Adobe After Effects: The main course

1. 1.1-Introduction: Hello and welcome to my brand new course on Adobe After Effects CC. My name is Martin, and I've been teaching about programs such as After Effects, Photoshop, illustrator, and others for over 12 years. In this nine hour course, I'm going to teach you all you need to know to create dazzling animations with Adobe After Effects. You will learn how to animate layers in many different ways, creating an animating texts and shapes, working in 3D, compositing animations into video, camera and motion tracking, and much, much more. Each chapter comes with many files with which you can follow along and use to create your own animations. So let's dive right in and get started with Adobe After Effects. 2. 1.2-The After Effects interface: In this lesson, I will give you a quick tour of the After Effects interface. And this is the screen that you will see when you launch the program. We have here the possibility to create a new project or open an existing project. We have a Home tab where we can see the most recent opened files and a Learn tab where you can watch some tutorials about working with After Effects on the Adobe website. We also have the possibility to create a new team project allowing you to invite others who also have access to After Effects to work on the same project concurrently. So several people can work on a project at the same time, or you can open a team project from here as well. I'm just going to click through this home screen actually by clicking the X at the top right on Windows, which will be on the top left on Mac, you can always get back to that splash screen, the start screen by pressing this Home button here at the top left. Now, quickly about the interface, I have here a menu where we can access different functions of the program, such as creating a new project or opening, or saving, importing and exporting media. We have below that a toolbar, which we will be looking at in future chapters. But I have a selection tool, a hand tool, zoom tool, and some other tools that we can use to create and manipulate things. I have here the project panel where our files will be organized. In. Here will be our compositions are Illustrator files, our Photoshop files, etc. All stuff that we create, an import. Here we have the actual composition panel where the video will be displayed. On the right-hand side, we have these panels for effects and presets, for example, which you can expand by clicking them and collapse by clicking them. Again, we have here some character formatting for texts on the Align panel, a library's panel, and some other panels. At the bottom here, on the left, I have the layers and on the right is where the timeline will be displayed, which I will show you in a little bit. Now, at the top here we have different workspaces that we can use for different functions. I usually leave it set to default, but you can also go into review. And that just changes how these panels are organized and which panels are available here on the right. So I can switch to a small screen, for example. And that's going to give me a larger composition panel. Or I can switch to standard or the libraries workspace, where we just have a library's panel here on the right-hand side. But usually I stick to default and summon whichever other panel I would need from the window menu. Speaking of the Window menu, you can always go in here. And for example, select, let's say the audio panel. That's just going to add it to this bar, the sidebar here on the right-hand side. So now it's in there. And if I want to remove a panel because I'm not using it or because it's taking up a lot of space, I can always click on the hamburger menu at the top right of the panel and then choose Close Panel. Now, if you're working with two or more screens, it can be useful to put different panels on a different screen. So let's say I want to undock this info panel and just put it in its own little area. What I can do that and it's just click and drag out of there and release it anywhere. Here, for example. And that's going to put the info panel here in this part of the workspace. I can also choose to undock the panel by right, by clicking the hamburger menu. And that's gonna give me this info panel floating in its own window. When I close out this panel, Let's say that I have removed a panel from the interface, or I've moved different parts of the interface around and I just want to go back to the default. I wanted to go back to the way it looked before. What you can do then is just reset the workspace by going into the window, window menu and then choosing workspace, and then choose reset, the workspace that you've chosen to saved layout. And that's going to put it back here. Just for demonstration purposes. I'm going to create a new composition. We will be going over the settings for new compositions in a future video. But I just want something to show you the actual timeline. So I'm going to click New Composition here in the composition panel and just use the default settings and click. Okay. That's going to give me a composition which is also visible here in the Project panel. And now I actually have a timeline here. We don't have any actual layers yet. We will look at that in a separate video. But here I have the timeline through which I can scrub by grabbing this playhead and clicking and dragging the mouse around. Now, there are some toggles and switches here at the bottom, a couple of which are actually pretty useful. Here I have a button for toggled transparency grid, and that's going to overrule the background color that is set for the composition, which for me is currently set to black. And that's going to show actual transparencies. So these checkerboard patterns indicate transparency in After Effects. That is a quick tour of the After Effects interface. In the next video, I am going to teach you all about compositions. 3. 1.3-Creating Compositions: In this lesson, I'm going to teach you all about creating compositions and compositions. You can see for now as new documents that you create within After Effects. You can have compositions within compositions, within compositions, but that's a concept that we will explore later when we start talking about pre compositions. Now, here in After Effects, I currently have a blank project and I'm just going to click here on New Composition. Alternatively, you can press Control N on Windows or Command N on the Mac. Or you can go into the composition menu at the top and then choose new composition. That's going to bring us to this pop up where we can determine the options for our composition. So for our initial video, first thing we can do is name our composition and that's the name that's going to be displayed in the project panel here. For now, I'm just going to leave this set to comp one. And comp then obviously stands for composition. Here we have a number of presets that we can choose from. I usually don't use these, but if you're looking for a four K 25 frames per second preset, then you can explore those options here. Or if you just want standard HDTV with a certain frame rate of 2425 or 30. That's also something you can choose here and we'll get to what those settings actually mean later in this video and the next videos. You can also click on the width and the height to enter your own sizes. So let's say you want to create something for Instagram, for real. So for example, you will want to switch these so you want a width of 1080 and a height of 1920s. So you can just click in here and enter those manually. So I can make this 1080 wide by 1920 tall. Pixel aspect ratio is always set to square pixels unless you're working with certain video format. So you can always leave that on. And here we choose the frame rate. The frame rate is important and I'm going to spend some time talking about that in a separate video. But basically, video is just a sequence of images within a file. And the number of images per second is what is called the frame rate. Now, most video is shot on either 24 frames per second, Twenty-five frames, frames per second, or 30 frames per second depending on where you're from. Because in the US it's actually 30 frames per second by default. And in Europe it's either 2425. But you can also increase this frame rate for more fluid motion and less motion blur when you are working with motion blur, which we will also get to in a separate video. The resolution that we can choose here. It doesn't have anything to do with our eventual file format. This is just a preview resolution. And if I'm just making some basic animations, then I usually leave this set to full. You can change the start time code of the composition, um, and that is not actually useful in this case. But if you're working with important imported video from a camera, by default, the timecode will be set to whatever the timecode on the camera is. But for now we're just going to leave this at 0. And even when I'm working with imported footage from my camera, I usually set this back to 0. But you will see that later in this chapter. Here we can specify the duration of our composition. So that is going to be the duration of the video initially, we can always change this later when we actually need the composition to be either longer or shorter. But usually here, I ballpark what the video length would be at the end. And this timecode actually works in an interesting way. If I enter one and then press Tab, then it goes to one frame. So now the composition will be one frame in duration. Then next to that we have the seconds, then we have minutes, and then we have hours. And this works with periods. So if I enter one period and then Tab, it will change it to 1 second. And if I press one period, period and then press Tab, it's going to change it to one minute. So if you have to navigate to a specific time codes, a system that is very easy to use. We can also set a background color for our composition. So I can just click on the color and set this to white, for example, and then click Okay. There are some other settings regarding compositions, mainly regarding the shutter angle and the 3D renderer. But those are concepts that we will talk about much later in the course once we get to those advanced functions. So I'm going to create a composition that is a 1080 by 1920 pixels with a frame rate of 60 frames per second. The brief you preview resolution is going to be set to full. The composition will be one minute long and its background color will be set to white. And then I can click OK to actually create that composition. That brings us to the composition here. And as you can see, this is a portrait oriented video for, let's say, Instagram Reels. And the composition is here in the Project panel as well. Now the composition is currently still empty, so we don't have any actual layers, but we'll get to that in a next video. If you want to change a compositions settings, once it's been created, you can always right-click the composition in the project panel and choose Composition, Settings. Or when you are working within the composition, you can always press Control K to get to the composition settings, and that will be Command K on the Mac. So I'm not creating a new composition here. I'm changing the settings of the current composition. And you get there by pressing Control K on Windows or Command K on the Mac. Now, I want to show you one more thing about navigating between compositions. And for that we're actually going to duplicate comp one here in the Project panel. So I'm just going to click on comp one and then I'm going to press Control D for duplicate to get a comp to which is just a straight up copy of the first composition. And I can open that composition by double-clicking it here in the Project panel. Now, compositions once double-click here or once you create them, will be displayed here at the top of the layers panel. So here I am working in Comp to, and I can always switch to comp one whenever I desire. So you can switch between different open compositions with this task bar here. You can also close these compositions by just clicking on this icon. And that just gives me the settings for comp one. Now, you want to make sure that you're actually working in Comp One by double-clicking it here as well. So that is the best way of navigating between compositions. 4. 1.4-About framerates: In this lesson, I want to go a little bit more in-depth about frame rates when talking about video animation. I have in the exercise files here 1.4 about frame rates, which is an After Effects project that you can just open. And in this project, I have three compositions, 60 FPS, 30 FPS, and 15 FPS, in which I've changed the frame rates to display how these actually work. This is a very simple animation of a square moving from left to right over the span of five seconds. Now, here in these 60 FPS composition, I can just press the spacebar to play the animation. As you can see, it moves through the screen very smoothly. And that is the result of this higher frame rate for 60 FPS. So when I am actually just creating an animation without any actual video content, I prefer to work in 60 frames per second because the animation is a lot smoother. And I can demonstrate the difference by going into the 30 FPS composition and then playing this one. So the settings for this composition is a frame rate of 30. So playing this animation, it's still smooth, but it's not quite as smooth. You can see a bit more stuttering in this animation. It's not as buttery as the 60 FPS composition was. And now I can go into the 5015 FPS animation and you will see that it's very choppy, so there's only 15 frames per second, meaning that our eyes can actually distinguish individual frames. So anything below 24 frames per second is going to give you this kind of stop motion effect, which can be useful in some cases if you want that look for your animations, but it's not going to play back very smoothly. So if you're working with video content, you will generally speaking, want the composition to match that video. Video contents frame rate. If you are creating animations within After Effects, just purely animation based, then I would work with 60 frames per second. Or if you have a slightly slower system, 60 frames per second might be a bit too much for your computer. So you might want to work with 30 frames per second then as well. So generally speaking, I myself work in 60 FPS when I'm creating animations and whatever the frame rate of my video is when I'm adding effects and animations to video content. 5. 