll just rough in a couple of quick keyframes here. Easy Ease, those, and preview. You know, not bad. One final note about Puppet Tool is when you are finding or creating art, if you're planning to use these techniques, you need to think about how it works. So I have this character here that I downloaded from a stock site, and generally, you would probably put, say, a pin on the head, on the neck, middle of the torso, shoulders, elbows, wrists, maybe one at the waist or hips, maybe one here at the top of each thigh, the knees, and the feet. This won't be the solution to every character, but usually a good place to start. However, there's going to be a problem here. This hand works pretty well, but look what happens if I grab this elbow. And the other hand doesn't have any usability whatsoever. So this is a case where even with Puppet Tool, I would still need to spend some time properly preparing the art so that I can move certain pieces without messing with others. Here's a slightly more polished example on a full body character. As you can see, by using a combination of techniques like this, you can find a pretty nice balance of an organic feel and keeping the amount of control that you want. Puppet Tool is obviously great for character animations as long as your art allows for it, but don't forget that you can also use this as a way to distort images or videos, add a rubbery feel to a text layer as it moves in, or anything else that you can imagine. As always, don't be afraid to get in here and explore. H 65. Class Project 08 - Puppet Animation: It's that time again, where I make you do stuff, almost like I'm a puppet master or something. But these are just class projects, and you love to do them. So I don't have to make you do anything, right? Okay, so spacewalks. They're a great way to pass the time on the long trip to the destination. So we would love for you to please create a short animation to showcase how much fun that can be. In terms of requirements, this one's going to be pretty wide open, composition size and frame rate. Those are going to be up to you. And the duration, that's really up to you, too, but I'd say probably around 5 seconds or so. We're looking for a short animation featuring a character. We've included this little astronaut right here, but you can, of course, find or create your own, and that character should be animated primarily using the Puppet Tool. Now, exactly what that means may depend quite a bit on what your art is. Maybe you found a realistic photo or maybe you drew a picture of an alien with a bunch of tentacles. Those are going to be animated very differently and probably take advantage of different features within the Puppet Tool. So don't be afraid to explore, try things, and feel free to reference that lesson if you need a refresher on any of the specifics. Your animation should use some kind of image or video as a background. We've provided you a space background, or you can, of course, pull from an earlier lesson as well. We've got plenty of options there, or once again, you can find your own elements or create. We would also like for you to find a creative way to incorporate some branding elements or your destination or all of it, of course. As a reminder, here's what I created, a little astronaut hello. And for deliverables, you've all got this down, but make sure you export your animation as an MP four using that preset we saw earlier. Upload your exported video to a video hosting site and then share that link with us on this website. As always, don't use any Cloud storage links. Those just don't work. And, of course, share this thing on social media. Character Animation is always really fun. People love to see it, especially if it's a character that you created yourself or you found some interesting piece of art to bring to life. It's great to share out what you're doing, keep other people posted on your progress, and feel free to ask people what they think. That feedback really helps you grow. So, have a great time with this one. I think this will be a really fun project, and I can't wait to see what you make. 66. What is Compositing?: So far, we've mostly been focusing on the motion graphic side of After Effects, but there's a whole other side that we've really only hinted at so far, compositing. I've used that term a couple times before, but let's take a minute and talk about what that actually means in this context. Compositing refers to combining multiple elements to make it look like they belong together in the same space, usually as a way to create something that didn't or maybe can't exist in real life. If the goal is to create something that looks realistic, if it's done well, viewers might not even realize that anything was done at all. Of course, you can also intentionally exaggerate these elements to go for a more surreal or fantastical feel. Movies and TV shows have, of course, been doing this for decades, placing characters in environments that the actors weren't actually in. It might be more affordable or more logistically convenient, and it's how Hollywood puts your favorite actors on other planets, gives them superpowers and creates exciting scenes that would be difficult or impossible to shoot practically. Making a believable composite with stills already takes some expertise, but doing it with moving video adds a whole extra level of complexity. These will, of course, vary depending on what you're trying to do. But generally speaking, we've got three main phases to think about extracting or cutting out the subject. We've already practiced some techniques using masking, track mats, and blending modes, and those all work well for still elements or video files that are specifically made to be used this way. But if you're trying to cut out a moving object in a video clip, we might need to look at some new techniques. Tracking will often be required when a subject is moving within a shot or when the camera is moving or both. Being able to extract that positional data allows us to create a believable composite without all the elements sliding around in weird ways. Finally, we combine or integrate these elements using compositing techniques. Blending modes, color correction, and effects will often be an important component of making everything look believable. Being successful with these techniques isn't just about after efect work, though. Proper planning and shooting techniques are often a huge component, and that's mostly beyond the scope of this course. But I will give you a couple tips to help you find clips that will work, or if you're involved in a shoot that's using these techniques to hopefully help you catch these potential issues before they get into post production, because that's when it becomes your problem. 67. Add Text Behind a Video Element: Isolating one element in a video allows you to explore new creative options like adding graphics without obstructing your subject or perhaps putting your subject into a completely different scene. There are different techniques you can use to accomplish this, and we'll start by cutting the thing out like we might do in Photoshop. But of course, this is video. So that means cutting the thing out over time. Often hear this technique referred to as rotoscoping, and until pretty recently, it meant totally manual frame by frame cutout work, which, yes, is just as time consuming and tedious as it sounds. There are times you'll still need to do this for cleanup, but fortunately, recent advances in technology have taken this kind of video cutout from a painstaking time suck to sometimes just a single click. These automated cutout tools have become fairly common, and you'll find them in video editing apps like Premiere, and those are okay for many tasks, but when you need the ability to really refine this cutout, that's a job for after effects. I do want to point out that the clip I'm using for my demo is available on Adobe stock, but is not free at the time of this recording. I've provided you with some other options for the next class project, but I didn't think they worked as well for a teaching example. You can download watermarked previews for free, but those are not really suitable for this kind of work because they're much lower resolution and they don't really give the tools enough information to work with. You can see by the filename that I'm just using the HD version of this clip. There is a four K one available, and I just want to point that out because if you have the ability to have a higher resolution clip, that means more pixels, which means more information, which means you'll get a better cutout. So as long as your machine can handle it, you always want to use the higher res version of the clip if you can. I'm using this one just to move a little faster because it's just a demo, and I don't need this to be perfect. You can see I've already put this in a composition, but I want to point out that I used this clip to create that new composition just by dragging it down here or pressing the button that usually lives in the middle of the screen. By clicking on this composition, you can see that it does have the same information here, the same frame size, the same frame rate. And that's important because the tools we're about to show require that your clip be in a composition with the exact same settings. You could always then place this composition into another one with different settings. That's fine. But in order for this to work, it needs to be in the right container. Looking down at the timeline, you can see that I've already trimmed this clip and the work area to a specific chunk of my clip. This is all that I feel like I need for what I'm doing. And there's no reason to waste the time cutting out the whole thing if you don't need it. So I'll go ahead and click on Network Area and choose Trim Comp to Work area so that we're only working with that segment. Now, to actually cut this out, I actually need to double click on this clip, and it's going to open it in what's called the layer viewer up here. Most of you should have this open up next to your composition viewer in your workspace, but I just want to point this out in case it doesn't. This may open up directly on top of your composition viewer. And if that's the case, you just need to make sure that you pay attention to which one that you're in. Notice that the layer viewer has some of this extra content down at the bottom, that's going to be your giveaway. And if you're working with other layers in your composition, you won't see those up here in the layer viewer because as the name implies, it's only concerned with this one layer. I'll go ahead and put this back over here just to be clear about which one is which though, but I will adjust this so that we can focus on the one that we're actually working in. The tools we're going to be using all live right up here in the toolbar. As with many of these, a long click will open up all of the options that exist here. We're going to start at the top and work our way down, so I'll choose Object Mat. And this one's pretty easy. All I need to do is roll over my clip, and it starts looking for objects that it thinks are what I want to cut out. All I need to do is click on that and you'll see it makes a pink outline around that shape. That means After effects is looking at this object, and it's going to cut that out for me. Part of the reason I chose this clip is because it creates an opportunity for us to use the other tools. You'll see this actually did a really good job finding the person, but it left out a little bit of his backpack. It just got confused and thought maybe that was part of the background. Now, if I move forward, this is actually going to do a really nice job of continuing to track this object, this person, through time. But before I do that, I want to make sure I pick up these other pixels here so that Aftereffects knows the entire thing that I'm looking for. And that's going to bring me back up to the tool bar, Long press again and choose Quick Selection Tool. If you've been using after effects in older versions, the Quick Selection tool is what was previously known as Roto Brush. So I'll choose that, and I'll come back down to my viewer, and I can just kind of paint over that shape. Now you'll notice I don't need to be precise about the edge. I just kind of need to say, Hey, look at this thing. As soon as I release my mouse, you'll see that after effects found the rest of that shape, and now we're good to go. Down here at the bottom, you'll see I have this little section that's going to show me what's called propagation as after effects processes each frame. Now, I could just press Space Bar or I could use page up page down to move forward and backwards, or you can also just drag your cursor. After effect is going to take a second to think about this, and you'll see it's actually pretty fast, and I could just drag it through the entire clip, and this one's going to work pretty fast. That's part of the reason I chose HD for this clip so that you wouldn't have to wait. Let's take a minute and review and see what we've got. Now, we're seeing this pink outline, and then over on the left, we're actually seeing the end result of this. So you can see how good that cutout looks either by itself or if we had other layers below it, you would see it in that context. And it looks like this did a pretty good job. Now, again, one of the reasons I chose this clip is because it has just a few frames that are going to create some challenges for it so that we can look at the other tools. Let's zoom in just a little bit, and I'm going to go through this frame by frame to look for these opportunities. Now, you may not always need to do this depending on what you're doing with your clip. But sometimes you'll find spots like especially a spot like this where you may have an opening that gets created. It's possible that there will be one frame where you have to decide whether you want that tiny area to be cut out or not. So I'm just going to move through this. Honestly, these straps are really the only thing that caused too much of an issue with this clip. And so I want to look at those and see if maybe we need to do some additional work here. We could zoom in and try using the same quick selection tool. If I hold Alt or option, the brush turns red, and now I can use it to paint away sections. Let's just click in here and see what happens. Pretty good job. Up here, I need to do a little more work, as well, but this area is smaller than my brush. So I can come up to window brushes and then there's a brush panel that I can use to change the size of my brush. Let's go down to a smaller one and see if I can just kind of get this shape in here and do a little bit better job. Now, right now, I am telling after effects, this is a shape I want you to follow. And so as I move forward through time, it's going to do its best to follow that shape and make sure that it does the cutout as well as it can. You may find some other places where you need to do a fix that only applies to one frame. Like, I see this spot right here on the glove where it's picking up a little bit of the background. I just got a little bit confused, and it's not doing that on other frames, so I really only need it for the one. Quick Selection tool would probably work fine here, but there's another tool that's specifically made for these kinds of one frame cleanups. Let's come back up to the toolbar and find the selection brush. The selection brush works the same way, but it only works on one frame. So this gives you the opportunity to either add by just clicking and dragging or again, hold Alt or option, and you can just paint away a specific place. Now, this one is only looking at what my brush stroke did. So if I want to get rid of this other chunk, I either need to use a larger brush or just go over that section again. The rest of this is just going through frame by frame and seeing if there's anything else that I want to clean up. So I'll just do that quickly so that you don't need to wait. Here's a frame that you can see needs quite a bit of individual work, and I just wanted to point this out because sometimes it might actually be easier to cut away a little bit more than you need and then paint that edge right back in like this. I think this feels pretty good. And again, remember that this is really up to you about how precise you need to be depending on what you're actually doing with this element. Sometimes you can be pretty loose with it, sometimes you need to be extremely precise. So it's just a question of how long you want to spend on this. When you're done, there's a magic button that tells after effects to stop thinking about this thing, and that's right down here at the bottom called freeze. If I don't click this, Aftereffects thinks that I still want it to be thinking about what to cut out. And so it's going to continue processing and make everything really slow. But when I click this freeze button, after effects will take a second and think through everything I just did and then freeze all of that information, so it doesn't need to process it anymore. You'll notice there's a little flag down here that indicates that this is frozen and you cannot edit this right now. If you feel like you need to come back and make changes, you click the freeze button again to unfreeze, and then you can make any adjustments. I'm pretty happy with this, so let's pull this back over and look at our actual composition. You'll see it did a pretty good job of cutting this out, even with a few of those strappy spin areas that were just a little bit tougher. And over here on the left side, you have some options for object mat. This actually exists as an effect on the layer, and you'll see that you have additional options over here so that you can refine those edges to make everything look correct. For this example, I feel like I probably won't need to adjust these, but we're going to get some of the other elements of our shot in place before we even worry about that. Our astronaut friend doesn't really have anything that requires the refine edge tool, but this young lady is kind of the perfect case. This hair would be basically impossible to cut out with anything else. I'll come back up to the toolbar and choose the refine edge tool. And I want to make sure I get a nice, decent sized brush here. Let's go with this one. The way this works is you use this brush around the edges that you want it to be looking at with more detail. And I will tell you that this works best if you use multiple strokes to go around this whole surface instead of just one big. So I'm going to paint this whole area around her edges, and you'll see that I'm trying to make sure I get all those little frizzy bits so that After Effects has all this information to be able to figure out what it needs to keep and what it needs to get rid of. Once you have this painted in, you'll just propagate this forward or backward, just like the other tools, it's just going to be slower because obviously there's a lot more information that it needs to think through here. Back with our astronaut, you can see I've added some text, and I'm going to go ahead and take that and drag it below our astronaut. Let's rename this layer to astronaut cutout. And then I'm