1.5-Navigating the timeline: In this lesson, I'm going to teach you how to quickly navigate the timeline, which is very important when you are working with After Effects. So the timeline is displayed here at the bottom, right, to the left we have the layers of this composition, and here we have the actual timeline. You can move through the timeline by grabbing the playhead and clicking and dragging it around, or scrubbing through the timeline as it's known. Or you can just click on any part of the timeline to jump to a specific section. You can play the timeline by pressing the spacebar. So when you press the spacebar, the timeline actually starts playing and you can see the actual animation. If this bar is not green, that means the sequence, the video is actually not pre-rendered yet. So you might have to let it play once to have it fill up all the way with green before you can accurately play the video in real time. You can also jump to specific parts of the timeline by just clicking here in the timecode at the top left of the layers. So let's say I want to jump to two seconds. Exactly. I'm just going to enter two period and then press Enter. And that puts the timeline at exactly two seconds. What's also often useful is being able to move in time frame by frame. So if I want to move one frame forward or one frame backwards, I can hold down the Control key on my keyboard and then use the arrow keys on my keyboard to jump one frame forward. If you do this, holding shift as well. So Control Shift and the arrow keys, you will jump forward ten frames. So that makes it a lot easier to navigate the timeline. Now, the next chapter is going to be all about animation. But before we get there, I just want to quickly show you how to move between keyframes. You will learn a lot about keyframes in the next chapter. But for now, I just want to actually show you what they do and how you can navigate between them with this shape layer here selected. So I'm just going to make sure that it's highlighted in light gray. I'm going to press the P key to get the position of this layer. Here. When the position is expanded, we see these three keyframes and these determine the animation of this rectangle. So if I go to the beginning of the timeline, it will move between these keyframes. And these are basically the animation points. So you will learn a lot more about that in the next chapter. But I just want to show you that you can navigate between these keyframes using these little arrow icons. Or you can use the J and K keys on your keyboard to jump between keyframes of a layer that just jumps between any layer that has an actual keyframe. So this also makes it a lot easier to navigate through time. And another quick and easy navigation technique that you can use in After Effects. It's pressing the I key to go to the end point of a layer. So in this case it goes to the start of the timeline to 0 frames and Sarah seconds. I can also press the O key to go to the outpoint of a layer. So that brings me to five seconds. So the end point of the layer. 6. 1.6-Zoom and navigation: In this lesson, I'm going to quickly show you in the document 1.6, zooming and navigating how to Zoom and navigate within your documents. I'm looking at the composition viewer here. And what I want to show you is that when you have the mouse in this panel, you can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. So on Windows, if I scroll up, I will zoom in and if I scroll down, I will zoom out. Depending on your settings that might be reversed on Macs, but that is the default on Windows. In any case. We can also look at the Zoom percentage here. So I'm currently at 50%. And let's say I just want to fit the whole composition on screen. Then I can just go to fit and that's going to place everything on screen that's happening in the composition. For now, I'm actually going to zoom in a little bit further to 100% using the mouse wheel. And I want to quickly show you that it's pretty easy to navigate along this composition if you hold down the spacebar. So the spacebar switches to the hand tool, allowing you to click and drag around to change to a different point of the composition. So if you are working in a zoomed in view and you want to look at a different part of the composition. Let's say while this animation is almost complete, I can hold down the space bar and click and drag around to get that part of the composition in view. So I'm just going to go back to fit for now. And I want to show you that you can't just zoom in and out on the composition viewer. You can also zoom in and out on the timeline. Let's say I just want to make sure that this keyframe is in the right place. What I can do then is either put the timeline there by clicking and dragging it to this point. Then using the zoom bar at the bottom left of the timeline, or what I can do is hold Alt and then use the mouse wheel to zoom in. Holding Alt and scrolling up actually zooms in where the mouse is currently placed. So if I hold the mouse on this keyframe, it will zoom in over there. And if I hold the mouse here, it will zoom in on 1 second in the timeline. So Alt scroll is very useful for zooming in and out of the timeline when you want to look at a specific section and Alt scrolling down, then again, zooms out of the timeline. 7. 1.7-Importing video: In the next few videos, I'm going to show you how you can import different types of files to After Effects and then create compositions based on those files. And for that, I am going to import a video file initially. So the first thing we're going to import is an actual video. There are several ways of importing files to After Effects. You can go into the File menu and then choose Import and then file. You can press Control I on Windows and Command I on Mac. Or what you can do is just double-click on an empty space in the project panel here on the left, which is going to put you in a file browser. I'm just going to navigate to the exercise files for this chapter in one course files. And I'm going to choose 1.7 importing video. Now I have the option to create an a composition right out the gate here by enabling this checkbox. But we're going to do it inside of After Effects itself. So I'm just going to click Import and that is going to import the footage to the project panel. Now, I like to stay organized in the project panel. And if I have several different types of footage or several files of footage, I prefer to put them in a folder. So what I'm gonna do is create a folder by clicking this little folder icon at the bottom. And I'm just going to name this footage and press Enter. And then I can drag in this video to the folder and that's going to place it here. Now let's say I want to base a composition on this video. This video is nineteen hundred and twenty one thousand eighty pixels with a 30 frames per second frame rate. So what I can do now is either right-click it and choose comp from selection, which is going to create a new composition with those settings. Or what I can do is click and drag the video to the new composition button at the bottom of the project panel. So the third bottom from the third button from the left. So releasing it here we'll create a composition and also placed the video on the timeline here. So that is a useful little trick. If I press Control K to get in the composition settings, you will see that the width and the height of the composition match that of the video. And the same goes for the frame rate, the frame rate to set that 30, because the video is also 30 frames per second. The duration also matches the duration of the video, which is about 30 seconds. If you do this based on video that you've just imported from a camera, the timecode will be set to whatever the timecode of that video is. So you might want to go in here and change the start time code to 0 so you don't get confused when you are working with imported footage. And that's something I just want to illustrate. If you import something that has a timecode, the timecode will be displayed here and not the actual timeline time. It's always useful to set the timecode to 0 unless you're working on something like a movie or documentary production where you actually want the timecode. But that's something for an advanced course and falls outside of the scope of what we will be doing here. You will note that the composition is actually inside of this footage folder as well. I can just click and drag it out of there to actually put it in its own thing. So it's not part of the same folder. I just clicked and dragged it down to put it separately. So that is how we work with importing video. 8. 1.8-Importing Photoshop documents: It's very common to design a document in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, and then bring it into After Effects to actually animate it and bring it to life. And in this video and the next one, I'm going to show you how to import those files. So I'm just going to double-click on an empty part of the project panel here in this blank document and a half here, 1.8, importing Photoshop files in this chapter's course files, you can create a Photoshop sequence. If the Photoshop document actually contains layers, or you can create a composition. And what I can do now is actually choose how I want to import this Photoshop document. So you can choose between footage, composition, retain layer sizes, or a composition. Now, this is a layered Photoshop document and if I import it as footage is just going to be a flat image. So I will not have the layers of that photoshop documents available to me separately. If I choose composition, retain layer sizes, it's going to create a composition with the Photoshop layers and the orientation point of the layers, which I will talk about more in the next chapter, is going to be centered on the layer itself. If I choose Composition, I will also get the layers in the composition. But the rotation point or the anchor point, is going to be centered inside of the composition, in the center of the composition, I'm just gonna go for this final one. So I'm going to choose composition here and then choose Import. You get the same pop-up box here where you can choose whether you want to create a composition or not. So I'm just going to enable this and then click, Okay, and that gives me a composition here in the Project panel. You will also note that this came with a file structure. So a folder structure which contains all the separate layers I have here, these separate layers that I can click and drag into any composition that I choose. But I can also open this composition by just double-clicking it and cure I have these separate layers of the Photoshop document that I can actually influence, separate from the rest of the file. So I can individually manipulate these layers because it is a layered Photoshop document. If you want to manipulate something or animate something separate from its background, you're going to have to cut out those objects from the background in Photoshop so you can animate them in After Effects. 9. 1.9-Importing Illustrator files: This lesson is going to be very similar to the previous lesson, except we are, we'll be working with an Illustrator file instead of a Photoshop file. So here in this empty project, I'm just going to double-click in the project panel and I'm going to choose 1.9 importing Illustrator files and then click Import. And here again, I can choose the import kind. I can choose a footage layer, which is just going to give me a flat result without access to the layers of the document. Or I can choose a composition and I can choose the footage dimensions to be layer size or document size. And I'm going to import this document twice to show you the difference between the two. So first I'm going to choose Layer Size and click. Okay. And that gives me this file here in the project panel, this composition. So I'm just going to double-click this composition to get into it. And here I have the separate layers. And what I want to show you is that these layers rotate around their own centers because we chose the anchor point to be at the center of the layers themselves so that they retain layer sizes. So when I select this wheel here in the layers, I can press R for rotation. When I start changing this value, you will see that the wheel rotates around its own center. For Illustrator artwork, I usually choose Retain Layer Sizes, so objects actually rotate around their own centers. So that's something important to note. But we just have these separate layers here from illustrator. So you also want to make sure that everything that you want to animate separately from an Illustrator document is on its own layer so that you can animate them separately in After Effects. Now there's another thing I want to show you in this video, because otherwise it would actually be pretty brief. And that is when you place a file into After Effects, you are not actually placing that entire file into After Effects document into the after-effects project. You are actually creating a link to the location of that file on your hard drive. And that has a few reasons. For example, if I were to open this Illustrator document and change the colors on the bus, for example, and then save the Illustrator document. Those changes will be reflected in after effects immediately because there is a link to the original file. So these are not After Effects shapes these, this is an Illustrator document and changing the document will change the appearance of that document in After Effects. Another benefit of working with links and not embedding documents in their entirety is that the After Effects files are actually quite small, usually no more than a few megabytes when you could have a Photoshop document, for example, worth a few 100 megabytes. But working with links also has the drawback that if you incorrectly, if the link breaks, for example, by moving the document or renaming the document or deleting it outright is going to break the link and you will not be able to use the file in After Effects. And just to show you what I mean, I'm going to find this Illustrator document on my hard drive, which is another useful trick I'm going to show you and change its name to break the link manually. So to find the file on my hard drive, I mean, I know where it is and I have it open here. But what you can do is actually find one of the layers here and then right-click on it. And then I can choose Reveal in explorer. And that's going to open the Explorer. And then I can just change the file name here to let say importing Illustrator files, dash one. Now that the file is renamed after effects is still looking for importing Illustrator files without the dash one. So going back to After Effects, I get this error message. Files cannot be found and it's missing four files currently. So clicking on Okay, it's actually going to completely break my animation and we will see this test screen, let's say. So to fix this, I have to put the file back the way it was. So I'm, what I'm going to do is go into the course files again and I'm just going to change the name back. So I'm going to delete the dash one and save it. But now in After Effects, it doesn't automatically update. I actually have to reload the footage. So what I'm gonna do is select all the layers that concerns. And then right-click on it and then choose reload footage. And reloading the footage will tell me that three additional missing items have been found. And that actually gives me back my illustration. I am still missing one apparently, so I'm just going to reload this one as well. That is actually not updating properly. This is a bug that happens sometimes. What I can actually do is right-click on the layer it concerns and then replace the footage with a file. Then I can choose this one here. And click import. And I can choose a specific layer. And that's going to be, we'll V and click. Okay. Now I can actually click and drag it back into the Illustrator or into the After Effects composition from the project panel and delete the layer that was there. So this is a bug that happens sometimes I'm actually glad it happened because I showed I was able to show you how to actually solve it. Sometimes footage will not just not reload. I could have saved it closed out of After Effects and open the project again. And it would have actually reflected the changes. But I'm just happy that I got to show you this little work-around for importing files. 10. 1.10-Importing an image sequence: I actually started working with After Effects about seven years ago because I was creating a lot of time-lapse video. And in this lesson I want to show you how you can use an image sequence to create a composition within After Effects that will play as video. So a series of images will be placed after, one after the other on the timeline. So you can actually play the images as video in the exercise files. I'm just going to find the folder image sequence. I'm going to select one of these images and press Control a to select everything. And then I have this checkbox here for import JPEG sequence. And with that checkbox enabled, I can click Import and that is going to give me a JPEG sequence here in the Project panel. Now, I'm going to base a composition on that image sequence by clicking and dragging it to the new composition button at the bottom of the project panel. And that's going to give me this result. So I can now play this image sequence, which is just a folder of images as a video here in After Effects, which can be very useful. Now, I can also speed up this footage a little bit by going here where it says stretch. And if that stretch column is actually not available to you, you can enable it here at the bottom left of the program with this third little switch. And then change the stretch to 50%. And click Okay. And that's actually going to speed up the footage by a 100%, making it slightly faster. This is actually footage based on an After Effects project that I created, which I will show you in Chapter six once we start working with 3D. So we will actually work with something very similar to this to create an animation in this style. So that's how we can import a J peg sequence. You just have to make sure that they are numbered sequentially so that the filenames go from whatever number two. However many images you are importing. So that after effects actually knows that there's a sequence. If there's one image in a sequence of hundreds of images that has the incorrect filename that will display as a dropped frame. So when you go to that frame, you will actually get the, the missing link display that we saw in the previous lesson. 11. 1.11-Working with Layers: In this lesson, I want to quickly tell you about working with layers in After Effects, which shouldn't really have any secrets for you if you've worked with Photoshop or Illustrator before. But here in the course file 1.11, working with layers, we will find the composition 1.11 working with layers in which I have these five layers. Now whichever object is at the top of the layer stack. So whichever is layer number one is above all of the other layers. And just for demonstration purposes, I placed these dice in approximately the same location. And what you will see is that die one, this one is on top of all the other dice. Now I want to show you what happens when I click and drag dye one down below die too. And you will see this blue highlight to indicate that it's actually being moved. Now this other dice is in front of die one. Die two is the top layer. So it's also displaying on top of everything else in the composition panel. I can also drag dye one down a bit further. And that's going to place it beyond die three and die for. The stacking order of layers is essential to understand for building good creative compositions, whichever is on top here in the layer stack is on top of everything else in the composition panel. You can also place layers above or below the background in this particular composition. So if I click and drag down, die one below original, it's actually going to disappear beyond this background image, so it's not currently visible. Now to click and drag layers around. We can just make sure that they are selected in the layers. And then I can just click and drag using the selection tool here to place them somewhere else in the composition. And I can do the same for die number two. And you can just click and drag these around. Now, besides this stacking order, another thing that's very important is the layer duration. Currently, these layers exist for the entirety of the composition. So if I go into the composition settings, this composition is five seconds long and all of these layers fill out this composition entirely, meaning that they will exist for the duration of this composition. Now I want to show you that we can actually change that by going to a different point in the timeline, for example, to 1 second exactly. Then I can grab the start of this layer with this little double arrow icon and click and drag it there. And what you will see is now the layer will not exist in the composition until the timeline hits 1 second. And you can trim layers like this by clicking and dragging the start or the end. Because I can also do this from the end, meaning that it will only exist for the first, second of the composition. Or you can use some keyboard shortcuts, which I very often use. If I hold down Alt and use the left bracket key, I will trim the layer in front of wherever the timeline is. And undoing that with Control Z, I can use Alt and the right bracket to trim the layer after where the timeline is. So that's something very useful to know that you can trim these layers and when you trim them, they will stop existing at some point in the timeline. So you can also click and drag layers around without changing their duration. So I can just click and drag it around to place it at 1 second. And the layer is still actually five seconds long, but the rest of it is trimmed by the composition duration. So now I've moved it by 1 second, going into the composition settings with Control K and changing the duration to six seconds. So I'm entering six period and then pressing Tab, zooming out. Now, you will see that these layers still end to five seconds, but this one ends at six seconds because it was moved by 1 second in the timeline. I'm just going to undo these changes with Control Z. Speaking of control Z. Control Z is your best friend in After Effects because it allows you to quickly go back a step. But it can also happen that you go back one step too far when you're tweaking some settings on an effect or an animation that you use Control Z to many times. Now, using Control Shift Z is actually going to go forward a step again. You can redo changes, you've undone with Control Z, with Control Shift Z to go forward another step. And that's basically all you have to currently know about the stacking order of layers and the duration of layers. I just wanted to show you some quick additional controls that we have concerning layers here in the left of the layers panel. The first thing we can do here is locking a layer. So if I click and drag over these dice, so you can click and drag over these. You don't have to activate them individually. I cannot actually select these layers to manipulate them so they are locked and unavailable until I unlock them again by clicking and dragging here. We also can influence a layer's visibility. So I can toggle a layer on or off by clicking this little eyeball icon. If a layer contains audio, we can also mute the audio by clicking this column of buttons here. And here we have the solo column, which actually does, does the reverse of the eyeball. So if I enable a solo for a layer, it's going to hide everything except that layer or several layers if they have their solos enabled. So if I solo a layer, I'm just clicking this little button here, and that's going to hide everything except that particular layer. One more thing I want to show you about layers is that you can create shy layers which you can hide at anytime. After Effects projects tend to become relatively complex if you want to create something fancy. So the layers quickly start adding up. So what you can do if you want to hide certain layers from the layer stack as you are working on something, you can click this shy guy icon here. And the shy guy icon is currently enabled for these four layers. Then clicking the shy guy here at the top of the layers panel is actually going to hide all of those layers from the layer stack. This is something you will see very often if you work with templates that you've downloaded, because the control layers that you use to influence the animation and contents will be visible. But all everything that's going on behind the scenes to actually make the animation will be shy so that you don't accidentally influence any of the important settings. If you want to clean up your Layers panel a little bit, you can use the shy guy to hide certain layers while you are not working on them. 12. 2.1-Position: Now that we've looked at the interface and some basic terminology, we are going to start animating here in After Effects. For this, I have the project chapter two main File Open. And in this project you will find 15 compositions that I've prepared. And we're going to start with 2.1 position. So you can double-click that composition to open it, which we'll put it in a tab here. And in this composition we only have this one rectangle or a square. Rather. We will be looking at this rectangle quite a bit throughout this chapter. But for now I just want to move this rectangle from the left side of the composition to the right side of the composition in a timespan of two seconds. So I wanted to start here at 0 frames and at two seconds or 120 frames, I want the rectangle to be on the right side. So we're going to look at the transform properties of this layer. So here I have the layers which lists is listing rectangle at the moment. And I'm going to expand this rectangle here. And then here we have the transform controls. Now, these transform controls to take up a lot of space in this Layers panel, especially when you have several layers open with different effects and different masks and other properties, Lists can get quite expensive. So to approach individual properties of layers, we have some more shortcut keys that we can use. If I press the P key on my keyboard, I only enabled the position. So only the position property is now visible. I can press the S key to approach the scale property. I can press R for rotation and I can press T for opacity. So if you want to enable the position, if you want to animate the position of a layer, you can click on the layer and press P to make the position visible. So then we can control the position. The position is displayed in coordinates based on the top-left of the composition. So here I see that the exposition, the first number is 228 pixels from the left of the composition. And it is 520 pixels from the top of the composition. And that is referring to the anchor points. So the center of this rectangle at the moment. So I want to animate the position. So I'm going to click the stopwatch in front of the word position. And that determines that I want to animate this property. So I've now saved the current position of the layer at 0 seconds, 0 frames. Now I want to create this animation spanning two seconds. So I'm going to go to two seconds in the timeline. And I can do that by either clicking and dragging the playhead here to two seconds. Or I can just click in the timecode at the top left of the layers and press two period and press Enter. And that's going to put me at exactly two seconds. So now I can change the position of the layer, the x position of the layer, in a couple of ways, I can either start clicking and dragging the layer. And that means I can freehand draw this animation path. So it's going to end up wherever I put this rectangle, holding down the Shift key enables me to drag it out straight. So now I cannot change the vertical position, I can only change the horizontal position. So that is one way of doing that. Well, you can also do, and I just use Control Z to go back a step is grabbed the exposition here, and then click and drag to change it. So I can click and drag to change the position. And this goes for pretty much all numerical values in after effects. These are called scrubby sliders, and that means you can click and drag on the number to change it and dragging it to the left obviously means a lower value. And dragging it to the right gives us a higher value. Now that I've dragged it out to the right, you will see this animation path. And when I go back to the start of the composition by clicking and dragging the playhead back and forth, you will see that it moves. Now, I can preview this animation by pressing the spacebar. So pressing space enables playback for the timeline. What that's gonna do initially is click play the entire timeline. Let's say I wanted to limit this playback to three seconds. What I can do then is look at this gray bar at the top of the timeline, which is called the work area. And I can click and drag this right side to about three seconds. Now when playback hits three seconds, it's going to jump back to the start. So that is something useful that we can use to limit playback to a certain part of our timeline. Now, how long this animation takes is based on where this secondary keyframe is placed. So if I click and drag this keyframe out to the right over the timeline, it's going to lengthen the animation, so it's going to take the rectangle longer to get to the other side. Conversely, if I move it to about 1 second, it's going to shorten the animation so it will move quicker. So the secondary keyframe determines the end position of the animation. So moving the playhead back to two seconds, I can click and drag this holding Shift and that's going to snap it to the play head. Without shift, you can release it anywhere. And holding shift, once you get close to the playhead, that's actually going to snap the keyframe to the play head, which is also something that we use very often. Now, note what happens when we disable the stopwatch for this layer. Then all keyframes will disappear. Also note what happens when we re-enable it. That is not going to bring back the keyframes that were just erased. So now we have to start over with our animation. So if you disable a stopwatch that is going to delete all keyframes currently attached to this property. And you will have to recreate the animation yourself. So in this case, I can actually use Control Z to re-enable the keyframes and bringing them back. Now what you will note is that when I am at a different position in the timeline, for example, exactly 1 second. If I change the layer position, then that is going to add a secondary keyframe in-between. So now I have three keyframes between which this rectangle will move. Moving the playhead to the beginning, It's now going to dip to the bottom. As you can see. If I then click this keyframe and delete it using Backspace or Delete. It's going to put the animation back where it was. Also note that if I put the playhead on the final keyframe here and then move the position that will also change the end point. Now, what I'm gonna do is select both keyframes by clicking the word position. So I'm going to click the actual position property here, and that is going to select all keyframes. Now, if I move the rectangle, it's going to move the entire animation. So now the entire animation is changed. When I'm at a different position in the timeline. That doesn't work. So to move an animation, you want to be on a keyframe and then select all keyframes to change the position that the animation is taking place in. 13. 