going to create a duplicate of this layer by pressing Controller Command D. Rename this second version to background or I like plate. I'll press E to reveal that object matt effect and just delete that from the plate. We'll put that down on the bottom. And now we have our cutout version of the clip, some graphics that go in between, and then the original version of the clip. Easy Ps. Now that we have this in place, this would be the time to really take a good look at your cutout and see if you want to do anything with these edges. If so, just come up to effect controls, and you could change the feather, the contrast, mess with the edge. If your edges appear to be dancing around a lot, that's called chatter, and that's where you would use this setting and turn it up a little bit by bit. The more of this you add, the slower things are going to be. Since this is just kind of a quick, silly social media example, I'm not going to worry too much about having super perfect edges. I think this works well as is. I did add a little bit of animation to our text, so let's just turn that on and see what this looks like. Alright, feeling good. A 68. Class Project 09 - Cutout Callout: It's your favorite time class project time. So we're looking for a short social promo incorporating some graphics behind the hero element of your clip, which means you're going to have to use those cutout tools that we just looked at. So the composition size and frame rate are going to be dictated by your chosen video clip. Remember that your clip has to be in a composition with the same frame size and frame rate for those object mat tools to work. While the clip that I used for the demo was unfortunately not available for free, I am providing you links to a handful of other options here, and of course, you can find your own clip anywhere on the Internet or shoot something yourself. One thing to look out for is that the more contrast your element has from the background, the better these tools are going to do. So you're going to cut out that hero element from your video or multiple elements if you'd like, and then use that cutout to allow you to place some kind of graphics. It can be text, it can be something else in between that and an unaffected copy of the clip on the bottom, just like you saw me do in my demo. Of course, you're free to get creative with this, and if you want to add some other coloring or some kind of other visual effect to your overall piece, that is fine, too. You may want to look at doing that on an adjustment layer at the top, just so that it affects everything consistently. When it comes to your deliverable, as always, you're looking to export this as an MP four video file using that preset that you saw at the beginning of the course and then upload this to a video hosting site so that you can share the link in the class projects or assignment section of this website. As always, don't submit any links to Cloud storage. And of course, this piece is already intended to be a short social promo, so share it out on social media, add a fun caption and see what kind of fun interactions you can have. We're really just looking for you to explore what these tools make possible and ideally have some fun with it, too. Good luck, and we'll check out some other techniques in the next set of lessons. 69. Remove a Green Screen: Filmmakers have long relied on other techniques with more predictable results, with color keying being the main one. Blue screen and then green screen have been used for decades in film, television, and video production to place actors into new environments and to add elements that didn't or couldn't exist at the time of shooting. When lit properly, post production can actually be pretty easy, while this course is not about green screen lighting, I will take a quick minute to point out a few things to avoid when you're looking for stock clips or if you're shooting this yourself. This technique is entirely based on isolating a specific color, typically a shade of green that's intentionally far away from human skin tones. So that green needs to be as uniform as possible. This means consistent even lighting that's separate from the lighting of the main subject. Uneven lighting and wrinkly backgrounds create a huge range of colors, which will be very hard to isolate and remove later. And having your subject too close to the background creates dark shadows, which again, means too many shades of green. Be careful, though, because many stock clips have already been processed to make this green artificially consistent, and then the clip is compressed for smaller file size. This means it might be easy to get rid of the green, but the clip has already been processed so you don't have any control, and the compression means it will be difficult or impossible to get clean edges around the subject. In general, the more color information you can retain, the better. So download the best file format you can. And if you're recording something yourself, you want to stay away from compressed formats. And, of course, green screen only works if your subject is actually in front of it. It's okay to see the edges of a green screen in a shot. You can always mask off that part of the frame. But this woman's hand and phone fall completely outside the green, which means the only way to isolate those will be rotoscoping. Hopefully this guidance will help you choose clips that won't be a total nightmare to work with. Now, let's look at the techniques needed to actually remove this green screen and After Effects. We'll then use effects and composite in additional elements to create a cohesive scene. Here's the clip that I'll be working with. It does have a few non ideal aspects and unfortunately is not available for free, but it was the best one that I could find that was both on theme and good for a teaching demo. I've already started a project, imported my clip, and put that into a compositions. These don't necessarily need to match, unlike with rotoscoping. I've also already isolated a specific chunk of this clip that I think is all that I need, and so I can go ahead and right click and choose Trim Comp to work area. Before I apply any effects, I'm curious about how consistent the screen is because it looks awfully similar. I'll come up to Window and choose info, which opens up the info panel. And among other things, that shows you the exact color that's underneath your cursor. I will notice that this is not changing at all. Sometimes that red value is moving just a little bit. But this tells me this clip was probably already processed and had a single flat green color replaced behind that. It's a little too perfect to be real. So while that makes getting rid of the green color very easy, I may have to do a little bit of work to get edges that I'm actually happy with. Looking down at my Effects and Presets panel, there's an entire category for keying, so I'll just open that up. And you'll see there are a variety of options. Some of them are very simple where you just choose a color and maybe get a slider or two. The most full featured one is called key Light, and it has quite a few options. I'm actually going to use a preset that applies Kelte as well as a few other effects to help dial things in. I'll just type in Key Lite and grab this preset right here, which is Kelte plus key cleaner plus advanced spill suppressor and apply that to my clip. You'll see that this actually applies three effects, but nothing happens immediately because we haven't chosen the color yet to tell After Effects which one to get rid of. Because this is so consistent, all we really need to do is find this little eyedropper right here, click on that and then choose the green color. You would generally want to choose something as close as possible to your subject, but since I found that this is already all the same color, I can click anywhere. As soon as I click, you'll see that that green background disappears. And if I toggle my transparency switch, that all becomes transparent. It is often helpful to have a good contrasting color in your background so that you can really see what you're doing. So you can press Control or Command K and choose this background color. And if you wanted to set this to something different that would help everything be more visible, that's always up to you. I'm going to leave mine on this gray because we'll be putting in a different background soon enough. I'm noticing that a lot of things have a little bit of a green outline around them, and that's a byproduct of it being already processed. I do think that the bottom effect in this list will probably help get rid of that for the most part. So let's try that. It's called spill suppressor. Often when doing keying, you'll see that you do get spill on other surfaces, especially lighter colored ones. If your subject is wearing a white shirt, for example, it may get a little bit of green just as bounce color from that physical surface. So I'll enable this, and that actually does a pretty good job in this case. One of the most important things about keying is that you want to be watching the clip in motion and over the background that you're actually using because you can dial these effects in, and you may end up going too far or not far enough until you really have that context. So I'm going to adjust a few settings, but we may revisit them after we bring in the background. Back up here in Key lite, the place that you're going to do most of your work is under this screen mat section. And for the moment, I'm going to turn off these other two effects so that we can just focus on what this effect is actually doing. You'll notice that you have a variety of views that you can choose from, and I really like looking at this set to screen mat so that you can actually see the mat that you're creating with this. This particular clip doesn't need a lot of adjustments because, again, it was already processed. But you'll often need to do a little bit of adjustment to the clip black and clip white just to kind of balance things out. For context, here's what this looks like on one of those other clips you saw a minute ago. I'll set this to screen Mat, and you can see now that this area is not perfectly white and this area is not perfectly black. So with a little bit of adjustment, we can dial those in and help make sure that we're getting a clean separation. Of course, you don't want to work exclusively in this view because it's very easy to go too far. So you might want to do a little bit of work here and then set this back to either final or intermediate depending on what you're doing. And see how this looks with your background in place and then make further adjustments as needed. In either case, you really want to pay the most attention to your subject and the area immediately around them, because all of this information out here can just be cut away with masks anyway. For this clip, I'm going to go ahead and set this back to intermediate result and zoom in a bit so that we can get a good look at what's happening here. And I'll turn these two back on. I am noticing that I have just a bit of an edge around my figure, and I think I'll need to bring that in just a little bit. Let's see what happens if we set the screen shrink and grow to minus two and the softness to two. That helps break up the edge a little bit around my astronaut and crucially here on the bottom. It's also not unusual that you might find different parts of a shot needing slightly different keying settings, and so you may need to make multiple copies of your clip or use masks to help isolate those different parts and use different instances of your keying effect to help dial those in. Just to point out a few of the issues I found with this clip, aside from it already being processed, I feel like the glass once existed on this helmet but already got keyed away. So that's a good example of something that there's just really no way to fix at this point. But when we add other elements later, you won't see that too much anyway. There are a few spots where you can actually see the edges of this sand box that they've set up here, and that doesn't look great. And crucially, up here, they have the astronaut walking on these boxes that could become rocks or something later, but then he steps right in front of this one. And obviously, there's no way to key that out. So if I wanted to make this look like a rock but have his foot be in front of it, once again, we would have to rotoscope this. I'm going to be putting some rocks in front of his foot so that we won't see this issue. From here, I think we really need to get our background in place so that we can see what this looks like in context and know if we need to make any additional adjustments to these keying settings. 70. Composite Background & Foreground Elements: Now it's time to add a background and some foreground elements to start making this into more of an actual scene. I've imported some rocks that will sit in the foreground and a background plate that looks like this planet scape. Let's go ahead and bring that into my composition as the bottom layer and rename it background. And let's move that up just a bit until it looks like it's in about the right spot. I think something like that will probably work. We'll need to do a little bit of color correction to even this out. And then these rocks will go in the foreground. Let's go ahead and bring that in. Boy, those are big. Let's scale that down. Probably something like this. You can see these are going to need a lot of color work, but we'll use this side to kind of cover up those boxes and probably cut this in half and bring this one maybe about like that. I'll go ahead and rename these rocks and just turn those off for a minute. We obviously need to do some color matching. But honestly, looking through my scene, I think we could probably cut off the right side with the frame because, as I recall, our astronaut never actually makes it over there. He's walking through, takes a minute to look off at this beautiful other worldly scenery and then starts to move again, but he doesn't get that far. So this part of the frame that is probably going to be one of the harder things to match, we can just get rid of. So let's select that layer, grab the Pen tool, and I'll zoom out just a bit. Just create a couple of points, maybe something kind of like this. And I'm planning to feather this quite a bit. So I'm going to take this way off the left edge so that I don't accidentally lose part of the frame over here. Something like that. Let's open up that mask. Unlink my feathering and just turn the X feather up to maybe about a little under 300. Yeah, I think that looks pretty nice. I'll switch back to my selection tool and maybe just bring this in until I feel like I'm getting a good amount but not losing any of my astronaut. You can see if I go too far, he'll start fading away as well because of that feathering. So you just need to kind of look for the right spot where you're keeping him, but getting rid of what you don't want. There are a few other spots around the edge of this set that I don't particularly care for, and I think we may need to come back in and do some masking there. Let's put in some of these other elements and see what we cover. I also think that we'll probably want to adjust those keying settings a bit. Now that we have this, you can see that there's a pretty clear line around this key, both around the astronaut and the edges of the set. And even before I do my color correction, let's go ahead and see if we can fix that. I'll come back to the Effect Controls panel. And I can try turning down this key cleaner. This usually works to help clean up your edge, but on a clip like this that already has been processed, sometimes it does more harm than good. I'll try turning this edge radius down to about five and maybe turning the strength down to 50. That's okay. You can see it softened up some areas, but we still have a bit of an outline. I'm going to see what happens if I shut this off and set this view to final result instead. This is what we'd be using if we were just using ke lite without the other effects added. Honestly, I think this looks better. You can see that we did lose a little bit more of the edge here. It overall got softer, but I think in this case, that's probably going to be the better play. Honestly, this may be a case where certain settings might work better for the edge of the set, and then other settings might help us get a little bit better edge around our astronaut. But I think for this example, this is probably right. We can come back and adjust these more when we get our other color correction and overlays in place, but we'll keep this in mind as we keep working. If we still had this glass and it hadn't already disappeared before the clip even came into my hands, I would want to be very careful to make sure that we're not losing that as part of this, and that would especially be something that may need its own group of keying settings. But for now, I'm happy enough with this. Let's do some color correction and see if we can unify these two pieces of the scene. Let's set this back to 100 and I'll come over to my effects and presets and look for curves, which we're going to apply to both of our clips. Let's add that to our green screen clip, and we can go ahead and twirl these other effects closed for now. I think bringing down the shadows a little bit would help and maybe boosting this back up. So we'll have a subtle S curve that's already making the red pop quite a bit, which I like. And if we want, we could even change this to the red channel and maybe give that a little bit of a boost. Let's see if we can replicate those settings on the other clip. The settings will probably need to be a little bit different to make them look consistent. But I think a good place to start would be copying this effect and then pasting it onto that background clip. Pretty close. I think we just need to do a little bit of adjustment. Let's come back to RGB and see if we can match this look. Maybe bring those darks up a little bit. Let's see what happens in our reds here. I'm going to bring this over a bit, bringing our whites into the red space a little bit more and then just pushing all the reds. Just a little bit. Often on something like this, it's all a little bit of a negotiation and sometimes a little bit goes a long way to making everything look unified. Let's watch this in motion once. I think we're on the right track. This area over here is still pretty clearly two different things, but we'll see what happens when we get our other elements in place. Let's close this up and turn on our rocks. I'll start with the larger one on the right, and I know I'm going to be using at least two layers of these. So let's go ahead and rename this with a one and duplicate that and shut off number two. So for ox one here, let's figure out a placement. I'm planning to probably cut this off right here. So let's figure out a placement that obscures those other boxes and helps create a little bit of depth. I'll zoom in. And I'm planning to use my Pen tool to mask around the bottom of this and just help everything look more unified. So I'll press G to get my pen tool and just zoom way in, and I'm going to do my