2.2-Interpolation: Before we continue animating different properties and after effects, I want to explain something about keyframe interpolation. For that, I have the composition to point to interpolation open in the project chapter two, main file. And here we are going to create another basic position animation. So I'm going to click the layer and I'm going to press P to enable the position property. And I'm going to enable animation by clicking the stopwatch, placing a keyframe at the beginning of the timeline. Then I will go to two seconds and the timeline by clicking in the timecode at the top-left and then pressing to period and then Enter. And now I'm going to grab the rectangle using the selection tool. And I'm going to click and drag the rectangle to the right side of my composition. Now, we have here two keyframes and After Effects calculates what the position of our rectangle is at each frame in between those keyframes. And that is called interpolation. After Effects is interpolating what the position is at any given frame, regardless of having any keyframes. So we don't need to create keyframes for every individual frame. After Effects calculates those, interpolates those to give us this animation, which is incredibly useful because you only determined the start point and the end point of an animation and after effects does all the work to calculate what happens between those frames. Now, we're gonna go back to the start of the timeline by just clicking and dragging the playhead to the left. And I am going to delete this animation by clicking the stopwatch once again. And I'm going to enable animation again by clicking the stopwatch once more. Now we're going to create a slightly different animation with different points here, which you will see. So with this keyframe enabled, I'm going to go to 1 second in the timeline, so one Period Enter. And then I'm going to click and drag the rectangle downwards. Then I'm gonna go to two seconds. So I'm going to enter 2 in the time code. And I'm going to click and drag it to the right to end up in about the center at the bottom of the composition. And what you will see is that it is no longer moving in a straight line that there is now what is called a Bezier curve apply to this animation that has something to do with the interpolation. And I will explain once we get to the end of the animation, how to correct this, because this is the default behavior of After Effects. And in my view, this is undesirable because in most cases you want something to move in a straight line. So now I'm gonna go to three seconds. So 3 Enter and I'm going to click and drag it upwards. I'm gonna go to four seconds. So four period, enter and click and drag it to the right. And I'm going to enter five Period Enter, and then click and drag it down. So when I'm, when I play this animation by going to the beginning of the timeline and pressing Enter, you will see that it moves in a curve. Now, I don't want it to move in a curve. I wanted to move in straight lines. So to do that, I have to change the interpolation of the keyframes. And that is due to a default setting in After Effects that we are going to change, which will then be saved even when we update the application to newer versions. So what I'm gonna do is first show you how to override it for this single animation. Because sometimes you do want this different kind of interpolation and then show you how to disable property globally. So to disable it for any future animations that you make. So I'm going to click the word position to select all keyframes. And then I'm going to right-click on one of these keyframes and then go to Keyframe Interpolation, the fourth one from the bottom. Now here we have the temporal interpolation, which we are going to leave alone because time is usually linear, going from the present into the future. But the spatial interpolation is set to auto bezier. Now, this provides this curve when we have more than two keyframes. So I'm going to change this to linear and then click, Okay, and that is going to change this individual animation to a linear interpolation. So now when I play the animation, they will move in straight lines. There we go. Now, like I said, this is behavior that I usually do not want. I usually want to animate and straight lines when position is concerned at least. So what I'm gonna do is go into the properties, the preferences of after effects. On Windows. You would use the Edit menu. On Mac, you would use the After Effects menu at the top left and then go into Edit Preferences and then general. Now the fourth checkbox from the top is going to allow us to switch the default spatial interpolation to linear. So once you enable this and click Okay, Any future position animations will have the linear interpolation, which should be the default. In my estimation, you might have a different opinion. Other animators do have different opinions on this, but I prefer to be linear. And now that is set for any future animations that we make. 14. 2.3-Easing: Another important aspect of animating in After Effects is the easing of keyframes. For this, I have the project chapter two, main file open and then the composition 2.3 easing. So you can double-click that to open the composition. And what you will see here is when you play the timeline is that the rectangle moves at a constant speed. So it never changes. Speed. Just hits the next keyframe and immediately starts moving in the other direction. There's no change in momentum whatsoever. Now, this is due to the easing of the keyframes. So what I'm gonna do is click the layer here in the Layers panel and press P to make the position property visible. And here we have regular old keyframes. And what you will also note is when you zoom in on the timeline, these individual dots in between the end points of the keyframes are the individual frames. And these are all equally spaced. So these are all exactly the same distance apart, indicating that the rectangle will move at a constant speed. What you usually want to make animation more fluid and dynamic is for it to accelerate from its original position, then slow down to its end position. In this particular case, I want the keyframe. I want the rectangle to accelerate from its origin, then slowed down towards this keyframe, and then accelerate once more. Once it leaves that keyframe, I want a fluid motion from beginning to end. And to do that, we're going to apply some easing to these keyframes. To apply easing, we can select the keyframe it concerns. So in this case the first one. Then I'm going to right-click and choose keyframe assistant at the bottom. Now this gives us three options. Easy Ease, Easy Ease in and easy ease out. Now for the start of an animation, you would usually use the Ease Out. For an end of an animation. You would choose Easy Ease in. And that's a little counter-intuitive because out indicates an n and n indicates beginning. But you are easing out of a position into another position. So that's why those seem reversed. But in actuality, this is the way it's supposed to be. Easy. Ease applies both an ease in and ease out to a key-frame. So for this animation, we would need all three variants. The Ease Out for the initial animation, for the first keyframe, easy ease for all the keyframes in-between, and then an Ease In for the final keyframe to ease it into its end position. I'm going to apply an easy ease out for the initial keyframe. And it will look like an opening bracket. And that indicates that from standstill, it is going to accelerate. And this is also something we can see when we zoom in on the individual frames here, you will see that these are closer together than the keyframes further than the frames further along in the animation. And this is how that looks. So when I play back, it accelerates from the initial position. So it's no longer moving at a constant speed. Now, the keyframes in-between, I'm going to select here by clicking and dragging within the timeline. And then you can also actually Shift-click on keyframes to select multiples, and Shift-click once more to deselect them. So that's also something useful. So I'm going to apply the easy, ease, easing to these keyframes by right-clicking on one of them. Choosing keyframe assistant and then easy, ease. This will look like an hourglass indicating that there is first and ease in and then an ease out applied to the keyframes. And this has how that looks in motion. It slows down and then accelerates again whenever it hits a keyframe. This is also displayed in the individual frames here. If I zoom in a little, you will see that these frames are closer together than it evens out. And then the distance between the frames becomes smaller again, indicating an ease in. And now I'm going to apply an ease into the final keyframe by choosing right mouse and then easy ease m. Note that there are also shortcuts for this F9, easy ease Shift F9, easy ease in and Control Shift F9 for ease out. For the start of an animation, you will always choose the Ease Out. For keyframes in-between, you will choose an easy ease. For the end of an animation, you would choose an ease in a final tip, once you have applied easing, you can't just remove the easing through the same menu. So when you right-click on a keyframe and choose keyframe assistant, you can no longer switch it off. So what you wanna do, if you want to remove the easing, you can select the keyframes and concerns and then hold Control on Windows and Command on the Mac, and then click on the keyframes wants. So that will remove the easing and now they are regular keyframes again. 15. 2.4-The Graph editor: A tool that gives us a little bit more control over the speed and easing of keyframes is the graph editor, which we are going to look at in two-point for the graph editor. The graph editor is found here at the top of the layers panel. So enabling the graph that are currently editor currently it doesn't actually show us anything. So when you click this, you will have an empty field. To actually visualize something within the graph editor, we need an animation. So I'm just going to leave the graph editor enabled for now. And I'm going to press P on the rectangle layer to enable the position. Here we have the y value, the y position of the rectangle in green, and the X position in red. So we will be animating the x position. And for that I'm going to place a keyframe by enabling the stopwatch at 0 seconds, 0 frames. And this keyframe will also be visible here in the graph editor. Then I'm gonna go to two seconds and the timeline. So in the timecode I'm going to enter two period. And then using the selection tool, I'm just going to click and drag the rectangle to the right of the composition. In the graph editor, you will see the straight line for the X position going from here at 228 pixels, all the way here to 1772 pixels. So this animation is now visualized in this graph. So I'm going to switch back to the regular timeline for just a minute to see to show you what actually happened. Exactly the same thing happened as what we did previously. So here we have two regular keyframes. Now I want to show you what happens when we change the easing of these keyframes. I'm going to choose an ease out for the first keyframe and an ease in for the second keyframe. So with this keyframe selected, I'm just going to right-click. Go to keyframe assistant and choose Ease Out and in-between. Before we change the final keyframe to ease in, I'm just going to show you what happened in the graph. So I re-enable the graph editor. And what you will see is that there is now a curve applied to the beginning of the animation, and that indicates that it accelerates to its full speed. So I can also change the easing of keyframes here on the graph editor. So I'm just going to click the secondary keyframe. And then we have here easy ease, ease in and ease out. So I'm just gonna make this ease in. That is going to give us this graduated line that starts off slowly and accelerates and then falls off in speed towards the end of the keyframe. Now, changing the position of these keyframes here, again changes the speed of the animation. So I can click and drag this end here, holding shift for example. And that is going to change how fast the animation takes place. So I just undid that by Control Z. What I want to show you is that using an additional keyframe, we can change the curve here. So we can change how quickly the rectangle moves. And to do that, I'm going to grab pen tool here at the top of the program, this little inkwell pen here. Using this tool, I can hover over the line here for the exposition and then click to add a keyframe. Now, switching back to the selection tool, I can now click and drag this keyframe to alter how steep this line is. So I can click and drag it upwards. And that is going to make the start of the animation, the first half of the animation play faster than the second half. So now, because we have this more steep line, it's going to slowly animate towards the end while the initial animation takes place a lot faster. So what I can do now as well as move this one keyframe to the left a bit. And this increases how steep it is, obviously. So the first part of the animation will take place very quickly and it will slowly graduate towards its end point. So now playing the animation, it looks like this. We get an initial burst of speed and then a rapid fall off to 0 towards the end of the animation. Now, switching the Graph Editor back off gives us this third keyframe in the middle. So now we have three keyframes. This has an easy ease obviously. So we have the hourglass shape here for the keyframe. So this is how we can change the speed of this animation. I can change it here as well by clicking and dragging it towards the right in the timeline. Switching back to the graph editor, that is going to give me this graph here. So sometimes when you want to change the initial or n velocity of a keyframe, it's useful to go into the graph editor at a point or a keyframe as it would be, and then change its position to alter the speed of the animation. 