best to trace along this line here. I'm going to click and drag, which will start giving me a curve to work with. I'm going to be using a lot of curves in this one and probably breaking some of them into corners, as well as we get in all these little nooks and crannies. So I'll start right here and just drag come around here and drag, and I want to make a corner here. So I will hold Alter option and then bring this down to kind of break that and make a corner. Come over here and drag again, maybe bring this back up just a bit. I'm just going to keep working my way through here. I'll break that one. I don't need to get absolutely every little detail. This is kind of just a negotiation to get as much detail as you like and decide what little details are important to you. You could even cut part of this off if you don't like it. And this is definitely something that you will get a feel for with more experience, kind of knowing how far you can go with each little curve, where you need to put corners, where you need another vertex. And again, I can always come back in here and edit one of these points later if I feel like it's not in quite the right spot. As I'm working, I'm occasionally holding spacebar to move my whole view to just keep adjusting it to the place that I need to be looking. And we're almost here to that other rock that I'm planning to end at. So let's just get a few more points around the corner here and make ourselves a nice edge. Let's zoom out a little bit so I can see what I'm doing. Looks like this comes around here. So kind of right in here, and then we'll have a corner almost straight up, bring that around. And now that I'm back off of the edge, I can just be very loose with this. I just need to make sure I get the whole shape and reconnect. Boom, there we go. I'll press M to open up my mask properties, or I could press MM to open all of them, because, of course, the feathering is something that I need. I'm going to try starting kind of lower on this, maybe about five. Makes it a little hard to see what you're doing when you have this selected. So if you want, you can click this button right here to toggle the visibility of your masks so that you can see that edge more clearly without that mask actually being in your way. Let's try bringing this up to more like ten and sometimes you can do a bigger feather and then play a little bit with the expansion, and it actually works better to have a little more feather and then actually cheat that edge back in to kind of soften that up so you don't end up with overage like this. I think something like that is probably going to feel pretty good. And as I'm looking at this, I'm noticing that this rock is probably a bit sharper than everything else in my scene. So I'll be using curves to match the color, but probably also a little bit of blur to help unify everything. Let's start. By pressing E and then grabbing these curves from the background, Control or Command C to copy and control or command V to paste. That's clearly going to need some more adjustment, but let's go ahead and come over here and look for fast box blur, which is a great way to soften up this rock. I bet something around three or four is probably going to feel better. Yep. That looks a bit much when you're zoomed in here, but when you get out here to the whole scene, our green screen clip is actually a bit soft. And looking at this now, I think the background probably needs that, as well. Way too much on the background. Let's back that way off down to maybe one and one, two and one. 1.5. We'll split the difference. And you see this is all just a negotiation. As you're kind of bringing everything together, each piece kind of tells you what it needs. So, speaking of which, let's see if we can get this rock to sort of look like it's in the same universe as everything else. We're certainly going to need a lot more red. So let's pump that up. Maybe something more in that space, and this rock is quite a bit brighter, so I'll come back to RGB and maybe just drag these points off of here to start over on my RGB curve, bring this overall brightness down some. Looking at my background, I'm seeing that this is probably my brightest point, so I don't want these rocks to really be brighter than that. So I'll create another point maybe kind of in her ish. And then we'll come back to this red. A lot of this is just tinkering around until you kind of get it to feel correct. That's obviously way too much, but I think we can get just enough of that red for it to feel like it's in the same ballpark. Maybe bring this white point over to kind of red that up a bit more, but not too much. I think this might still need a little bit of work, but I think it's close enough for now that we can move on to the other rock and see how that one feels. So let's turn that one on. This will end up living behind that other rock, but let's cut this out first. I'll get this roughly positioned. I think I may end up needing to move this anchor point and rotate this just a little bit. Maybe something like this. We'll see how that feels in motion. Let's go ahead and cut this guy out and see what it does for us. This side can probably be pretty rough right there. I don't love that color, so let's just open this up and see if we can find something that will be a little easier for us to work with. Hmm. Maybe something in here. That's okay for me, may not be great for your eyes, but this one has a bit fewer details along the bottom, but also a few opportunities where you could kind of create some if you like. And again, when you get to the edge, you can just be rough with it here. There we go. Let's bring this behind our other rocks, and we can start out by copy pasting these effects. Pretty close. I think this rock may need just a little bit of a different touch on those. Let's adjust that feathering to about the same around 12, disable that and maybe bring that expansion as well. Close these up so we can see our layers, maybe set our rocks to be a different layer color just so they stand out. How about pink? I think our left rock maybe needs just a little bit of attention here, color wise. Maybe darken that up just a little bit on the reds. Let's see what just a little bit of attention to RGB does for us. All right. Let's see what happens when our astronaut walks over this. I suspect we may want to reposition this a little bit, but we kind of need to see what's actually happening. I think that top step feels good. Of course, in an ideal world, I would love to be able to see his feet coming in front of her, but that's a lot more work. I think I'm happy enough with that. I might try to bring just these reds in a little bit more on this one, make that feel a little bit more like it's part of this sand at the bottom. And we're going to be adding more color correction over the top of all this, so I suspect we'll come back and adjust these a bit more at the end. But I think for now until we add some of those other elements, this is looking pretty good. 71. Add Atmospheric Effects: Now I would like to add some dust and atmospheric effects to really help sell the whole scene. I've got this clip right here that is just some smoke moving slowly, and I think that will help everything feel nice. And then better yet, I have this clip of some swirling dust that's just going to really help sell how inhospitable this planet is. You can see that this dust is actually moving the opposite direction from the smoke, and I think it's going to look best if both of these are sort of blowing into our character to make it look like it's hard for him to walk. So let's come back to our composition viewer, and I'll start with this dust. I'll just bring it in as the top layer. And go ahead and rename that as dust and maybe set this to orange. Now, I'll want to flip this. So I'll go ahead and unlink my scale, set this to negative, and then I could relink so that now I can scale up a little bit and have them stay together, maybe about 130. Now, I could use blending modes to overlay this or I can use effects to achieve that same thing. There's an effect called unmolt that's probably going to be my best play here. So let's look for that. Actually also lives under the keying effects, as you can see, and I'll just drop that onto my clip, and poof, it magically gets rid of the background. You can see that this clip is kind of blue overall, which makes it not really work too well. So let's go ahead and get rid of that. I think if these dust particles are basically black, that's going to work pretty well. So I'm going to search for black and white, drop those onto my clip. And then I will use Invert to flip these particles from white to black. Let's see how that looks. Alright, not too bad. Again, I think these are a bit overly sharp, so let's blur this a bit. I think that same fast box blur would work nicely here. And just a little bit is going to go a long way here. We just kind of want to take that edge off. There we go. And it looks a bit like we have a swirling dust storm that he's trying to walk through, which is going to sell even more when we add some of that smoke. So let's come back to our project panel and find our smoke clip here. Let's bring that below the dust. And again, start by renaming this smoke. Let's again reach for unmolt and see how that feels? There, that smoke is subtle, but it definitely adds some atmospheric component, and it just makes the air feel thick. These are both a little bit much. I think I'm going to drop down the opacity, but this is feeling nice. Et's open up the opacity on both of these layers, maybe bring our dust down to 40 something. So it's not so oppressive. And speed wise, this actually works pretty well with the smoke. Let's bring that smoke down to maybe 70 ish. And let's see what happens if we add some curves to darken that smoke slightly. Just kind of bring down the middle here. See what that looks like before and after. Didn't really do too much. Maybe I'll bring those whites way down. Be quite a bit more aggressive with this on and off. That's right. Let's try making a duplicate of our smoke. We'll put that underneath, maybe bring that opacity down a bit more and scale this up so that we have two copies, bring one here, just make that air feel even thicker. And we'll use that trick from earlier, offset this one a bit so that they don't look like they're just the same clip. Even though you can't really see it too well, I think you might feel it. It might be worth looking through some blending modes and seeing if one of these makes this feel better, or if that just makes it disappear entirely. Let's find out. That's pretty subtle. What happens if we go for, say, overlay? Honestly, sometimes this is just trial and error and seeing what works with your particular combination of elements. And don't forget that subtlety can go a long way. I think those are feeling pretty nice. Let's add a lens flare in the background as if the sun is just coming up over these mountains and see what that does for the whole scene. So we'll create a new solid and make sure that's set to black because this is going to be our lens flare. So we'll definitely need a blending mode here. I could have renamed it when creating, but I'll go ahead and rename it now just as flare and set that to yellow because, of course, lights are yellow, right? We'll find lens flare. Lens flares are definitely something that are done pretty well by some third party packages, but the default stuff is right with a little bit of adjustment. I'm going to set this brightness up a bit, maybe around 150, and we'll go ahead and set this to screen. Now, this makes quite a difference to the whole scene, doesn't it? I think some curves would really help sell this. So let's put those on. We can maybe adjust the brightness a little bit. And I think to help really play up the red of the scene, instead of boosting the red, we could drop the green and the blue. A little goes a long way on these. Dropping that blue really makes it feel hot and yellow, see? But a little bit in here. There we go. Let's see how that feels. And just as a reminder, this is what we had before we added any of this. Quite a difference, right? You see why we wanted to kind of get close enough, and then you add in these elements. And then if you want to come back and touch the brightness or color on some of the background or foreground elements, you can do that with a much better context now with all these other elements in place. 72. Add Handheld Camera Motion: This is definitely getting there, but the whole scene feels pretty static. And if we're on this alien world with this swirling sandstorm, I feel like it would make sense to have a bit of a shaky camera, right? Whether that's being held by another astronaut or on some kind of tripod, you would think that the wind would be affecting it. So let's see if we can bring that idea into this scene. I'm going to stop my preview and create a new layer called a null object, which exists only to parent other layers too or a few other special use cases. And I'm going to select all my layers and parent them to this null. Now, anywhere this null goes, the entire scene goes with it, right? If I'm going to add some shake, I want to make sure that I don't see those edges. So let's scale things up just a little bit. I believe our smoke clip. Yep, let's scale that up just a little bit to make sure that we have some clean edges, and, of course, our green screen clip, as well. So it might be easier to just scale this whole thing up just a bit like this. And now, if we shake around the position of this null, we shouldn't see any edges. We'll just need to make sure. We're going to add another simple wiggle expression to this position property, so I will Alt or Option click on that stopwatch and then type Wiggle. And in the parentheses, let's do 0.7, eight. For something like this, a lot of times, it's just trial and error. You want to apply this and kind of see how it feels. And if you need to tweak those numbers a little bit, then we will. I think this feels good. It's just enough to kind of make the scene feel alive, but not so much that we're going to get sick from the gamer movement. 73. Compositing Final Touches: To finish this off, I think we just need to do some final look adjustment and color correction. So let's create a new adjustment layer and name that look. Let's go for a little bit of vignette. CC vignette right here. And I bet one more instance of curves will probably finish us off nicely. So for our vignette, I think it would make sense to stick that center right where our sun is and we can play with this amount a little bit. The default might be okay. Let's see where the curves get us and come back and adjust from there. Let's just add a little bit of contrast. So I think a nice subtle S curve will bring the shadows down and bring the highlights up a little bit. Makes that sun feel a lot hotter. And let's just experiment with making this whole scene a bit redder. We could boost that up, or, again, we could bring down the blues and greens and just see how that feels. It really adds a heat and extremeness to that sunlight. I think there's a case to be made that the left side of the set is still a bit darker than I would like. But honestly, now that we have all this other color correction in place, it matches the background pretty well there, so I think it's okay. And hopefully this example helps you get a good idea of how you can build up layer by layer and make adjustments as you go and don't be afraid to revisit things as you add other pieces to make sure that you have a good cohesive scene. 74. Class Project 10 - Green Screen Scene: It's Class Project Time again, and we are looking for you to help us capture the excitement of planetary exploration by creating your own realistic scene using these compositing techniques. Once again, the composition and the frame rate are going to be up to you. They may be based on your source material, but it's not 100% necessary here. We're looking for you to utilize at least one greenscreen clip and a background layer and a foreground element. I have included links to the pieces that I used, but a reminder that not all of them are free. For scenes like this, I do really recommend that you spend some time looking through clips that are available on the Internet on some of the different sites that we've recommended earlier. Being able to find appropriate greenscreen material is kind of a part of this process. And even though it can be a little tricky looking through stock material, I do think that's an important part of learning how this works and what to look for. So as I said, at least one greenscreen clip, but if you find more than one element that you'd like to add into your scene, that's great. You don't necessarily need your scene to look exactly like mine, but if you have something similar, adding some atmospherics like dust and smoke really go a long way to helping everything feel more tangible and realistic. And honestly, those kinds of clips can typically be found fairly easily. As far as deliverables, you know the drill here, export your animation as an MP four, upload that exported video to a video hosting site and share that link with us. Don't submit links to any Cloud storage, and make sure you share this on social media when you're all done. These techniques enable so much creativity, and I really hope you have some fun with this one. Good luck. 75. Intro to Motion Tracking: A subject or surface in a video clip often moves. It's video, after all, and that adds an extra layer of complexity when you want to modify or add elements that move with that subject or with the rest of the shot. To accomplish this, you need to use what's called motion tracking, and After Effects has a variety of different ways to approach it. If you have an object that moves through a shot but doesn't otherwise change much, a simple mask tracker can be effective. Draw your mask, right click on it, and choose track mask. Allow After Effects to follow the object through the shot, and now you can use this to remove that element or apply effects to this area. This is best for simpler tasks like removing or blurring a logo or doing isolated color correction within a specific area. We'll be going more in depth on the other tracking options in the following lessons. But here's a quick overview. When you need to follow a single point that moves through a shot, you want the point tracker. You can also follow a second point to establish the scale and rotation changes needed to follow that object correctly. When you need to follow a flat surface or plane, you want a plaanar tracker. This is great for replacing device screens or for adding additional elements onto surfaces like walls or backgrounds. After Effects can also recreate the real world movement of a camera through a scene using the three D Camera tracker, allowing you to place objects into that shot in three D space. Each of these techniques has its own use cases, strengths, and weaknesses, but they will all be looking for areas of clear and consistent details with good contrast. That means to get the best results, you want footage of a reasonably high resolution with good visual contrast and ideally little to no motion blur. 76. Track an Object with the Point Tracker: The after effects point tracker allows you to follow one specific point through a shot. This works best when you have a small area of high contrast, but this could be anything from the corner of a sign or the end of a ballpoint pen or in this case, stars or planets. And I think this actually may be Jupiter, but I haven't double checked that. You can see I've already created a composition and put my clip in here. I've actually trimmed off a little bit of the very beginning of this clip because this element actually starts just barely off screen, and this is what I would like to follow. Before I begin tracking, I'm going to create a null object, which I will later use to hold this tracking data and parent other elements too. So I'll come up to layer, new null object. We saw earlier that these exist as invisible layers that are really handy for parenting other layers, too, and that's exactly what we're going to use it for here. I'll go ahead and update the name to Tract Point, and we'll come back and use that in just a minute. To track this clip, I need to double click it, which will open it up in the layer viewer as we saw earlier. Then I'll come up to Window and find tracker to open the tracker panel in my interface. You'll see a variety of different options here, and the one we want right now is called Track Motion. As soon as I click that, you'll see something called Track 0.1 appear in the middle of your clip. We just need to come over here and find this area inside this inner square drag this over onto the point that you want to follow. Make sure this little X comes with it because that is actually the point that you are tracking. Let's zoom in and take a closer look at this. This inner square is designating the area we're actually following. If this was a smaller point like this one here, we could make this box a bit smaller, like that. I think about this size is probably good. This outer square is telling after effects what area to search every frame for this element inside the inner square. This one isn't moving that much every frame, so I don't think our outer square needs to be that big. If it were moving a lot, we'd want this to be larger. The bigger this outer square is, the longer it takes to track because it's more area that after effects has to search. So I think something like this is going to be just fine. As is, this will just track the position of this point. But if you'd like, you can also track the rotation and scale of this point. Coming over here into the tracker panel, you can check either of these, and as soon as you do, you'll see a second point up here, because in order to track rotation or scale, you need another point to create that reference. I'll go ahead and use this other bright point right here. We can zoom in. This one's a bit smaller. I think that will work well. And now we'll be able to track the position, rotation, and scale of this point right here. In your tracker panel, you can track backwards or forwards, and you can do it a single frame at a time by clicking this button right here. This is good if you don't have high confidence that it's going to hold that track, and you may want to make manual adjustments as you go. I believe this clip is going to work pretty well, so I'll just click this button right here and just let after effects do all the work for me. As soon as it finishes, you should see trails indicating that it tracked those points for every frame of your clip. And if you open up the clip, you'll see that you now have tracking data that you can use for whatever you need. I'm going to apply this tracking data to that null object that I created. So I'll come back to my tracker panel and after effects already guessed what I want to use, but I could click Edit Target and choose a different layer if I desire. I'll just click Cancel. And since this is already pointing at the right place, I will just hit Apply. And confirm. And you can see that it pasted that position, scale, and rotation data to that null object. Let's close the layer panel and look at this in our comp viewer. There's my point. Working very well. We can actually close these up and bring in our other layers that we want to parent to this point. I have this graphic right here that I created. Let's size this down. And we're just going to have this float sort of up here and go along for the ride. So now this is as easy as parenting to that point. In this particular case, I don't think that including the scale and rotation actually work that well for the effect that I'm after, so I can just disable those. Let's come back to the first frame, open up the transform properties on Tract point, and I will just disable the stopwatch on both of those. Let's set rotation back to actual zero. And now you can see our graphic follows along just like it should. So we have the basic pieces in place. Let's add a little bit of embellishment. I'd like to have a little call out circle following this, as well. So let's zoom in, get our shape tool, and I'll just draw a small circle. I would like this to be a stroked circle with no fill, so let's set that up. And I'll pull this red from my graphic right here and set this width to maybe four. To keep things clean, I would like to center the anchor point of this shape layer within the layer, and I can actually do that by pressing Control Alt or Command Option plus the home key. And it centers that anchor point right there in that circle. Now I can just scoot that a little bit to be perfectly on that point. Rename this to circle and parent it to that null. Looks like my anchor point got just a little bit off, so I'll re center that again, zoom back out, and check that with a preview. Following perfectly. I would like this graphic to pop up as we go. So it will appear maybe around here about 2 seconds in, and then I'll draw a little line from here to that graphic, and that's what triggers this popping on. So I'll press Y to get my anchor point tool and bring this anchor point right over here to this corner. I can hold control or command to make it snap to that corner right there because that is the point from which I would like this layer to scale. Let's go ahead and make that scale animation. I'll jump back about 20 frames here and set this to zero and then come up about two thirds of the way through and set this to maybe 13. Let's see how that feels. Just a little bit of overshoot. Let's easy ease those key frames. Not too bad. I'll go ahead and press Alt and open bracket to trim that layer. And now we can slide this around to kind of find the right spot, but we need to create our line and animate that to know what that's going to be. Let's close both of these up. There are a few different ways that we could create our line, but I think the easiest is using something called the beam effect. That lives on a solid, so I'll right click and create new solid and I'll name this line. And to that, I will add the beam effect. This effect is intended for making lasers or light sabers or things like that, but it can also just be a nice clean line. Let's come over here to the effect controls and set the length all the way up to 100. We can use this to animate it on in a minute. And let's zoom in so that we can get this red color, and I'll just set both the inside and outside color to that red. This effect gives you the ability to set a start and end point, which are going to look something like this, and we want to sharpen this up. So let's find the softness and set that down to zero. Now, of course, this isn't going to follow. We could parent this layer on here, and that would work pretty well in this case. But there's a slightly more advanced thing that we can do that actually parents the points of the effect to the layers. Let's open this layer up and find that starting and ending point for the beam. I'll bring my timeline up just a little bit so I can see the other layers. And what we actually want to look for are the position points of this tract point null and our graphic. Instead of parenting the entire layer, we can actually link just one specific property using this pick whip on the property itself. If I link that to the position of tract point, now this point turns red. That means it created an expression, and it's always going to be following that tract point perfectly. I could do the same for the graphic, but this is actually going to create a problem. And the reason that doesn't work as intended is because this graphic layer, remember, is actually parented to the tract point. And if you look at the position value that it has right here, these numbers don't indicate where it is in the composition space. If I unparent it from that tract point, you're going to see those numbers change. And this is actually where this lives in composition space. When you parent one layer to another, its position becomes relative to that layer's position. And so we would need to account for that in this expression to make this work properly. In this case, that's pretty easy. I can click in here and type plus and then use this other little pick whip right here to link to that starting point. Since the starting point is linked to that null object, this is going to give us exactly what we need. Perfect. Let's refine the look just a little bit more by setting the starting thickness down to zero or maybe one so that we get a nice taper. And I'm noticing that the corner is just a little bit shy of where I would like it to be visually, and that's easy enough to clean up. Pressing A to find our anchor point and just nudging that inward just a little bit so that it kind of looks more like it's in the right spot. I'll move that graphic up above the line, and now everything looks just right. Let's bring our time line back down, see how this feels. Yeah, pretty good. We just need to animate our line, which we can do just using the length property right here. So let's set that to zero, create a keyframe, jump ahead a bit, and set that to 100. Of course, I created these in the wrong spot. So I'll just kind of drag these around. About here is probably good. Easy Ease. Let's see those keyframes on this layer and press U to see those keyframes. Worked out pretty well. Personally, I think it looks just a little busy to have this line extending inside the circle, but there's an easy way to get rid of that. Let's just create a duplicate of the circle and use it as a track mat so that the line isn't visible inside there. I'll press Controller Command D to create a second circle, rename it as circle mat and re enable the fill color inside of it. It doesn't matter what color. We just need it to be filled. Toggle those switches and modes, and I can set the line to use circle mat as a track mat. And then I just need to invert it by clicking this switch right here. Now that line exists everywhere except where that circle is. And with that, our animation is complete. And you can see here how these tracking techniques enable you to create graphics with the prior knowledge we've gotten earlier in the course and make them follow along perfectly with the movement of the clip. 77. Class Project 11 - Tracked Pop-Up Graphic: Class Project time again, and with so many details in space, it's always helpful to have some cool graphics to call them out. We'd like you to create a short animation highlighting some specific detail in a clip using graphics tracked into the shot. Composition length, size, and frame rate are going to be up to you. They're probably going to be decided by your clip, although that's not 100% necessary that they match in this case. We want you to choose one video clip and use the point tracker to follow at least one specific detail. I've included a handful of clip options that you can choose from, or, of course, you can find your own. You just want to make sure that you find something with a clear, consistent detail that has decent contrast from the area around it so that the tracker works well. You should add at least one graphic call out or piece of text or arrow or something like that to call attention to that object. You can do a simple call out like I did or do something a little more complex, if you'd like. I've actually provided an editable PSD version of the graphic that you saw. So if you want to just make your own spin on mine, that's totally fine. Or if you want to make something from scratch, that's great, too. Again, here's what mine looks like. You can see there's that one clear detail and a nice little call out. You probably don't need me to keep telling you about the deliverables, but just in case export your animation as an MP four file using that preset you saw at the beginning of the course, upload your exported video to a video hosting site like Vimeo, YouTube, Behance or something similar, and share that link with us. But please don't submit anything from a Cloud storage site, and make sure to share your video on social media so that your friends can see all the cool stuff you're making. Have fun with this one and good luck. 78. Replace a Screen Using Planar Tracking: In this example, we have a phone screen that we're going to track some of our own content into, and you can see that it's moving around quite a bit. So we'll need to use those tracking tools to make it stay in place. There's probably a world where you could use the Point Tracker multiple times to find the corners of a surface like this and get things in the right spot. But that would obviously be a lot more work. And we have rounded corners. So which point would you even choose, right? Fortunately, After Effects has a tool specifically designed for this job. Now to start, you can see that I've already created a compositions. I did make it directly from this clip using this command right here, so it has the exact same settings as my clip, which is important in this case. I also have this graphic right here, which is what we'll be adding to the screen later. But first, let's get that track. I'll select my clip and look up under the Animation menu and find track in Boris FX Mocha. This is actually a third party tool by another company called Boris FX, but it's included for free with After Effects. To activate the tool, you click on this Mocha right here where it says Launch Mocha AE. And this opens up in its own interface on top of After Effects. This works just a little bit differently than what you might be used to, and a few of the shortcut keys are a little different, but it's otherwise pretty familiar. We need to use a Pen tool to isolate the area that we want this tool to track for us. I'm going to make sure that I'm at the first frame just for ease, and then I'll come back up here and find this pen tool. This is actually going to create what's called an X spine, which works a lot like the mask tool that we've used, but it's just a little bit different in a way that you'll see very quickly. I can just click to make my corners. And this actually rounds itself for us. I'll just click up here to finish that shape. And you'll see that each corner is already rounded, but you can pull this little handle to decide how rounded that is. What's important here is that you want to make sure to track the entire surface of this plane. So it's better to have a little bit of extra than not enough. Once you have your shape in place, you just need to track. There's a button down here at the bottom of the timeline or over here on the left. And I'll just click that and let Mocha do its work. If you're doing a more complex track, you do have the opportunity to pause this and make manual adjustments as you go. And you can actually use these same tools to make rotoscoping cutouts if you need those. Once your track is complete, you can press the space bar, and it will play backwards or forwards, depending on where it is and just ping pong back and forth between those. Looks pretty clean to me. Now we just need to define the surface where we want to put something. So we'll come back up to the top and find this blue button right here, which is called show planar surface. When I click that, you'll see a blue rectangle with corners, and we just need to put those in the right spot. I find what's usually the best is to get these roughly in the right area, and then you can zoom in using your mouse wheel. And adjust them better. For an object with rounded corners like this, I find it's best to just try to match up the flat areas here and we'll probably need to come around and touch everything again. I'm going to use the hand tool to adjust my view, and that shortcut key is different in here. You hold down the X key to get that hand, and then you can drag this around. Make that adjustment. Hold X, drag down here, release X, or you can press C to get your selection tool back if it doesn't do it for you and just try to match up this edge. And we're just going to do the best we can here. I'll zoom out a little bit so that I get more context, and let's see how we did. That looks like this follows that edge pretty well. Looking across the top, I maybe need to adjust this just a teen C bit. The top looks good, the right edge looks good. The bottom looks good. Okay, let's zoom back out, maybe adjust that view again. And since we already have that tracking data, this is going to stick in place now. We can press Space Bar again to see that in action and make sure that it fits properly throughout the whole clip. That looks great. If you want to further check the track, click on this pink grid icon up here, and that will create a grid that sits on the plane that you've created. Now you can preview that and make sure everything feels like it's sitting on the correct plane. This all looks great, so I'll stop my preview. You can do multiple tracks in here, but we've just done the one. I'm still going to rename it just to be thorough. I'll double click on that and name it phone face. And then we just need to save our project and exit. Now, we have all that tracking data and we can stay back in our After Effects interface from here. In the Mocha effect, I'll open up that area where it says tracking data and click Create tracking data. Again, we only have one track, so it's just going to do this for us. If we had multiple, there would be a little drop down where we can choose which track we want to create the data for. It's assuming that I want to do what's called a corner pin, and you can see over here, it's actually created those four corners of our surface, just like we set inside the tracker. You do have the option to just do a transform if you just wanted to grab the positional data from this. But corner Pin is exactly what we want here. We just need to bring in the source to apply it to. So let's come back to our project panel and grab that graphic and bring that into our compositions. Select our clip. Come back to that Mocha effect and tell it which layer we want to apply that corner Pin data to and hit Apply. And huh? Well, it's actually tracked correctly, but it's in the wrong spot. And that's because these two layers are not the same size. The way the corner pin effect works, it once this other layer to be the same size as the clip that we got that data from. So we'll need to do a little bit of extra work before this actually looks correct. I'll just undo and the easiest way to fix this is to precompose this layer. But