16. 2.5-Anchor point: Another very important aspect of animating in After Effects is influencing a layer's anchor point. And to demonstrate this, I have here composition 2.5 anchor point in this chapter's main file. And in this composition, we will be drawing our first shape layer. So here at the top I have my toolbar, and here I have the shape layers. The rectangle tool is activated by default. If you hold down the mouse button on these tools, you can expand them and choose the other tools in the tool group. For now I'm just going to stick to the rectangle tool. The rectangle tool, by default has a red fill color and a white stroke color. We're not going to be looking at that for now. That will be for the chapter about shape layers. But initially I just want to show you how this tool works. I'm going to click and drag and hold my mouse down. So if you're following along, just hold the mouse down until I tell you to release it. And that allows me to draw a rectangle by freehand so it can have any size in any proportion. Holding down Shift constraints, the proportions to a square. All sides are equally as long in relation to each other while I am drawing it. So while I still have the mouse down, I can hold down the spacebar to still move the rectangle around. Now, using these shortcuts, I'm going to draw a small square here at the top left. Now I have this square here. And what you will note is that wild the square is selected. We see this little target in the middle of the composition. This is the layer's anchor point, because adding a shape layer automatically places the anchor point in the center of the composition, not on the shape itself. So to demonstrate what this actually does, I'm going to switch back to the selection tool. And I'm going to enable this layers rotation by pressing R with the layer selected in the layers panel. Here in rotation we have a number of rotations and then number of degrees. So number of rotations and degrees respectively. Now I'm going to click and drag on the number of degrees. And I want you to note what happens when I start clicking and dragging the rectangle is not going to rotate around its own center. It's going to rotate around the center of the composition because that is where the layer's anchor point currently is. Now I'm just going to undo that using Control Z or Command Z on the Mac. And I'm going to show you the tool to influence a layer's anchor point, which is here in the top toolbar, the pan behind or anchor point tool shortcut. Why? So pressing Y will enable this tool. This tool allows me to click and drag around to change the position of the layer's anchor point. So if I place it below the layer and then start influencing the rotation, it's going to rotate around that. This also applies to scale. So pressing S for scale will allow me to scale the layer. And the layer will not scale from its own center. It will scale from the layer's anchor point. So that is something very important to note. Generally speaking, you will want the anchor point on the center of each layer. So I can use the anchor point tool, the pen behind tool as it's called, to drag the anchor point to the center of the layer. But a shortcut for this very handy one, which I use daily, is holding Control on Windows or Command on the Mac and just double-clicking the tool. So not the anchor point itself, but double-clicking the tool holding Control will allow you to center the anchor point on the layer itself. Now, shape layers can contain multiple shapes and this varying effects depending on how many shapes are contained within a layer. But for these, for the purpose of this lesson, that is basically all you need to know about a layer's anchor point. 17. 2.6-Scale: In this lesson, I will show you everything concerning an object scale. So I want to make an object bigger or smaller. That's when you want to animate an object scale. I have here composition 2.6 scale in our chapter two main file project. And I have here a single ellipse with its anchor point already at the center. Later in a later chapter, I'm going to show you how to draw something like this quickly and efficiently. But for now I've created the ellipse for you. So here in the layers I'm just going to press S to enable the object scale to make it visible. And here I have the horizontal and vertical scale respectively. So the left is always the horizontal and the right is always the vertical scale. Currently, these are being influenced at the same time. So if I change the scale of one, the other will scale concurrently because of this chain link icon, meaning that they will both be influenced at the same time. And in many situations this is what you want, but what you can also do is disable the chain link icon by clicking it once. And then you can affect the scale of the object over the x and y-axis separately. So now I can animate those separately if I so choose. Also note that the item, the layer is scaling from its anchor point. So it's currently scaling from and to the center of the layer, which is often what you want. But you might want the anchor point in different places for different situations, which I will show you in a little bit. So let's say I want to animate this circle from 0 to 100% scale within 2.5th or 30 frames because we are working with a 60 frame per second timeline. I'm just going to enable the chain link icon and make sure that I'm at 0 frames the timeline. And then I'm going to click the stopwatch icon for scale to start animating its scale. And then I'm going to put this percentage at 0%. So 0% scale means the object is invisible. Then I'm going to move to 30 frames in the timeline by just entering 30 and pressing Enter. And then I'm going to enter 100 for the scale again. And as we've seen earlier, After Effects interpolates everything in-between. So now within 2.5th, we see this circle grow from 0% scale to a 100% scale. As you will see in many places in this course, 2.5th doesn't sound like a lot of time, but it is a measurable span of time. You can watch it animate from beginning to end. So often you need less animation over a smaller span of time than you would think initially. Now, again, note that the layer is currently scaling from its anchor point. I just wanted to show you what happens when we move the anchor point. And for that, I'm just going to go back using Control Z. I'm going to enable the stopwatch for scale again. But this time I am going to move the anchor point downwards. So I'm just going to move it down here to the bottom center of the layer. Again, go to 30 frames. And let's say this time we're going to go from 100 to 0. So I'm just going to put 0 for the second keyframe. And now it's actually going to scale down into that anchor point. The anchor points position is incredibly important for scale animations. Now you can also animate these properties separately. So let's say I'm just gonna go to the beginning of the timeline, disable the animation by clicking the stopwatch and enable it once more. And let's say I am going to put the scale for the vertical axis at 0. So I'm going to disable the chain link icon, put the second percentage value at 0. Then go back to 30 frames in the timeline and then change it back to 100. Now it's not going to scale over the x-axis. So the width, it's only going to scale over the height, giving us this effect. If you are into animating info-graphics, for example, this is very useful for scaling bar graphs upwards. Or if you want to make like a pop-up animation, this is also something you can use what you will see later in this course. I'm also going to add some easing to these keyframes. So I'm going to add an ease in for the last keyframe and an ease out for the initial keyframe at, with this. As a result, the anchor point is important and it's important to note that you can animate the x-axis and the y-axis separately concerning scale animations. 18. 2.7-Rotation: In this lesson, we will be looking at animating rotation for our layers. And for that I have decomposition to 0.7 rotation with this shape layer, just say simple 400 by 400 pixels square. And to get to the rotation property, I'm just going to press the R key on my keyboard. And rotation actually has two values that we can change. We have the number of rotations and we have the number of degrees that it is rotating. And what you will note is that when I enter 360 degrees in the second value, it's actually just going to change to one rotation because one full rotation is 360 degrees. I just undid that change by using Control Z to go a step backwards. And now we're going to animate the rotation of this layer. So to animate it, I am going to enable the stopwatch for rotation. And that is going to tell After Effects that I want this property to animate. And then I'm going to go to 30 frames in the timeline. And then I'm going to rotate it twice. So I'm just going to enter two. Actually, the first value will contain two. And that's going to rotate it twice within 2.5th, which is quite fast. Let's say I want to spread out this animation a bit more. What I can do then is just put the timeline at 1 second. Then grab this keyframe and just click and drag it off to the right. And if I hold down shift, it will actually snap to the timeline indicator. So that is another very useful trick. Now, it rotates twice and I'm just going to apply the correct easing for this animation. I'm going to give the first keyframe an ease out. And the second keyframe and ease in. Now the animation will speed up and slow down towards the end. Now, let's say I want this square to remain at this rotation for 1 second before animating backwards again. What I'm gonna do then is just go to two seconds in the timeline. And then I'm going to add another keyframe with the same value as the previous key-frame, because I don't want it to rotate between these two points. So I'm going to click this, this little keyframe icon on the left of the layer controls. And then skip ahead 1 second to three seconds. And then just put the number of rotations back at 0. And that's going to rotate it between two rotations and 0 rotations. So reversing the rotation, I'm just going to give this first keyframe and ease out. And the second one an ease in. Now when I play the animation, it will look like this. It's going to spin one way and then spin the other way within 1 second. So that is all you need to know about animating rotation. You should note that rotation's always take place around a layer's anchor point. So if I were to move this anchor point, it's not going to rotate around its own center, but around where the anchor point is now. So that's something to keep track of. It will always rotate around the layer's anchor point. 19. 2.8-Opacity: In this lesson, I'm going to teach you how to animate a layer's opacity. So animate its visibility. Visibility. Essentially. For that, I have here the composition to 0.8 opacity, which contains this simple ellipse. And we're going to animate this ellipse from being invisible to be invisible, to becoming invisible again a second later. So to animate this layer's opacity, I'm going to select it in the layers panel and then press T for opacity. And I'm going to put the opacity at 0 at the beginning of the timeline. And by the way, these scrubby sliders allow me to just click and drag on the value to change it. Opacity cannot exceed 100 or go below 0. So it's very easy to go from 0 to 100 by just clicking and dragging. Then I'm going to add a keyframe by clicking the stopwatch. And then I'm going to go to 1 second in the timeline. And something I usually do is just kind of eyeball where I need to click to get to 1 second and I either hit it exactly or I can skip frame by frame by holding down Control and using the arrow keys on my keyboard. Now to animate the opacity to 100%, all I have to do is just click and drag the opacity value to 100. And that's going to give me this animation. Very simple. Now, I want it to remain at 100% opacity for 1 second, so up to two seconds. And then I want it to animate to 0% opacity within another second. So what I'm gonna do now is go to two seconds in the timeline and then add another keyframe for a 100% by clicking this little keyframe icon at the left of the layer property. Then I'm gonna go to three seconds. Then I'm going to animate it to 0 again by just changing the numerical value to 0, giving us this animation, it fades into view. It stays in view for 1 second and then fades out of you within 1 second yet again. Now, one thing I want to show you about these keyframes is that I can change the duration of the animation by selecting everything, holding down Alt on Windows or Option on the Mac, and then just clicking and dragging the last keyframe. So by doing that, I'm spacing the keyframes out evenly. So you change the entirety of the duration of the animation so you can increase its speed by putting them closer together. Or I can Alt, drag them further apart. And that will actually slow down the animation. Now let's add some easing. So I'm going to select these two keyframes, holding Shift. And these are going to become ease out. And these two, when I select them, they are going to become 0s in key-frames. And this is the final result of our animation. 20. 