if we want it to precompose at exactly the right spot and fill the frame, there's something else we need to do first. So I'll right click, come to transform and tell it to fit to comp. Now, this is going to look pretty silly right now, but once we precompose this and get the effect applied, it will look right again. Now that we have this set to fill the frame, that means it will be the same size as this composition once we precompose it. So let's right click and choose precompose. And we want to make sure that we move all of these attributes into the new composition. So it takes this silly scaling along with it. I'm going to go ahead and rename this as screen content fit because, of course, that's what it's doing. And hit Okay. I didn't really need it to open this composition, but this way you can see, it just tucked this away in a composition that's the same size as our other one. Let's come back in here. Select our clip again. Make sure it's looking at the right layer to export this data to and hit Apply. And now look at that. Perfect. We do have a little bit of edge cleanup we'll need to do, and of course, we need to finish our compositing, but that track looks pretty good to me. Let's stop that preview and take a look at what After Effects did for us. On our screen content layer, it applied an effect called corner Pin, and it applied all of that positional data from Mocha to each of these corners. So this effect actually takes the four corners of whatever that layer is and move it into a new spot. I could actually move one of these, and you could use this to distort things, however you want. Of course, I don't want to move this around because these are all keyframed every frame. Then if I mess with these, I will mess up the track. Still looks good. Corner pin is great, but it actually has a few limitations in that you can't make adjustments, as you just saw. If I wanted to fix one of the corners, I'm going to have to fix it every frame, and that's quite a bit of work. So a technique that I really like to use is using a slightly different effect that does the same thing, but it's just a little bit more powerful. Let's come over to our Effects and Presets and look for CC Power Pin. And I'll just apply that to my layer. You can see it's basically the same effect. It just has a few more options. So I'm going to press home to jump back to the beginning of my composition and open up CC Power Pin. And I'm just going to copy paste each of these corners into its corresponding corner on PowerPin. So upper left, copy to top left, paste. Now, of course, this looks wrong because we're looking at both of them. So I'll just either turn off or delete that corner pin effect. Not only does Power Pin give you more options, it also has this great visualizer where it actually shows you the edges of the object, which I find really helpful. You can test and see that, yep, the track is still there, but crucially, you get this little expansion property right here, and I find it so helpful to be able to just move this out one pixel or even half a pixel sometimes to cover up any edges. Let's just try half a pixel on each direction. And deselect that effect and take a quick look. Hey, there we go. That looks perfect. Of course, we have some corners to clean up, and we need to get that phone screen on top of this, but we're almost there. I think the best way to get rid of those corners of the screen right here will actually be to do that inside that graphics precomp. So let's go in here and hm. Well, it would be a little weird to round the corners here because everything is stretched, and we need to make sure that our corners are stretched appropriately. So while this might not be the most intuitive thing ever, I think it would actually make sense to precompose this once again back to its normal size so that we can make any modifications we want without it looking silly like this. So let's select that layer, right click and precompose. This time, we'll leave all attributes, so this silly scaling is going to stay here in this precomp. We'll go ahead and rename this as screen content original. And now we know that this is where we can make any modifications to the graphic in a place that actually makes sense. So here's what our content actually looks like. And if we were doing animation, this is where we would want to work. I just want to round off those corners, and I think the easiest way to do it would be to create a rounded rectangle. So I'll select that tool and just double click it to make a rounded rectangle the size of this composition. Now, I know from practicing this that I think around 150 is going to be about the right size for these corners. And then I can just tell this screen graphic to use that as a track mat. And it will just trim off those corners right there. And when we look back at our main composition, this should look just right. Perfect. Now, there's probably a world where you could just be done here, but I want to make sure that our screen edges are perfect, and there's actually a little bit of the phone screen that exists up here that is getting covered up by this graphic. So let's fix that. We have our original clip here, and we want this copy to stay at the bottom. Let's go ahead and rename this as background plate. We're going to make another copy to sit on top and then get rid of that screen area. I'm going to make a duplicate of this clip, rename it to phone front. Press E and get rid of Mocha because we don't need that on this copy. We'll put that up top, and now we're going to have perfect phone edges once we get rid of this green. Of course, we know how to do that. I think key lite alone will probably do the job wonderfully here. So let's just stick that on the clip. Eyedropper that green. Okay, well, we got a pretty good key. We'll need to adjust the edges a little bit, but since we're in a forest, it killed all the trees. Okay, well, we can deal with that. Let's get our edges first. You can see there's a little bit of kind of glow around these. But I bet coming into screen matt and maybe just bringing up the clip black a little bit. I'm just going to drag this until it gets to the right spot somewhere right around 30 looks pretty good for this clip. I think that cleaned up that bright edge pretty well. Let's watch this real quick. And, hey, it even kept some of those reflections, which I love. Brought back that little bit at the top of the phone screen. And this looks great. We just need to fix the rest of the world outside this screen, right? Now, there's a world where you could spend your life masking around this phone screen, and that's workable. But we actually already have the pieces to make this work. Now, remember, we already have another layer that is exactly the size of the phone screen. So what if we took that and just expanded it a teensy bit to use that as a mat for this top copy of the phone? Well, let's come down here, make a duplicate of our screen content layer and rename that to screen Matt. We'll move that up to the very top of our compositions, and we can see it right now sitting on top of everything, which is good. Let's look at this expansion property and see what we need to do to just bring this out a little bit more so that we're getting the rest of that phone screen, but not all of the trees. Looks like about two to three for each side is going to be good. I know it's a little hard to see here. Sometimes if you're doing work like this and you need to make it more visible, I really like to use the fill effect with just the loud default red, and that makes it much easier to see what you're doing. But it looks like I did a pretty good job. Maybe I'll bring in that bottom just a little bit. And now we can use this as a track mat for the phone front layer. So let's toggle switches and modes, tell phone front to use screen mat as a track mat. And now we should have a perfect track, no corners sticking out, and the world is green again. Looks great. And once again, if you wanted to animate the content on the screen, you could do all of that in the screen content original pre composition that we made, and it will all show up here perfectly. If this clip had fingers moving in front of the screen, that would work, too. You just have to cut around them using some of the tools we've already seen. Of course, if they tap and you want to match animation to that, that just becomes more complexity in terms of timing coming back and forth and working with it until everything matches up. 79. Class Project 12 - Screen Replacement: A once again, we'd like you to put those new skills into practice with a class project. Let's help visualize how our promotional materials are going to look on customers devices. I know you're getting used to hearing this, but the composition length, size, and frame rate are going to be up to you, and this time they will be determined by your clip because your composition should match the clip settings. You can, of course, trim it to be shorter, though, if you like. You're going to choose a video clip containing a screen of some kind that can be a phone, a tablet, a TV, anything like that in the shot as long as there's some movement so that you need to track it. We've provided you a couple of suggestions, but of course, you can go find your own as well. Then you're going to use Mocha AE as a planar tracker to follow that surface and then use the corner pin or CC Power pin effect to stick your content onto that screen. As a reminder, here's what I created. That device is moving around all over the place, but we got a nice solid track, and we're able to replace with the custom content and make everything look like it belongs together. So you'll be replacing that screen with your own custom content. Once again, I've included an editable PSD. So if you want to just do a phone screen with that same dimension and update my design to fit your project, that's totally fine. But you can totally make something from scratch, if you like. Just want to make sure that what you create approximately matches the dimensions of the screen that you're replacing, so it doesn't get stretched out when you're pinning it in place. As far as deliverables, as always, export your animation as an MP four file, upload to a video hosting site and share that link with us. Please don't submit links to Cloud storage sites and share this on social media when you're done. Maybe you could get really meto with it and make your clip be someone looking at your own clip on a social media site on the device that's in the clip. Maybe not. That's probably a little too deep. But have some fun with it. Good luck, and we'll see you in the next lesson. 80. Track a Scene with the 3D Camera Tracker: For our last example, I found this sweeping aerial shot in a wide landscape. This is actually shot in Death Valley, not on another planet, but hey, you might think it would be difficult to track something into this shot, but it's actually going to be fewer clicks than some of the previous techniques. Now, it probably wouldn't be too hard to zoom in here and track something to one of these astronauts using one of these points on them. Of course, they're moving around a little bit, but I think you could get in there and do a little call out of their name or their rank or something like that. But I'm looking to track some pieces of text into the scene to make it look like they live in the same environment and follow this camera move. So once again, I have created a composition from this clip, just like this. So it has the same settings which is important here. I've already trimmed this to a slightly shorter area. I'll go ahead and just trim that to the work area. I think that's plenty for the technique that I'm showing. And there's one more thing that I want to call out, which is that I actually downloaded this clip as an MP four, but before bringing it in here for this tracking, I thought it would work better if I converted it to an intermediate format called Pro Rs. Adobe Media encoder is also installed on your system, along with After Effects or Premiere, and you can use this as a way to export from After Effects, but also to convert files before you bring them in. I'll just drag the file directly in here. And I'm going to choose QuickTime. And ProRes 422 LT. I think that's a good format for this use case. It's far less compressed, and so After Effects won't have to work as hard doing some of this tracking. I'll just click this button to convert, and that's what I would import into After Effects. I already have that clip in here, so I'm ready to track. All I need to do is have the clip selected, and then either from the Animation menu right here or over in the tracker panel choose Track camera. And as soon as you click that, After Effects will start working, you can see a progress indicator over in the Effect Controls panel. And as soon as that's complete, you'll see these colorful little Xs all over your footage. These are the tracking markers that After Effects has used to solve this camera. You'll see a few of them disappear as you go. Those are just points that it doesn't have as much confidence about. But most of them stick in place through the whole shot. If you'd like them to be a little bit bigger, you can do that right here under track point size. I'll just size those up so they're easier for you to see. And now we just have to choose some of the points that we want to use to place an object in the shot and create a virtual camera that matches the real one. I'm planning to put a piece of text up here in the foreground, as well as up in the sky. For that one in the sky, I'll obviously have no tracking markers up here because there's no information. But I do have all of this ground area below where I'll be able to find the right place and then just bring it up from there. So let's go to a bit later in the shot. And you'll notice as I roll my cursor around, there's actually a target appearing here, and that's After Effects trying to find a plane from these track points. To confirm one of those, I just need to select a group of points. We have quite a few here, so I'm going to grab quite a few. I can just click and drag and get a nice big selection. I just want to make sure I don't get any on this front cliff up here. That looks pretty good to me, but you can always redraw if you need to. Once you're happy with your target, simply right click and you'll have these options right here. I'm planning to use this very first one where I'm going to create a text and camera, but you'll see that you could also create a solid or a null object, as well as a more advanced version that creates what's called a shadow catcher, camera and light. That's a bit more advanced, and we'll worry about that later. I'm just going to choose the simplest option, create Text and camera. So it will create for me a piece of text, three D text, actually, as well as a camera that helps it track into this scene. Let's set this text to be white so that it's more visible and do a quick preview to see what we've got. So we obviously have a laying issue here, but it sure feels like that text is properly tracked into the shot. Let's stop the preview here and I'm going to manipulate this text to bring it up into the sky. Because this text is a three D object, you'll notice that the layer controls look quite a bit different. We'll talk more about three D layers in the following group of lessons. So right now, we're really just going to do this by eye. You can do this visually using the controls right here on the layer, or you can also look over your properties panel and adjust the rotation properties here. You'll see that because we're in three D space, we have different rotational properties for all three axis instead of just one. Your X axis moves the object like this. Your Y axis moves the object like this and your Z rotation rotates like this, which is effectively the rotation that you're used to as long as the object is pointed directly towards you. You can adjust either the orientation or the rotation. Since we're not animating this piece of text, it doesn't really matter which we just want it to look right. So feel free to scrub these numbers or come over here into your viewer and adjust the controls directly on the layer. By grabbing each of these little ball controls right here, you can rotate on each of these axes and turn the layer until it looks just right for you. You can also move this in all three dimensions so you can go straight up on Y, left or right on X, or toward or away from us on Z. I'm going to bring this directly up into the sky and then push it over a little bit on X. And let's see how that feels. Pretty good. To really prove that this is working, I would like to add another piece of text up here in the foreground. To do that, I'll need to select that three D Camera tracker effect again that's on my footage. And that will make all of those tracking points visible again. Let's just find a nice big area here on the foreground. It's a little dense in here, but you can see that target. I'll right click again and choose Create Text. We already have a camera, so we don't need to make another. Let's deselect that. And you can see that this new piece of text is properly tracked into the foreground. It's just a little too big. Let's stop that preview, select this foreground text. And again, I'll rotate. Let's go ahead and scale this so it's a little more appropriate size. I might bring it down just a little bit. And let's see how that feels. Nice. You do need to be careful when you are doing something like this. The closer you are to the ground, the more accurate you need to be when you're moving things around, but I think this works pretty well. Let's go ahead and update what these actually say. And I may need to tweak the positions again. I think exploration is probably a little too big. So let's just scale that down some. Maybe move it a bit to the left. Great. We'll finish this off with just a little bit of text animation, and I think we're done. Um, 81. Class Project 13 - Camera Tracking: Time for another class project, lucky number 13, and we would love for you to find a dynamic moving shot for an upcoming promo and make sure that we have some text included in the shot in a way that looks like it really belongs there and moves with everything else. Once again, the length, size, and frame rate are going to be up to you. That size and frame rate will be determined by your clip. Your composition should match the clip settings so that the Camera tracker works properly. But the length is going to be up to you, however long or short you want that to be. We'd like you to choose one video clip with some kind of dynamic camera move. We've included a couple options for you, but as always, you can go find your own. You'll find that aerial footage works really nicely for this as long as you have some kind of consistent details. So like, water is probably a bad choice and a big open sky with no details for it to track, that's going to be a bad choice, too. But if you can find some lovely shots of flying over mountains or canyons or things like that, that's going to look like another planet with maybe a little bit of color correction, and it's going to track really, really nicely with that three D Camera tracker. Once you've got that track completed, you're going to add at least one piece of text or some other graphic element, if you feel like a challenge, into the shot, and you want to make sure that it moves correctly and feels integrated. It shouldn't be shaky, it shouldn't be drifting or sliding around in a weird way. If you run into that, you may just want to try your track again or maybe try a different clip. As a reminder, here's what I created. Once you're finished, export that animation as an MP four file, upload that exported video to a hosting site like Vimeo, YouTube or Behance, and share that link with us, please. But please don't submit anything from a Cloud storage site and make sure to share on social media when you're done. These kinds of clips always look great, and I'm sure you'll get a great response on social. This technique looks pretty cool and actually doesn't take nearly as much work as people probably think. So I hope you're excited to make something. I'm looking forward to seeing what you create. Good luck. 82. 