2.9-Parenting: By parenting layers to each other, we can make one layer followed the same animation as another layer. And in this lesson, I'm going to give you a quick introduction to this concept. I have here these three rectangles, so one larger one at the bottom, which is rectangle, the regular rectangle. Then we have rectangle two in the middle and rectangle three at the top. And obviously the top one is the smallest. And what I would like to do is rotate these three rectangles around the same point around the center of the largest rectangle. But these all have their own rotation values. So if I rotate rectangle one, you will see that it rotates in place. What I could do is grab this layer's anchor point and just click and drag it to the center of this other layer to get the desired effect. But it's actually quite difficult to set the anchor points of all three of these layers to the same point. And it would be a lot more difficult if you had even more layers than this. So to get the desired result, being able to rotate all three of these shapes around the same point, I'm going to parent rectangle two and rectangle 32, rectangle one. There are several ways of doing that. I'm just going to look at rectangle to initially, what we have here is a Parent and Link column in the layer controls. If this is not visible for you, you can always click here at this second little switch at the bottom left to enable the Parent and Link column. And here you have a drop-down list for all the layers in this composition. So I can choose rectangle, the third layer. And what you will see is that once I click on rectangle one and grab its rotation value and start rotating it. That rectangle two is now following along with that rotation from the same anchor point. Now rectangle to still has its own rotation which I can animate independently. But now when rectangle one rotates or changes position or scales is going to follow along with that. Another way of parenting layers, looking at rectangle three is using the pick whip. The pick whip is this little squiggle next to the Parent and Link drop-down. And what I can do now is click and drag this pick whip to rectangle one and release it. Then it's just going to fill in rectum rectangle one over here. So let's give this rectangle an animation by just rotating it once. So I'm gonna go to the rotation of rectangle one and keyframe it, and then go to two seconds in the timeline. I'm just going to rotate it once, so I'm going to enter one. And that will give me this animation. Let's put some easing on that. So right-click and choose Ease In for the second keyframe and ease out for the first keyframe. It's going to make it a little better looking this animation. What I can still do now is actually parent or give these parented layers their own animations. So what I can do here is grab the rotation of rectangle two and keyframe that independently of the rotation of rectangle one. And then I'm gonna go to two seconds and the timeline, and I'm just going to rotate this twice because it's smaller and it will rotate around its own center because it still has its own anchor point. Now I get this as a result. Let me add some easing to that. So an Ease In for the second keyframe and an ease out for the first. And that's gonna look like this. Now let's say I want to copy this animation to rectangle three. I can just click on rotation, which highlights all the, all the keyframes involved. And then press control C to copy them. Then click on rectangle tool and press Control V to paste those keyframes in place. So now if I grab the rotation value, you'll see that they're in the wrong place because the timeline wasn't at the beginning. I can just click and drag these back forwards. And that's going to give me this animation. So you can parent layers to each other and the children will follow whatever the parent is doing. But you can still give these parented layers their own animations if you want. 21. 2.10-Parenting-2: In this lesson, we are going to expand on the concept of parenting a little bit by creating a chain of parenting to get some interesting animations with this robot arm in composition to 0.10 parenting to what I have here are separate layers for each circle. So each pivot point of this robot arm and individual layers for these segments here, and a separate layer for the claw and the floor or the base of the robot. Now, what I would like to achieve is that when I rotate circle one here at the top of the layers panel, everything rotates along with it. So the entire robot arm just rotates. When I rotate circle too, I want everything above circle to rotate, but I want to circle one to stay in place. When I rotate circle three, I want everything above that to rotate, but everything below it to say in the same location. So I want to be able to animate each segment individually, but also be able to animate them together when I rotate circle one. So that's something we are going to achieve through parenting. What I'm gonna do is parent segment one and circle two to circle one. So I'm just going to select these second, third layers and grab the pick whip and just parented to circle one. So now when I grabbed circle one and press R for rotation, I can rotate it and the segment, and the circle will rotate along with it. Now I'm going to grab segment two and circle three, and I'm going to parent dose to circle two. So I'm just going to grab the pick whip and I'm going to release it on circle two. And that gives me this result. So I can rotate circle one, and that's going to rotate everything that we've parented so far. And I can rotate circle too, and that's going to rotate everything above that. By the way, I am. Every time I rotate these, I just press Control Z to go back to the standard value. Otherwise, the segments in circles are not going to be aligned in our end result. So now we have circle three, segment three and circle for which of course I want to parent to circle three. And again, let's just look at the result by pressing R for circle three and rotating that rotates this rotating circle tool now rotates everything above it. And circle one works as well. So now we grab segment for and circle five and that's going to be parented to circle for and let me just grab circle forced rotation to test that out. Okay, and now we only have the claw of the robot, which I want to pair it to circle five. So now we have a complete parenting chain. And I can show you that by just enabling the rotation on all of these rotating circle one is going to rotate the entire robot. Rotating circle two is going to rotate everything above they're rotating. Circle three is gonna give us this result. And S4 is gonna give us this. And circle five is going to allow us to actually rotate the claw. So you can key-frame these if you want by just adding keyframes with the stopwatch value. In the next chapter about expressions, I'm actually going to show you how to randomize animations within certain values to make this robot do a little dance, but that's something we will look at in the next chapter. 22. 2.11-Copying keyframes: In this lesson, I'm going to teach you how to copy keyframes to a different point in the timeline, and also how to mirror keyframes across the timeline so that you can rewind an animation here in the composition to 0.11, copying keyframes, I have the following animation which we already created in the lesson about position. And basically what I would like is if this animation rewound itself, starting at five seconds, so that it starts moving back to the exact same positions as it did in the previous keyframes. Now, I could just eyeball this and go to six seconds and then drag this rectangle up towards this previous point. But that is pretty tedious, labor-intensive and not very exact. So what I'm actually going to do is copy everything except this last keyframe here. Because starting at that point, I actually want it to animate in reverse. So I'm going to select these first five keyframes and then press control C to copy them. I'm going to go to exactly six seconds. And then I am going to paste these keyframes using control V or command V on the Mac. I'm not going to click anywhere else for now because I want these keyframes to remain selected. Now, these keyframes are in the exact same order as these first five keyframes. And that means that starting at five seconds, it's not going to reverse the animation. It's gonna go back to this original point from the first keyframe, because this is a copy of this first keyframe. What I actually want is to flip these keyframes over. I want to reverse them in time. And for that, I can right-click while these keyframes are selected and make sure that you right-click on the actual keyframe because otherwise he will get a different menu. And then you can go into the keyframe assistant. And the bottom most option is time-reverse keyframes. And that's going to flip them around. And that's gonna give me the following animation. It's going to keep going till five seconds, and then it's just going to reverse to the same positions. And they will be the exact same positions because these keyframes along with their values, were copied and pasted on. So when you want to actually rewind that animation, there is something you can use called the ping-pong loop expression, but I will teach you more about that in the next chapter. Or you can just copy the keyframes and flip them using time-reverse keyframes. In the keyframe, assistant. 23. 2.12-Hold keyframes: In a previous lesson, we have talked about interpolation where after-effects basically calculates what the position of an object is in-between key-frames. And it doesn't just do that for position, it does it for every property that you animate. So after effects just calculates the state of an object in-between key-frames when you have animated them. But sometimes you don't want After Effects to interpellate anything. And you just want the state of the object to change from one frame to the next. So I basically, with this animation, it's moving through the screen and each individual frame has its own position for this rectangle. But what I actually want is at 1 second, I just want the rectangle to jump to this position immediately. And a two seconds, I wanted to just appear here all of a sudden, like it's a stop motion animation basically. And that's something we can achieve with hold keyframes. So what I'm gonna do is summon the position of this shape layer by pressing the P key. And here I have all of these keyframes selected already because I clicked on the word position. And now I want to toggle these into hold keyframes. And to do that I can right-click on any of them. But do make sure that you actually right-click on a key-frame. Otherwise you get a different menu and this is not going to make sense. So I'm just going to right-click on one of the keyframes and then I can choose toggle hold keyframe. So the position of these shape, of this shape is actually not going to change in-between the keyframes, but it is going to change once it hits a keyframe. So when I play the animation, it is just going to jump across the screen at each second. Now, this is a toggle, meaning that I can just go back into the right mouse menu and choose toggle hold key frame again. And that's going to normalize the animation to just a linear fashion. But you can always switch to toggle hold keyframes to get something like this. And if you want to go for a stop motion look, then this is definitely something that you can use. 24. 2.13-Project: It's time to put everything we've learned in the previous videos to the test by making a little project animation. So we're going to draw a 400 by 400 pixel rectangle. We're going to animate its position, its rotation, its scale, and its opacity while looking at some tips and tricks along the way. So the first thing I want to do is create a 400 by 400 pixel rectangle. And the easiest way of doing that is just double-clicking the rectangle tool here at the top of the toolbar. I'm just going to double-click this tool and that's going to create a rectangle that spans the entire composition. So this rectangle is now 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high. Now, what I'm going to do is expand the contents of rectangle one and then go to rectangle path and expand those options as well. And you will learn more about this by the way, in the chapter about working with shape layers. I'm just going to disable this little chain link icon so I can influence the width and the height separately. So I'm just going to enter 400 by 400. And now I have a rectangle that's exactly 400 by 400 pixels. And its anchor point is also automatically centered when you create it within the composition by double-clicking the tool. So this, to my mind, is the easiest way of drawing exact shapes. Now I'm going to grab the selection tool and just put the rectangle up here somewhere. The first thing we're gonna do is get the same position animation as we've seen previously. So I'm going to move it down in 1 second, right into seconds, up in three, right in four, and down in five. So the same animation as we did previously. So I'm just going to press P for position. And then at 0 seconds, 0 frames, I'm going to enable the stopwatch to add the first keyframe. Then I'm gonna go to 1 second in the timeline. And with the selection tool, I'm just going to click and drag it down. Then I'm going to go to two seconds, and I'm going to click and drag it to the right. It's below here in the center. Three seconds. And then drag it up. Going to go to four seconds and drag it to the right. And clicking on exact time codes is a skill that you acquire as you work more with After Effects. A lot of the time I will end up a few frames off and then I can just use Control and the arrow keys of the keyboard to navigate to the correct time code, which is displayed here on top of the layers panel. But that's something you acquire as a skill as you go along. So now we have this 5 second animation. I'm just going to add the correct easing to these keyframes. So I'm just going to right-click the last keyframe and turn this into an ease in. I'm going to do the same for an ease out on the first keyframe. And this intermediate keyframes, these four are going to get an easy, ease keyframes. So instead of right-clicking and going to the keyframe assistant, I'm just going to pressing on my keyboard, turn them into, oh, actually F9 is occupied by a shortcut of my recording software. So I'm just going to right-click and choose easy, ease. So now they slowed down towards the keyframes and accelerate out of them once more once it hits the, hits the keyframe. Now we're going to animate this rectangle's scale. I want it to start at 50%, then animate to 100% at 1 second, then remain at a 100% until four seconds. Then animate back to 50% at five seconds. So I'm just going to grab the scale by pressing S and enable animation by clicking the stopwatch and changing the scale to 50%. Then I'm gonna go to 1 second in the timeline. And I'm going to change the scale to 100. And that's gonna give me this animation. Now. It's a little bit off with the easing of the position animation. So I'm already going to apply the correct easing. So an ease out over here and then an ease in over here so that the position and scale actually animate at the same time. Now I want it to stay at a 100% until it hits four seconds. So I'm going to go to four seconds in the timeline. And I'm just going to click this keyframe icon to insert a keyframe with the same value as the previous keyframe. And I can already give this an ease out. Then I'm gonna go to exactly five seconds and then rewind the scale back to 50. And that's going to give me this animation. It scales to a 100, it stays at a 100, and then it scales back down to 50. Now we're gonna do the same for the opacity. And note that we already have the correct positions on these keyframes with the scale animation. So what I'm actually going to do is use these keyframes as a reference to navigate in the timeline. So we don't have to enter time codes or click exactly on the right spot. So I'm going to press Shift T to also enable the opacity. So now I have scale and opacity in view. And at the beginning of the timeline, I'm going to enable the stopwatch for opacity and put it at 50%. Now I can use this little arrow icon to navigate to the next keyframe, which is where I want the opacity to become 100. And then I can click this arrow icon for scale again to jump to four seconds and insert another keyframe for 100 to keep the value at 100. For these three seconds. Then move to five seconds, and then change the opacity back to 50. And now we have this animation. So the opacity and scale animate at the same time. There we go. And the final animation that we are going to add is two rotations from one to five seconds. So between 05 seconds, I want it to rotate twice. So I'm just going to grab the rotation with R. And at the beginning of the timeline, I'm going to enable the stopwatch go to five seconds in the timeline and just enter two rotations. And I'm going to give these some easing again. So an ease out for the first one and an ease in for the second. And that's gonna give us this animation. It looks like it's spinning more than twice, but that's because this is a square. So those pointy bits make it look like it's spinning faster than it actually is. Now, we currently have a 10-second timeline. And let's say I want to cut off this animation at five seconds. I'm going to show you a little trick for that. I'm going to go to five seconds exactly on the timeline by just entering it in the timecode. And then I'm going to press N to limit the work area to where the timeline is. Now the work area is set to five seconds. And that means that once the playback hits, the end of the work area is just going to skip back to the beginning. Now to trim the comp to work area, I can right-click here in the top of this gray bar and then choose trim comp to work area. And that's going to trim the comp to exactly five seconds. So that's another little handy trick that we very often use in After Effects. So this is the animation that we've created. And in the next chapter about expressions, I'm going to teach you how to make animations like this a lot more interesting and dynamic using expressions. 