2D Layers in 3D Space: You got a quick informal introduction to three D in the last lesson, but let's take a few minutes to give you a proper understanding of what's involved in working with three D here in After Effects. This is best described as a two D program with three D capabilities. Some folks refer to it as 2.5 D. I say this to differentiate it from a dedicated three D app like Blender or Cinema four D. That said, you do get a lot of the same capabilities in After Effects. You can move and rotate layers in three D space. You can work with cameras and lighting, and you can even import three D models or create simple three D shapes with editable textures. Many of these features do come with additional complexity and specific limitations, and they can be a lot more demanding on your machine. So it's best to get a handle on the basics first. I'm just working with a few assets from our earlier lessons as a demonstration, but if it helps you to follow along, you can just grab whatever you like. I'm just working with a few assets from our earlier lessons. If it helps you to follow along, you can just grab whatever you like. I have this planet layer already opened up so you can see all the transform properties, and you can, of course, also look at it in the properties panel. I'm going to come over to my switches column right here and find this switch right here underneath this little cube icon. Clicking this will enable three D for this layer and watch what happens to the transform properties when I do it. Notice that anchor point, position, and scale all got an additional property on them for your Z values, and rotation turned from one property into four. As far as position, that mostly works the same. You can move left and right in X. You can move up and down in Y, but now you can also move towards and away from us in Z-space. You can scale things in three dimensions as well, although that's a little less common in here for reasons that will become clear in a minute. Rotation is probably the biggest change because now you need to think about multiple axes of rotation. You can do this here in the viewer using what's called the three D Gizmo. Or, of course, you can adjust the values by scrubbing them like we've done many times before. I think it's a bit easier to see what you're doing by manipulating the Gizmo, and you actually have rollovers that help you see what you're about to touch. This red circle right here will be our X rotation. And if I grab this little bubble on it, I can rotate my layer around the X axis. Et's undo that and find the Y axis. So we're rotating around this object's Y. Let's undo and find Z, which when the layer is pointed towards you, is basically the normal rotation that you're used to seeing in two D. You might notice that I've actually been adjusting the orientation property when I drag this around. And just to differentiate, notice that orientation has three degrees but no full rotations. Essentially, this is just to kind of set a starting position for your layer, and then you can animate the rotation of each of the axes beyond that. It's certainly possible to animate orientation, but you generally want to avoid that because you can't do full rotations. And when you get all the way around, it will just click back to zero. Let's reset this layer and move it back over here. I'll scale that up just a little bit. The biggest thing to understand about three D here in After Effects is that your layers are typically still flat. Let's go ahead and enable three D for these other layers so that we get a better understanding of what we're dealing with. If I take this layer and move it just a little bit towards us in Z space and then rotate my layer on X, I can actually find a place where parts of this layer are disappearing. Since we're in three D space, we now need to start worrying about layers intersecting one another. This is a little easier to see by using a secondary view. If you look down at the bottom of your viewer panel, you have this little drop down right here, and I'm going to choose two views right here. On this second view, I have this set to custom view one. You can try some of these others and see if that helps you out. Having this additional perspective can be really helpful for understanding what's actually happening. I'll select my planet layer again, and now watch what happens as I move this in Z. It's now moving relative to its current rotation. So it's actually not directly towards us. It's towards us at an angle. And you can see as I move it forwards and backwards, it's getting to a point where it's intersecting that other layer. But both of these are still just flat planes in three D space or postcards in space, as some people like to call it. So as you move layers around, you need to be attentive to not only where they are in space and in your layer stack, but actually where they are in three D space relative to one another. Let's open up the position property of both of these so that you can get a better understanding of what's happening. If I take this planet and I adjust this Z value so that it is a positive number, that means it's further away from us than our background layer that has a Z value of zero. The smaller the number, the closer it is to us. So right now, this planet layer is not visible to us because it's actually behind that space layer in Z-space, even though it's above it in the layer stack. So as you can see, this adds a whole nother literal dimension of things that you need to pay attention to when you're working with layers. You also need to pay attention to mixing two D and three D layers in the same composition, which you can absolutely do. If you look right now, you'll see that all three of these layers are three D enabled, and there's a little outline around all three of them indicating that they're grouped together in what's called a three D bin. Watch what happens if I disable three D for the rocket layer. Now that outline is only around the planet and background. But if I take the rocket layer, which is now two D and I put it between the planet and background in the layer stack, it actually breaks that three D binning. So these two layers are both in three D space, but because I've put a two D layer in between them, I've now broken that rendering relationship. This is actually something that you can do intentionally when you need to. But since you're just getting started with this, I would probably recommend against it as it has the possibility to add quite a bit of confusion. Let's set this back to a single view, and there's one more thing I want to explain. Let's go ahead and set this rocket back to be a three D layer, and you'll see that our planet disappears because, again, it is further away from us than the background. So let's go ahead and bring that towards us, bring that Z back to negative. So it's in front of that background, and we'll move the rocket towards us a bit as well and maybe rotate it a bit. So right now, we have a couple layers that all have different Z values with the rocket and planet being closer to us than that star background. If I select all three layers and precompose them, they're, of course, treated as one layer now, as you would expect. And I can enable three D for that and huh? Well, they've gone flat again. If you want to have access to that three D ness inside this precomp, there's a little magical switch that actually enables that. This little switch right here that looks a bit like a sun, we used that earlier to tell Illustrator layers to be continuously rasterizing, right? You can also use this on pre compositions to do what's called collapse transformations. And this will enable us to actually see that three D layering here on this single layer, as well as some other things that I'll explain in a minute. Watch what happens when I click this. Suddenly, those layers are out in front of the background, and notice that the layer bounds now also have depth. And when I rotate this, you can fully see that depth inside that precomp, even though we've collapsed this down into a single layer. But understand that this only works if the layers inside have already been set to be three D. I do want to offer one more warning about using collapse transformations. This also means that things like effects, blending modes, and track mats will also pass through this, and that can add a lot of room for confusion. So again, this is probably something I would steer you away from until you get a better handle on everything. Lastly, you should understand that working in three D means that now your motion paths can get quite a bit more complicated. If I enable animation for the position on this property and move up to another time, of course, I could just work in the same sort of X and Y space, and my motion path will be pretty straightforward. But if I bring Z to that party, now this motion path is actually in all three dimensions, and it becomes quite a bit more complex to work this way, especially if you have multiple layers moving in multiple dimensions at once, making the possibility for intersections go way up. As you can see, this does have a possibility of getting very complex very quickly. Now, I don't want you to get intimidated, but I did want to expose some of these to you in case you start exploring and find yourself way outside your comfort zone. But just like with the earlier parts of this course, we're going to step back and deal with the fundamentals to get you comfortable. 83. Motion Design Workflow: We've mostly worked with short and single shot examples in this course, because motion can be pretty time consuming, but I do want to make sure that you're prepared for a real project. So let's talk through what that workflow looks like. Of course, these aren't universal, but most of these will apply to any project with more than one or two shots. I really like using the metaphor of a waterfall for motion projects because it's possible to go back to an earlier step, but it's much easier to go with the flow and make sure that each step is approved by whatever stakeholders are involved before you move on to the next. You definitely don't want to spend 40 hours animating something and then be told that the script and original designs need to be totally redone, right? So these are certainly not universal, but this is a good overview of what most standard projects are probably going to involve and the order in which they should happen. You're typically going to start out with a concept of some kind, whether that's just bullet points or examples of the kind of look that you're after. And that will typically be developed into a script, which might have fully scripted dialogue and descriptions of the visuals so that you can make sure that you have all the pieces that you need in both and are communicating the message that you're after. Your actual visuals might start as rough pencil sketches, and those can be developed into a full storyboard, where each chunk of dialogue or description is lined up with those visuals. Those get approved, those can start being refined into the final design frames, and at the same time, either the sketches or the final designs can be used to create what's called an animatic, where you use those visuals, either the rough or refined ones, along with any voiceover, which again, can be either rough or final and ideally something that's representative of the final music to help give you the pacing and feel. An animatic is really helpful for developing a sense of what the final piece is going to feel like in a rough form before actually putting all that time into the animation. This is helpful both for you and potentially for your stakeholders. Once that is locked in and or approved, you can move on to some rough animation, where you might just be doing simple blocking passes or just kind of marking out the major beats of the script. You might refine one or two shots at this stage, just to make sure that the final feel makes sense. Again, before you move on and animate the entire project. Once your stakeholders feel good about that, then you can dive in and finish refining the rest of the animation and make everything feel more final. After that, that's when you can do your final visual polish and those adjustment layer finishing touches that just bring everything home. This is also when you would want to do your final sound mix because the timing is locked, and that way you won't be wasting time mixing sound on something that might still have timing changes. Once that's all done, you deliver the final files in whatever format is appropriate, archive your project, and move on to the next one. 84. Add Perspective to a Flat Image: We're going to use some of this new three D knowledge to create a dynamic perspective shift as a way of helping to make a static image more interesting and engaging. But instead of moving the layer itself, we're going to create and animate a virtual camera. I've already imported this image, which is just a screen capture from the NASA website, and you can see that I captured this at four K. We're going to be working at 19:20 by 1080, so having a larger image gives me a lot of flexibility to get closer without losing quality. I'll start by creating a new compositions. And I'm just going to use this 1920 by 108030 frame per second preset. You can use anything similar. 4 seconds seems like a good duration for this, and the background color doesn't matter. So I'll just hit Okay. And I'll grab that image and just drag it directly into my compositions. You'll see that it's too big for the frame right now, but that's actually good. Next up, we'll create a camera. We actually did this earlier as part of a tracking lesson, but we're going to create one from scratch and animate it ourselves. You can come up to the Layer menu and choose new camera, or you can press Control Alt Shift C, or, of course, Command Option Shift C. Or you can come down to the empty area here, right click and choose new camera. You'll get this pop up that gives you all kinds of options for creating the camera. The first place you probably want to visit is this preset drop down. 50 millimeter is the closest focal length to the human eye, and it's kind of a good middle ground. If you go to the extremes here, you can have an extremely wide angle lens or a telephoto lens, and these will have an impact on the way your scene looks and the way the camera behaves. I would definitely recommend making yourself a sample scene like we used in the previous lesson, and just try out some different focal lengths and see how they affect the way everything looks. Leave the set to 50. I'll also just point out that because this is a virtual camera, you can make any of these settings be pretty much anything. I could set this focal length to 2 millimeters. They don't have to be things that are possible in the real world. So again, feel free to experiment and try out all kinds of crazy stuff in here. The other setting I should point out is up here. The default is a two node camera, and I'll explain what that means in a minute with some visuals. You could set this to a one node camera, which some people find a little easier to work with. But I think for this example, two node is going to be much more intuitive. Then I'll just press Okay. And before we do any work with our camera, we need to make sure that this other layer is set to three D so that the camera movements actually show us something. To help you understand what's going on, I'm going to go back to this dual view and make sure that my second one is set to custom view one. But again, you can choose a different view over here if that helps you understand better. I'll zoom out a bit on this right side so that you can actually see what we're looking at. On the left, we're viewing our composition through the camera. And here on the right, you can see both our layer in three D space and that virtual camera that has the same three D layer controls that we saw in the previous lesson, as well as the area that it is currently looking at. So as we use the controls to move the camera around, you're going to actually see this camera move and adjust itself in three D space. I'll select my left composition again, and I accidentally selected my layer as part of clicking over here so you can see that it took those three D controls. But we don't want to animate the layer. In fact, just to be safe, I'll come down here and lock that layer so that we can't accidentally move it. But looking over here in this left viewer, I'm going to use the camera tools to adjust our view. You can find each of these up here in your toolbar. Here's the orbit tool that rotates the camera, the PayNTol that moves you in X and Y, and the dolly tool that moves you in Z. You'll see that each of these has additional options underneath it, but we're just going to be using the top one for each of these. You can come up here and click these buttons, but of course, these have shortcut keys. You can cycle through each of them by using the C key. So right now I'm on the orbit. I'll press C once, and now I'm on the Pan tool. I'll press it one more time, and now I'm on the dolly tool, which will move me in and out from the scene. You can also temporarily activate each of these by using the one, two, and three keys at the top of your keyboard. So holding the one key will give me the orbit tool temporarily until I release it. Holding the two key will give me the pan tool, and holding the three key would give me the dolly tool if I didn't already have it selected. So you can use either of those, whichever is more comfortable for you. I'm going to start by using the dolly tool, which is moving our camera away from the image as I click and drag. And if I come back far enough, you'll see the edges of our image, which we obviously don't want here. I'm going to create a dynamic move zoomed in from this area and then pulling back to see the whole frame. But we can use this to create some interesting angles, and this can be a really great way to bring some life to a static image that you need to include in a video and to help your viewers focus on a specific part of the image and then reveal the whole thing. I'm going to use this dolly tool to get us nice and close here and