25. 2.14-Motion blur: Motion blur is something that we are all intimately familiar with, and most people don't even realize it. It's basically the effect where an object appears of blurry in a video because it is moving too fast. So when you watch videos of cars racing by or a fight scene, you will see that the action isn't frozen perfectly from frame to frame, but there is actually blurring going on. And that's because of the shutter speed of the camera. And it also has to do with the frame rate of the video. If you're filming in slow motion from, let's say, 60 frames per second and up. It's a lot more difficult to get motion blur because objects need to be moving pretty fast for motion blur to occur at those higher frame rates. So after Effects is very capable of simulating Motion Blur. And I'm going to show you how in this video, in this composition to 0.14 motion blur, I have this animation of a robot. And in the next chapter I'm going to teach you how to actually create this animation using a wiggle expression. But if we were filming this on a regular camera, there would be some motion blur happening to this robot. And I'm just going to show you how to enable motion blur for the layers and then for the composition, and then how to change the settings for motion blur. So you have a little bit more control over the amounts. So I'm going to select all the layers here by pressing Control a or Command a on Mac. And here in the layer switches we have a motion blur column. And because all of these layers are selected, I can just click one of them and that's going to activate it for all of them. You also want to make sure that motion blur is enabled in the composition settings here at the top. So if I enable motion blur, you will already see some blurriness occurring because this robot is actually moving pretty fast. So now when I play the timeline, you will see this motion blur inaction. Now, motion blur can be pretty processor intensive, so it might be a bit more difficult for your computer to render this kind of animation as a preview. That's why you can always toggle it on or off with this switch at the top. And when you enable it again, it's going to have to pre-render everything again. But you can always disabled the preview so you can work within a composition more quickly. Now, you also have control over the amount of motion blur in any given composition by changing the shutter angle of the composition settings in the Advanced tab. So here inside of this composition, I'm just going to press Control K or Command K on the Mac and then go into the advanced settings. And here we have a shutter angle. The shutter angle by default is set to a 180 degrees. And what this actually means and what this actually does when we are comparing it to a physical camera, falls a bit outside of the scope of this course. But I just want to show you that a higher value equals more motion blur. So I have preview enabled here at the bottom left so I can actually see what's happening in the composition. And then I'm just going to change it to 360. So that's double the amount of motion blur for the same amount of motion. When I put it at 720, our robot arm is a lot less visible, but I just wanted to show you what this looks like in motion when I click on Okay. And then just pre-render the scene by pressing space bar. So this is how that looks. This is how the motion blur is configured. Now, this doesn't exactly look natural because of the 720 degrees shutter angle isn't exactly natural, especially not at 30 FPS, which is the setting for this composition. But if you want some more motion blur in your animations, you can change the shutter angle off the composition to achieve that effect. 26. 3.1-Wiggle: Expressions are an incredibly powerful tool within After Effects because they allow us to automate certain animations by randomizing values, for example, or to make animations more interesting and dynamic by adding just a little bit of pizzazz to them, let's say. So here in the Chapter three main file, you will find the composition three-point one wiggled and the wiggle expression is the first expression that we will be looking at. We will also be looking at several different ways of working with expressions in this chapter. And this is the only expression that we will fill in manually because it's so easy to remember. So let's say I have this rectangle and I want this rectangle to just kind of move around the composition in a random way. What I can do then is grab the position. And I could animate this with keyframes. I could just add a keyframe, change its position, then move forward in time and change its position again. And change its position again. And I could just make it wiggle all around, let's say. And I could add some easing to this to make it more interesting. But what I can also do is just assign a number of wiggles per second, along with an amplitude value that tells After Effects how hard I want it to wiggle to randomize this position value. So to do this, to add an expression to the position, I'm not actually going to use any keyframes. I'm just going to Alt click or Option click on the Mac, stopwatch for position. And that opens this code and dialogue in the timeline here. And what I'm gonna do now is type in W I, G for wig. And that's going to autocomplete to wiggle. Autocomplete was introduced into After Effects in 2019, I believe. And for stuff like this, it is a lifesaver. Now with the wiggle highlighted, I'm going to press the Tab key to auto-complete. And that's going to type wiggle with two brackets and opening bracket and a closing bracket. Now, in this bracket, there are two things. I have to specify. The frequency of the wiggles, so the number of wiggles per second and the amplitude that the wiggle can reach as a maximum value. So I'm going to enter two for two wiggles per second. Then type a comma to separate the operators and a space. And then I'm going to type, let's say 25. Now to confirm the expression, I'm just going to click anywhere outside of it. And now when I start playing the timeline, you will see that the rectangle is actually moving over the x and y axes because this wiggle is applied to one property, the position here. Now to, let's say that the position was actually collapsed. So I'm just going to press P to collapse the position and then press P again. The values for the x and the y position have turned red, and that indicates that there is an expression active on this property. And you can always access the expression by just collapsing or expanding this triangle here. And then you can click inside of the code to edit the values. So let's say I'm going to change the wiggle frequency two for the amplitude to 75 and then just click outside of the expression to confirm. And that's going to turn it into something like this. Let's say I also want to randomize the scale value. So I'm just going to select the rectangle again and press S for scale, and then Alt click the stopwatch to enter an expression. Again, I'm going to type WIG, WIG and then press Tab to autocomplete to wiggle. And I'm gonna go for two times per second with an amplitude of, let's say 25%. That is also going to randomize the scale value, giving us this, as a result. Notice that I have all this animation going on, but not a single keyframe added. Just this wiggle expression already gives us this kind of dynamic result. So that is something that's exceedingly useful for the wiggle. If you want to animate a layer's opacity randomly to make it flash, for example, or to make it Flickr. You can also do that. So I can just press T for opacity. Alt, click the stopwatch for opacity and type in wiggle. Wiggle this 15 times per second with a maximum value of 100. Then what you will see is that it also starts flickering as if it were a light. Let's say. The wiggle expression allows you to randomize an object's properties for a certain amount of times per second across several, across a maximum value that you can also specify. 27. 3.2-Separate dimensions: It happens quite often that you want to animate the different axes of an object. So the x and the y axis separately when it comes to a layers position. But what we've seen in previous lessons and in the previous chapter is that when I enable position for this layer by pressing P, we have these two values, one for the x position and one for the y position of this layer. But it only has one stopwatch, meaning that any expression that I add for the y-axis will also apply to the x-axis and vice versa. Now, let's say that I want this rectangle to wiggle on the, on the Y position only, but stay in place on the exposition. So just wanted to move up and down randomly, but not left to right. Now, to achieve that, we can actually separate the dimensions of the position for this layer. And to do that, I'm going to make sure that position is actually highlighted here so that it's clicked and highlighted in the Layer Properties. And then I can go up into the Animation menu here at the top and hear about a bit more than halfway down, you will see Separate Dimensions. And once I click Separate Dimensions, you will now see that I have an x position and a y position that I can animate separately. So let's add this wiggle expression to the Y position only. So I'm just going to Alt click the stopwatch or Option. Click on the Mac, type in wig for wiggle and press Tab to autocomplete it. Then I'm going to enter for wiggles per second comma space 50, let's say. Now you will see that it's only animating on the y-axis and not on the x-axis. So it's just moving up and down and not left to right because I split the dimensions and any expression that I add to the Y position not automatically apply to the X position. Now one thing to note is that if you forget to do this and you add the expression first. So I just went back with control Z to before separating the dimensions, I can, I'll click the stopwatch and type in wig and then enter four comma 50. So now it's actually active on the x and the y axis. So it's moving from left to right as well. Now, nope, what happens when I separate the dimensions? Now, I don't have to go into the Animation menu here at the top, I can just right-click this position. And then I can choose separate dimensions. And note that the expression disappears. So any expression that you have active, it will disappear and you will have to add it again. So make sure that you keep an eye on whether or not a property has an expression and then reapply the expression to the relevant x or y position. You can also do this for objects in 3D space when they also have a z position. So enabling 3D on this layer about which you will learn a lot more in chapter six, we'll also give you a separate position coordinates for the z axis. 28. 3.3-Wiggle-2: As promised in the previous chapter where we were looking at this robot arm, I'm going to show you how to animate this using the wiggle expression. For brevity sake, I've already completed the parenting chain here actually, so everything is parented correctly. When you think back at the video about parenting in Chapter two, I've already arranged that when we rotate circle one, everything rotates except the claw apparently. So I'm just going to parent the claw back to circle five. This is why it's always a good idea to test your rigs, let's say. And what I wanna do now, because the rest of them appear to be in order. These are parented to circle to circle three, circle for and then circle five. Okay, so the rig appears to be in order. So what I'm gonna do is add a wiggle expression to the rotation of circle one. So I'm just going to Alt click on the stopwatch here. And then I'm going to type in wig and Tab to auto-complete. And let's say we're gonna go for two comma 20. That's going to give us this wiggle. Now I'm going to enter this wiggle again for the rotation of circle to, before I show you how we can actually copy expressions to other layers. So I'm just going to Alt click the rotation stopwatch on circle tool, and I'm going to type in wig and then tab to autocomplete two comma space 20 and close the expression. And then we already have something like this. Now to complete the animation and animate the entire robot, I'm going to copy the expression from one of these rotation values. So you can choose either circle one or circle too. And I'm just going to right-click on rotation for one of those layers. And then I can choose for copy expression only. And that only copies the expressions. So no keyframes or whatever, just the expression itself. And then I can select the remaining three circles, circle 345. And then I can just paste using control V or command V on the Mac to add this expression. When I press R for the rotation values of these layers, you will see that the expression is active because the rotation is changed and it's a red value indicating that there is an expression active. Without much effort, we have now created this animation and we didn't use a single keyframe for this, only the wiggle expression. So the wiggle expression is very often used for just animating background elements that need to do something, but it's not really important what exactly they do. So that is one of the most practical applications of the wiggle expression. 29. 