then switch over to my pan tool to adjust the view, Dolly in a bit more. Pan tool. I have this great little framed area, and I haven't adjusted my orbit tool at all yet. So I'm still facing straight on this image. I just adjusted the camera's position and dolly. I'll select my camera and open this up. And you'll see that this camera layer has most of the same controls that we're used to. But instead of an anchor point, it has something called a point of interest. And looking over at the right viewer, you can actually see this. Here's the position of my camera, and we can rotate the camera around its current point, but you can also select the point of interest and actually move this around to change what your camera is looking at without changing its position. Pretty cool, right? Let's go ahead and undo that. A one node camera will not have a point of interest. That control just won't exist. So you can adjust the camera's position and rotation, but you won't have a control to specifically determine what it's looking at. For some projects, that will be simpler, and for others, that would make things harder. You'll just need to determine what's right for you in each context. For this one, I want to be able to determine what the cameras looking at. So when we animate this, we'll need to keyframe both the point of interest and the position. So let's create those and move up a bit. Let's say to about 3 seconds here. I'll come back over here and use my camera tools to adjust the view. Let's dolly back out so that we can see what we're doing. Pan over. And this would be okay. It would just be sort of a simple Zoom. Honestly, you could achieve the same thing by just scaling the layer. So that's not very interesting. Let's use the orbit tool and give ourselves a nice dynamic angle here. You'll probably need to use all three of these controls in combination with one another until you find what you're looking for. And you do need to be careful that you don't accidentally show some of the edges as you're making these adjustments. If you're using a different image, of course, your settings are going to be a bit different than mine. Let's try a quick preview and see what this looks like. Okay, not too bad. I think a slightly more dynamic angle might be even more interesting. Let me see if I can do that without losing my edges here. Just kind of keep navigating this. And if I can find just the right spot. I think that's pretty good. Let's finest these keyframes a bit. I'll move these in, select all of them and Easy Ease, let's go ahead and open up the graph editor. Now, because these are both position like properties, I will not be able to use the value graph here, so I'll need to make sure I'm set to the speed graph. I'm going to select both of these at once. Bring those in, and let's bring in those landing keys as well and see how that feels. Nice. So, this gives me a great way to frame a specific area of interest to direct the viewers attention to that and then pull out to show the whole frame. If you ever decide you don't like what you've done, you can, of course, reset the camera right here. There's also a special control to reset cameras that you may have noticed when I was in this menu earlier. You can actually reset either view that is currently selected. I happen to be selected on the custom view right now, so I can reset that if I had made any adjustments to it. Or I can come back out, select over here, and reset that to the default view if that's what I wanted. But of course, right now, I don't finish this up, let's go back to the single view. Zoom in and watch our final preview. This technique can also be really effective with moving footage, especially a screen capture like this. You just need to be a lot more mindful about timing and coordinating movements so that you aren't creating distractions with one or the other. 85. Class Project 14 - 3D Camera Moves: Once again, it is class project time, and we have an upcoming presentation that's going to need a handful of static images. So we were wondering if there's anything that you can do to make those feel more interesting. Composition length, size, and frame rate are again going to be up to you. I would suggest using a 1920 by 1080 frame because it's pretty easy to get images larger than that, and that will give you plenty of flexibility. We would like you to collect three different images that are relevant to your destination. And again, it's ideal if you can save those as at least double the frame size. So that would be four K or if you find them even larger, that gives you even more flexibility without any quality loss. We're looking for you to create a short dynamic camera move for each image and then assemble those together into a single video. Now, you could do each of these in its own composition. Or if you want to, you could do all three of these in one composition with the same camera. You just need to be a little bit more mindful about your trimming and your keyframe. This is going to be a good opportunity to practice working with cameras in a few different ways. Practice finessing those keyframes and ideally, find a way to make those three shots, feel like they work together and don't have huge abrupt jumps between them, if possible. Once you're done, as always, please export your animation as an MP four video file. Upload your exported video to a video hosting site and share that link with us. Don't submit anything to Cloud storage sites and share this on social media when you're done. This would be a great little exercise to get comfortable with three D cameras and just three D space in general. Good luck. 86. Create a Parallax Effect: For this lesson, we'll be working with some artwork that I created in Illustrator. Let's just take a quick look at the layers we have to work with. We have some background sky, a couple of moons, this rocket ship that we'll be planning to animate across the sky, a few layers of mountains, and then buildings in background, middle, and foreground. Here in After Effects, I am importing that file as a composition layer size. And you'll see that that frame size is quite a bit different than what we would normally work at. We'll be addressing that in just a moment. Let's go ahead and open that up. And of course, it would be possible to animate a scene like this totally in two D. We would have to select each layer, open this up, and adjust those positions. But then we would need to do the same for each other layer, and on each one, we would need to adjust it a little bit less, and that gets pretty hard when you're dealing with a lot of layers like this. There's a lot of back and forth adjusting each one, and it's possible it just gets pretty fiddly. In real life, the further away from your eye something is, the less it appears to move as you shift your perspective. We can replicate this here in After Effects by moving the layers further away from us, and then we'll once again be using the camera as our primary way to animate this scene. I'm going to bring this up a bit to give us more room to work in the timeline. Let's do a little bit of housekeeping before we start animating. Thinking through our layers, we have our sky background and these two moons which are not really going to need to move relative to the sky. And as I said, I'm planning to animate this rocket across the sky, but it's also so far away that it's essentially going to be on the same plane as the sky, and I don't think I need to deal with the complexity of a three D motion path here. So what makes the most sense is just to select all four of these layers and precompose them. So we'll just treat those as one piece and animate the rocket inside that precomp. Let's do a little bit of quick color coding. And set all of these layers to be three D. Now that we've got everything imported and set up, I'm going to update the composition settings. So we'll come up here, composition settings, or you could hit Control or Command K, and I'll just set this to one of these 1920 by 1080 presets. I'm using 24 frames per second. And since these layers are all much wider than our compositions, now we've got plenty of room to slide back and forth. We just need to create a camera. So I'll just right click down here, new camera. I think that 50 millimeter preset is going to work great again. This time, a one node camera is going to be perfect. We're not changing the orientation of this camera at all or changing where it's looking. We're just literally moving the camera across the scene. So we won't be taking advantage of a point of interest at all, so it's easier to just not have one. This is easy enough to do in a single view, but I'm going to go ahead and open up that second one to help you see what's happening. So right now you can see our camera is looking at all of these layers, but since they all have the same Z position, it's just a flat scene. I can move this camera around, but it looks like I'm just moving around on a single image, right? But if we start moving these layers back in Z-space, we're going to create that depth that's going to look great as we move the camera. Now, we could totally do this manually by opening up the Z positions, and we could leave buildings one at zero, but set buildings two back maybe 200, tab our way through and set the next buildings at 400. Maybe we leave a little gap between the mountains, so we'll set those at 800, 11,200. And then we'll create some more space again for the background and set that way back at 2000. As you can see in the custom view, we've now created a lot of depth in the scene. And if you look back on the left side, you can see that depth, but we did create a problem also in that as the layers get further away, we're actually going to need to scale each of them back up so that they sit in their original positions. You can absolutely work this way, and when you need to be precise, this is a good way to go. But if you would like to easily move all the layers back in a proportional way, there's actually a really fast way to do that. I'll quickly undo to get us back to our starting values. And then I'll come down to my timeline, select buildings one, hold Shift, and select Sky VG. So I'm being intentional about selecting them in that order. Now if I hold Control and Alt or command and Option on Mac and scrub the Z value, it's going to adjust the bottom one and change everything in between in a proportional way. Watch this. I'm going to try to scrub that background all the way back to about 2000 and notice how everyone in between is getting incrementally changed all the way back to zero change on that first layer. And now since we have them all selected, I can just hit S to reveal the scale and do the same thing here to get those scaled back up to the proper size. And with just a quick check on our Camera tool, look at that beautiful parallax that we've got now. I think we're ready to animate. So I'm going to go ahead and close this back to a single view. I don't find this one very helpful for what I'm doing right now. I just wanted you to understand that depth that we're creating. So thinking about our scene, I'm going to have the rocket flying from about here over to here. Let's maybe have that camera track right along. I think right about there is probably a good starting place so that we're not losing the edge of anything here. We can open up our camera. And notice, again, we have no point of interest here, but we can animate the position, jump up to the end of our composition, and just slide it over using that pan tool. Let's do a quick preview. Great. I'll just press you to collapse that. Let's go ahead and animate that rocket. I'll just jump up to the beginning. I'll just open this all the way up because I'm planning to animate the position, scale rotation and maybe the opacity a little bit, too. I'll start this over here and then move it about like this. Let's use our Pen tool to give just a little bit of arc, and then I'll adjust the rotation so that it looks like it's following that line. There is a setting to make it just follow along a path automatically, but often I find it's nicer to just do it yourself. Now, I'll adjust the scale down a little bit to make it feel like it's getting further away, and to help really sell that, if I bring down the opacity a little bit, that'll feel a bit like it's disappearing into the atmosphere as it gets further away. Pretty straightforward, right? I think we're good with that rocket. Let's come back to the other composition and see how they feel together. Nice. Now, I'm seeing just a little bit peeking through here at the bottom. Looks like I may be caught the bottom of one of those layers. And this happens sometimes when you've moved everything back and scaled it up. I might need to adjust the positions of a few of these just a little bit. Let's get rid of that background here. Just move those mountains down just enough so that there's no issue here and just take a quick look at each of our other layers. Maybe I could move this layer up a little bit. I'm kind of just doing this to eye both by looking at the bounding boxes and seeing what they actually show us in the viewer. Alright, that's pretty solid. We could totally be finished here, but these virtual cameras have another great feature that we can take advantage of depth of field. If you look over here in the camera options, you'll see depth of field right here. And there's plenty of other settings that we're not going to play with today. But we can enable depth of field, and then we'll have a few controls that determine how it looks. I'm going to turn these settings up quite a bit to help make it really clear what's happening. You'll generally want to be a little more subtle here than the numbers that I'm using. I'm going to turn my aperture up to about 50, and let's set the blur level to, I don't know, 300. You should already be able to see some softening in the background. Now for this focus distance, we want to make sure that the layer that we want the most in focus is exactly this distance from our camera. So looking over here, we see that our camera is at -2,666.7, and of course, our first layer of buildings is right at zero on Z. So this value right here is what we want in our focus distance. So we'll just set that to 2,666.7. Front layer is now perfectly sharp. Let's bring our CTI up to about 2.5 seconds and create a keyframe for the focus distance. You can change this value over time and create a focus poll to shift which layers are in focus. I'll come up here to 5 seconds. And now if we want the very back layer to be in focus, we just need to calculate what that distance is. Looking at that layer, we ended up at 1983 on Z. Since After Effects helps us do the math, we'll just type in plus 1983. And now that sky background layer is perfectly in focus, and the buildings in front are nice and soft. I'll set this aperture even just a little bit higher to really make this clear. And let's come down here, easy ease these keyframes and try a quick preview. We're once again using these techniques to help the viewer's eye focus on what's important. Just by adding this dimension, we can help them focus on the foreground and then point their eyes right back to that rocket. I think this looks pretty nice, but I've got just a couple final details. One thing I'm noticing is up front, we have this lovely BCA from our stars, but right now it's just a square. That's because the iris shape is set to the fastest possible option, which is a rectangle. We can set this to a polygon with more sides to make it a bit more realistic. I think a hexagon is probably going to be plenty for this example. You may not be able to see it very well in the recording, but the stars changed from little squares to a much more round shape. I also feel like with this lovely Boca that we're getting, having some more stars would really help play that up. So I'm going to come back into that composition and add some more stars using that technique that we did earlier. Let's close this up and create a new solid. We'll make sure that it's white and name it stars. We'll grab CC Starburst. Set that speed to zero, and maybe just turn down the size until it feels good. About there, we'll put that back here, maybe adjust the grid spacing just a bit so that those aren't feeling quite so dense. There we go. So now we have some hero stars and some good just sort of background fill stars. And look at the difference that makes. Alright, let's try a final preview. I will note that changing the shape of this iris definitely makes the previews take longer to build. So you'll definitely want to do most of your work with the faster settings and save that change for the end. 87. Class Project 15 - 3D Parallax Scene: I hope you've got time for one more class project because we're putting together a proposal for future space colony developments, and we would love it if you could create a short visualization of some of the possibilities that we'll have. Once again, the composition length, size, and frame rate are up to you. I do recommend you using something pretty standard here, but if you wanted to make this more vertical, for example, that would be just fine. We would like you to create or assemble a scene with at least five layers arranged in Z-space to create depth. I've provided the design from my demo, which you're free to reuse and recolor, however you like, or, of course, you can make your own. Once you've got that design set up, create and animate a one node camera moving across the scene to create a parallax effect. Feel free to add some extra bonus stuff like depth of field or some objects moving across the screen. You could have that rocket ship or other spaceships or create some more motion in the foreground layers. It's totally up to you. As a reminder, here's where I ended up using all of that. Once you're done, export your animation as an MP four file, upload that to a video hosting site and share that link with us. As always, please don't submit links to any Cloud storage sites, and make sure to share this on social media when you're done so that other people can see all your great work. I hope you have some fun with this one. Good luck. 88. Work More Efficiently: Now that your projects are becoming a bit more complex, there are a few things in the preferences I want to make sure you're aware of. Looking down here at disc, there's something called the disk cache that After Effects takes advantage of when it builds your previews. Ideally, you would want this to be on a dedicated, fast hard drive. If you don't have that, just be aware that After Effects will take just a little bit longer to process if it's sharing that same drive with your operating system, your project files, and your source media. It will also use up as much space as you give it. So if you only have one hard drive on your computer, After Effects is going to fill up this space, and that may end up with you having a very overfilled hard drive. So I really recommend you come in here, check this out and make sure that you're being mindful about where this is and how much space you are giving to After Effects. If you are moving this to somewhere else, I would make sure to empty your disk cache before you leave those files where they already are. You won't lose anything here. After Effects will just regenerate those next time you build previews. You also want to check out here in memory and CPU. After Effects will use up basically as much of your RAM as you give it, but you want to be mindful about how much RAM you reserve for other apps that you might be using. And especially if you're planning to also have Premiere or Photoshop open while you're working in After Effects, you want to make sure that you're not starving those apps of RAM because then they're going to be very slow and maybe lock up your machine. Generally speaking, the more RAM you have on your machine, the more you probably want to allocate here. If you have 32 gigs, you probably want to reserve six to eight. If you have 64, you probably want to reserve eight to ten. That number, again, is going to vary a bit depending on your system, but if you are seeing performance issues, this is a good place to check. Another good way to work efficiently is making good use of the preview panel. We looked at this in a very simple form earlier, but understanding some of the options in here can really save you a lot of time. For example, you can preview just the range that your work area is currently set to, which is usually my preference, but you can also set these to look at the entire duration or your work area extended by the current time, meaning where your CTI is if it's outside of your work area. You can also choose to play from the start of that work area. That's the range or your current time, wherever that may be. Here are the ones that really save you a lot of time. This resolution is usually set to auto by default, but you can also set this to some specific resolution, and this will actually override whatever your composition viewer is currently set to. So if you set this to quarter, all of your previews will actually be built at quarter resolution, meaning they will happen much faster, but look a little worse. For certain stages of your animation, though, that's a really smart way to work. You can also tell After Effects to skip frames if you only need to see sort of the main idea and not every individual frame right now. Skipping every other frame means your previews will literally be built in half the time. Let's set this back to Auto. And the real power move is up here, you actually have several different shortcuts that you can use to create previews, and each one will have its own set of options that you set up. So perhaps I want Spacebar to be a preview that creates every frame and does it at whatever resolution my viewer is already set to. But I could set Shift plus Space Bar to be a quarter resolution preview that skips to every fifth frame, meaning it's going to be very quick and dirty but very fast. As with most things in After Effects, take a few minutes to look through this and explore the options and make it work for you. I would generally recommend against adjusting the frame rate here in the panel unless you're being very intentional about what you're doing. Most of the time, I just consider that a good recipe for confusion. Speaking of faster previews, you can also use a strategy called pre rendering when you have a project that involves several smaller pieces, and maybe some of them get to the point where they're essentially done, but they're still slowing you down when you need to make previews of the whole timeline. For example, let's say that this bar graph section of this project was all done and locked up, but I'm still working on the other pieces. Obviously, this is a pretty simple project, but if this was a more complex animation, it might actually be faster to jump into this precomp, render this one out, and just bring that file back in here as the top layer. That way, After Effects won't have to think about generating the preview from all the layers in here, it will just look at that video file, and that allows you to work much faster out here in this timeline as you're building the whole thing. And lastly, as of After Effects 2026, we have a great tool for quickly looking for effects, menu commands, presets, and more. If you press Control or Command Enter, it will bring up a menu called Quick apply that gives you access to basically everything searchable within this program. But of course, you have to know what you're looking for. All you need to do is type in the name like fractal noise. And you'll see anything that matches that or comes close to matching that. This search is actually pretty squishy, so I could also just type Fn. And fractal noise still comes up, but so do anything else that would match FN, like frame number. You'll notice that menu commands are also in here. So if I typed NF, New folder qualifies for that. And as with most things in here, you can actually customize this. So if you'd like to change which things are visible in here, you can do that. And if you would like to change which shortcut brings this menu up, you can change that up in your keyboard shortcuts. 89. Exporting Tips: Video files can get large, so we want to make sure that we're using the correct settings when exporting. As we know from earlier, when you're ready to export animation, simply come up to composition, add to render Q, and in many cases, the default settings in here are going to be just fine for you. But let's take a look at what you can do if you want to change these. This drop down menu right here gives you several presets, including a few quick options for a lower quality h264 or a higher quality h264. These are all good as final deliveries, or you can use other presets like high quality. This is going to create a completely different file format. It will be an MOV file using a video codec called Pro Rs. This is a good intermediate or working format for you to use internally, but not so great to deliver. Video encoding technology is a whole separate rabbit hole, but I do want to show you the options that you have in here. With any of these presets, you can simply click on the name after you've created it to customize that. You'll be able to choose different formats, set post render actions like being able to import a file as soon as it's done rendering, that sounds handy, right? And then if you know what you're doing, you can come in here to the format options and choose various settings in here. Many formats will also allow you to export with Alpha or transparency. So you can export video files that include transparency information or one that only includes that transparency information and not the visual channels. Whether that's available or not will depend on which formats you're using. You have additional options to resize and crop, although I don't typically do that in here, and then down at the bottom, you have additional options for audio. If you find that you have a custom setting that you would like to reuse, down here at the bottom of this preset menu, you can make template and use those same settings that I just showed you to create a new template for yourself so you don't have to set it up every single time. You can export multiple videos at once from the Render Queue. I'll just duplicate this one a few times to show you what that looks like. Generally, you would do this with different compositions, of course. And you can line all these up and click Render, but, of course, that ties up After Effects while you're doing it. So if you have a powerful enough machine, instead of lining things up in the Render Queue, you can take advantage of Adobe Media Encoder. With your desired composition or compositions selected, you can also choose composition, add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Once you select that, it will open Adobe Media Encoder and line up any compositions that you selected into a queue here in Media Encoder. The workflow is very similar. We simply click on this right here, and now we'll get a pop up with additional settings that we can adjust. Once you're ready, you simply click on this green play button right here to render everything in the queue, and you can actually go back to After Effects and work on other things in the meantime. 90. Archive & Share Projects: When you're finished with a project and you're ready to archive it or if you need to transfer it to someone else or a different machine, there are a few commands that can be really helpful for that. If you come up to file dependencies, you'll find a few things in here. Collect files does exactly what the name sounds like. Once you click on that, you'll have a few options. You'll generally want to leave the set for all, but you can do just specific compositions if you'd prefer. After Effects will tell you how big the collected file will be, and then you click Collect and find a place on your hard drive to save it. The bigger the file is, the longer it will take to collect. And as soon as it's done, you'll have a folder with the After Effects project, something named footage that will recreate your folder structure from the project panel and any files that you used in this project. You'll want to find this folder that it created, and this is what you want to transfer to another machine or to your archives. If you want to clean up an existing project before you collect or just as you're working, there are a few other good commands under dependencies. These three right here can help you clean up a project. Consolidate all footage, means that if you've imported the same file into a project more than once, it will just get rid of those extra copies for you. Remove unused footage does exactly what the name says, and it gets rid of any files that you are not using in any compositions. Reduce project is the more aggressive version of that, and it will get rid of anything that's not in the selected compositions. So before using Reduce, you'd want to select something. Let's say I wanted to only select what was in this line graph composition. Then I'd come up to file dependencies, reduce project, and it will throw away anything that's not included in that specific composition. And it tells you how many items. That means files, compositions, and things like solids that it got rid of. Reduce is very handy, but obviously it's destructive. So make sure you use it intentionally, and after you've done it, don't save over anything that you wanted to keep. 91. Integrate with Premiere Pro: We've seen that After Effects has good integrations with Photoshop and Illustrator, but it also works really nicely with Adobe's Video Editing app Premiere. If you're creating graphics for a longer video, of course, we could export these pieces as video files and then import them into Premiere and work with them like any other clip. But if you need to make updates, it becomes a lot of back and forth and a lot of unnecessary rendering. You can actually place an After Effects composition directly into Premiere without rendering. If you have an existing After Effects project with a composition you'd like to use, from Premiere, simply come up to file import and navigate to the After Effects project you'd like to use. You can also just drag the After Effects project from your file browser directly into Premiere Pro panel. You'll then get this pop up and be able to choose which composition you'd like. I only have one in this case, and I'll press Okay. And now that composition is imported into the project. If you have both apps open, from After Effects, you can actually select the composition that you want to bring to Premiere and literally just drag it down to your dock until your machine flips back over to Premiere. Drag that into the project panel and release. In either case, notice that you have this little composition icon with a link. That's telling you that it's live linked to that project. I'll add this to my timeline, and you'll see that it works like any other clip. There's my animation. But watch this. If I flip back to After Effects and make a change like turning off this background, once I flip back to Premiere, I see that update immediately. Now I could use this graphic over these clips with transparency. This actually works in the other direction, too. If I wanted to take this edit and bring it into After Effects, I could just drag that down to my dock and drop that into the After Effects project panel. And now I get a linked sequence. I could drop that into a composition, and After Effects treats it like one clip. But once again, this is live linked. So if I changed anything about this edit or replaced any of the clips, I would see that updated immediately in After Effects. Say you're working on an edit and you need to push one of the clips over into After Effects to do some additional animation work. You can simply highlight a clip or multiple clips, right click on it, and choose replace with After Effects composition. This flips over to After Effects or opens it if it's not already and creates a new composition using that clip or clips. If I make any updates to this, like just adding a random shape here, if I look back in premiere, that's now a live linked After Effects composition that's just sitting in my edit where that clip previously was. Want this to be even easier. You can literally just grab a clip or clips from your Premiere timeline. Copy it, flip over to After Effects and paste and voila. Now your clip is in After Effects. Premiere also has a panel called graphics Templates. This is filled with customizable animated templates that come installed on your system, or you can download more from Adobe Stock or build your own. These can be anything from a full screen animation to smaller elements like an animated name title. Here's one I created myself. We'll just bring this onto our Premiere timeline like any other clip. And once I select this, my properties panel gives me access to all the properties that I can update. Let's change the guest name. Open up this customizable photo area, and I can just drop on a new image that I've imported into my project, nudge that over a bit, and maybe even update the colors. Now this fully animated title is ready to go, fully customized in just a few clicks. These motion graphics templates are great for making polished animated elements accessible to almost anyone, and they're also an efficient way to make repeated elements like episode titles, name graphics, charts, and more easy to work with and quick to customize, either for you or your team. 92. More to Explore!: Even with everything we've covered, there's so much more to explore in After Effects. There are features we've just barely scratched the surface of and plenty more we didn't even get a chance to talk about yet. This program has literally hundreds of effects, and you could probably make an entire course just covering their most obvious uses, let alone all the interesting ways that they can be combined. Understanding effects will give you tons of new creative problem solving possibilities and will really level up your After Effects game. Three D is another topic with a ton of complexity left to be explored. There are multiple kinds of lights that you can add to your scenes, creating dynamic shadows. After Effects actually has multiple three D rendering engines with their own capabilities and limitations, and you can use these to do things like extrude text layers and import existing three D models, including animated ones. You can also create native three D shapes and apply complex materials to them that you can edit without leaving After Effects. If you're more technically minded, expressions go much deeper than just wiggle. They allow you to work faster and even automate many day to day animation tasks. You can use them to connect different property types in dynamic ways and even drive entire projects with data from a spreadsheet. And, of course, they're the basis of creating more responsive templates that can be exported as Mgerts for use by you or your team in Premiere. The features that will matter most to you probably depend on what you're actually using After Effects for. So we would love to hear about what you would like to see in a future course. 93. What's Next?: First of all, congratulations on making it through the course. I know this has been a ton of info, and I'm so proud of you for sticking with me. I'm sure that your brain is pretty full right now and you definitely deserve a little break. But when you're ready to keep advancing, this video is about what to do next to continue developing these skills. Now, obviously, the best way to keep improving at anything is just to keep doing it, right? Make more work. This can mean creating projects for clients, and, hey, getting paid is always nice, right? You can also create personal projects. Look around for online collaborations and competitions. These are great ways to come up with new ideas and new ways to challenge yourself. Creative problem solving is obviously a huge part of all of this, so make sure you take the initiative to keep pushing yourself and keep learning. The Internet is full of resources for people who know how to ask the right questions. Of course, learning more about After Effects itself is great, but since this app and this whole discipline combines multiple different skill sets like design, filmmaking, animation, storytelling, and more, there are also lots of ways that you can keep pushing your motion graphics development forward without even being in After Effects itself. This site offers courses in a lot of related Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator, which are really important for being able to adapt downloaded elements or create elements for your own designs. Or you can also check out a course on Premiere if you're looking to get more into video editing. If you don't already have a background in graphic design, learning more about design principles, good composition and color theory will make all of your projects look that much better. You can also learn more about three D apps like Blender, which will open up literally a new dimension of possibilities for your multimedia projects. And, hey, if you actually want to get away from the computer sometime, which I recommend, remember to find other things out in the world that interest and inspire you. You never know what might trigger that next great project idea. If you enjoyed this course, make sure to let other people know what you thought about it and what kind of cool stuff they could be making if they took it too. Maybe you could even find yourself a new creative collaborator that way. I know you've probably been doing this as you went along, but make sure to share the work that you completed as part of this course. Show it off and be proud of what you've made. Getting feedback from others is extremely helpful, and giving feedback to others is just as helpful. So make sure you do that, too. Also, this can be a really great time to look back at your earlier work, especially just what you made at the beginning of this course and look at how far you've come. And remember, with practice and dedication, you'll only keep getting better from here. Alright, that's it. After Effects essentials, complete. I hope you learned a ton, enjoyed spending this time with me, and are super excited to make so many cool new projects. Welcome to the amazing universe of motion graphics. Take care, and I can't wait to see what you create.