3.4-Linking properties: In this lesson, we are going to animate this bus driving from off-screen to the center of our composition, remaining stationary for a second and then driving off screen to the right. And besides animating the position of the bus, I obviously also want to animate the rotation of the wheels because the wheel should be spinning while this van is driving. But the actual calculation of how much it should rotate, depending on how much it moves, can be quite complicated. So I would have to calculate how many times it has to rotate to drive from here to here, and that's not the easiest thing to do. So what we're going to do is use an expression by linking layer properties so that the position of this bus, it determines the rotation of these wheels so that when we start moving the wheels, moving the bus, the wheels actually rotate along with it. And for that, the first thing we need to do is parent these four top layers to the van outlines layer. So I have here two wheels. I have the mirror, I have the Windows, and here I have the fan itself. So main body of the bus, Let's say when I animate the van, I want everything to move along with it. So I'm just going to grab these four layers and I'm going to parent them to the then outlines by dragging one of the pickups to the van help lines layer. Now they're parented. So when I grabbed the position of Van outlines, you will see that I can now move everything at once because they are parented. Now, I'm going to start with this bus off-screen actually. So I'm just going to click and drag it with the selection tool to the left. Then at 0 frames, 0 seconds, I'm going to animate its position. So here I click the stopwatch to add a keyframe. And then I'm going to move to four seconds in the timeline. And I want it to end up in the exact center of the composition. And I happen to know that this bus is symmetrically drawn, at least in its size property on the x-axis. So I can actually just move it to the middle of the composition by clicking in the exposition and entering 960. Because this composition is 1920 pixels wide, nine hundred, nine hundred and sixty is half of that number. So 960 actually puts it exactly in the center. And now I'm going to go to five seconds. And I'm going to add a hold keyframe so it actually stays in the center between 45 seconds. So I'm just going to click the keyframe icon here on the left of the layer controls. And then click and drag the timeline indicator to the end of the composition and then just click and drag it off screen. I'm going to add some easing to this. So on this keyframe, I'm going to give an ease in. This one will be an ease out. This one will be an ease in because it's supposed to come to a stop. And this one will get an ease out. Now these animations like the beginning and the end of it won't actually be visible. But I'm just doing it for completion sake. Let's say now we have the following animation. The bus enters or flies. Interview comes to a stop, stay still for a second, and flies out of you. Now the bus should actually be driving. So at this point, I want to link the rotation of the wheels to the position of the bus. For that, I have to get the rotation values for the wheels interview. So I'm just going to select both of them and press R. And then I want to link this rotation to the x position of the bus, not the y position. I only want to link it to the exposition. I don't want the wheels to rotate when the y position changes. If the y position will change next to the parenting pick whip. So slightly lower. Actually, you could say that it's at the end of this rotation column. Let's say what I can do here is grab this property pick whip. And the property pick whip allows me to link the property of one layer to a different property on another layer. So I'm just going to click and drag this pick whip to the first position value. So the X position van outlines and release the mouse. And I'm gonna do the same thing for the wheel, F, the front-wheel. So I'm just going to grab this secondary property, pick whip, click and drag it to the X position. Now when the bus moves through frame, you will see that the wheels are rotating. And not only are they rotating, they are rotating exactly as much as they need to for this position animation to take place. So they are linked together so the wheels will rotate exactly how much they have to. That is exceedingly useful because if I change the position animation now, this rotation will also change with it. So if I speed up the animation by just grabbing these three keyframes and moving them to the left. I don't have to change anything about the rotation value for these layers because they are linked to the position animation. So this is a very basic character rig, our vehicle Reagan, that we've made here actually, because when the bus moves, the wheels rotate along with that movement. So if you ever want to animate some kind of vehicle, this is an extremely easy way of managing it. 30. 3.5-Loop out: In this lesson, I'm going to teach you how to loop an animation using the loop out expression. For that, I have the composition three-point five loop out, which contains the outlines of this ball illustration, this football illustration. What we're going to do is make this ball fly through the air. Going from off-screen at the bottom-left to the top in the middle, and then to the bottom-right. So what I'm gonna do here at the beginning of the timeline, it's just move the ball off screen using the selection tool. And then I'm going to start keyframing its position. So I'm just going to click the stopwatch for position. And then I'm going to go to 15 frames. Let's say that's a quarter of a second. And then I'm going to click and drag it up to the middle of the composition and skip another 15 frames. So I will now move to 30 frames in the timeline and then click and drag it down to the bottom right. Now, as you might note, actually this animation is a little bit too quick for me. I'm just going to select these key-frames. I'm going to hold down Alt and click and drag to about 1 second. So now the animation is a bit slower, but that works for our purposes. Now what you will note is that this ball is flying in a perfect triangle shape. Now, that's not usually how balls behave. And it's behaving this way because we changed the keyframe interpolation from auto bezier a two linear to make sure that we can actually move layers in straight lines. But in this case, I don't want it to move in a straight line. I want it to move in an arc. So what I'm gonna do is with these keyframes selected, just right-click on one of them, and then go to Keyframe Interpolation. And then I'm going to change the spatial interpolation from linear to auto bezier. And when I click Okay, you will see that it is now a curve. I can still change the angle of this curve by clicking and dragging these handles around. You will learn about a bit more about these handles when we start working with the pen tool in one of the next chapters. But now the ball is flying through the screen like so. Now let's say that I want an infinite stream of balls flying from left to right. What I could do is just copy and paste these keyframes to wherever I want that animation to take place. So I could copy these keyframes. And I could go to, let's say, one minute and 31 second, 30 frames and then pasting those keyframes again, that's not exactly what I want because the ball is actually moving through the frame back to the beginning. Now, that can be something that you find desirable for any random animation. But in this case, I would just like this animation to start over as soon as it hits this final keyframe. And that's where the loop out expression comes in. Because the loop out animation expression, we'll actually go through the animation. So go from key-frame to keyframe. And when it gets to the final one is just going to jump back to the first one and then play the animation again on an infinite loop. So to achieve this, I'm going to Alt click the stopwatch for position where we just created this animation. We've already looked at a couple of different ways of adding expressions to our layers. We've entered them manually with a wiggle expression. We've linked properties to each other, which also is basically adding an expression. We can also use the expression language menu, which you will find here at this Play button next to the layer controls. So clicking this opens a pretty intimidating menu with way too many options for the normal user variety. But the only category where you actually have to be in on a regular basis is the property tab. So I'm just gonna go to property. And here we have a few loops to choose from. Now, the one we will be choosing is the loopOut type cycle. So loopOut type cycle. And I'm just going to click this. And now when I click out of the expression, the loop is already applied. So now when I play the timeline, you will see an infinite stream of balls just flying through the screen. So the animation is playing as follows. It's going from keyframe one to keyframe to keyframe three. And then it just jumps back to keyframe one. And it will keep looping this into infinity or as long as the composition actually lasts. Now, there's actually a different type of loop out that you can use. The default is cycle, which cycles through the keyframes and then starts over again. But there's also the ping pong type. And the ping pong type actually hits the final keyframe and then goes back to the first one through all the other keyframes. So that is going to give us the effect that the bowl is being hit back and forth. So not an endless stream of balls, but one ball going back and forth. So clicking in the expression, I can change the word cycle here to ping-pong, and that is one word. And now you will see that the ball just keeps going back and forth between the left and right side. Again, we've only keyframes a second here, but we basically created an infinite animation by adding this loop out expression. One thing I want to note about expressions is that when I remove the expression by Alt, clicking the stopwatch, and then add it again. The expression is gone. So just like keyframes, when you remove an expression, you remove all of the settings and all of the texts in this code panel. So if you, you really have to keep in mind whether you need to Alt click on the stopwatch or if you just need to click on the stopwatch. 31. 3.6-Loop in: In the previous lesson, we looked at the loop out expression to make an animation loop infinitely. But it often happens that you don't want an animation to loop infinitely, but only up to a certain point, and that is where the loop in expression comes in. So here in the composition 3.6 loop in, I have this same animation, but without the expression. So over 1 second, the ball flies through the screen to the other side. Now, what I'm gonna do is select these keyframes by just clicking and dragging in the timeline. And I'm going to move them to three seconds. So I'm just going to move the timeline to three seconds and click and drag these keyframes to the right. And holding Shift allows me to snap them to the timeline indicator. So now the animation is not going to start until the timeline hits three seconds and then it will play once. But what I actually want is for this animation to loop until it hits the final keyframe over here. That is where the loop and expression comes in. So I'm going to Alt click or Option click on the Mac, on the position stopwatch. Then I'm going to go into the expression language menu and go up to property. Then I'm going to choose the loop in animation. And what you will see now is that the animation will loop on a cycle until it hits this final keyframe. So once the animation itself actually plays on these keyframes, then the, then the loop will break and the animation will stop. So however far I move this, these keyframes will be the end point of my animation. Note that this also has a type, so I can go from cycle to ping pong. Let's say. That's going to loop this animation for four seconds. From four seconds to five seconds. The animation itself plays on the keyframes and then the animation ends. So if you want a loop that ends at some point, that's when you use the loop in expression. 32. 3.7-Inertial bounce: The inertial balance expression is my favorite expression to work with because without much effort, it just makes our animations a lot more visually interesting when it comes to specifically rotation and scale animations, because it makes the animations more bouncy and more dynamic. And to demonstrate this, I have here the composition 3.7 inertial bounce. And we're going to create a scale animation of a quarter of a second from 0% scale to 100% scale. So here at the beginning of the timeline, I'm just going to keyframe the scale by clicking the stopwatch. And I'm going to put the scale value to 0. Then I'm going to skip to 15 frames and then increase the scale value to 100%. Now, this animation is completely linear, but what I also want to point out is that a quarter of a second doesn't sound like a lot of time, but you can wait for this animation to complete, like you consciously experienced the animation. And sometimes a quarter of a second is even too long for an animation like this. So even though a quarter of a second, it doesn't sound like a lot of time for an animation. It might just be plenty in many cases. Now, this animation is completely linear and static, not very visually interesting at all. I want to show you how we can use the bounce, the bounce expression to improve this animation a little bit. We could work with easing and we could even add some keyframes on the graph editor to make the animation more visually interesting. But because the animation is so short, easing isn't really going to help us there. So if you look in the course files for this chapter, you will find a text file labeled expressions. And this is a file in which we will work in this video. And the two next ones about the inertial bounce again and about the bounce back. But for this video we're just looking at the inertial bounce to get this expression into After Effects, I'm just going to select it here in this text file. And please note that you don't have to understand what this says. You don't have to be able to write this in any way. You don't have to know which component does what. You just have to be able to copy and paste it to an After Effects expression to be able to benefit from it. So don't, unless you know, JavaScript, don't bother trying to understand what this says. You just have to be able to copy and paste it to be able to use it. So I'm just going to copy this with Control C and then head back to After Effects. Now I'm going to add it to this scale animation by Alt clicking on the stopwatch and just straight up pasting in with Control V. Now when I click outside the expression and I'm actually going to zoom in a little bit. I'm going to play the animation. You will see that there is a very pronounced bounce. So what actually happens looking at this scale value? The scale actually increases past 100%, then goes back below a 100%, then back over 100%, but slightly less so, and then back under a 100% but slightly less so it keeps bouncing until it reaches the actual value of the keyframe. And also note that this animation actually continues past the keyframes. So when I play the animation, you will see that the animation is not completed until about a second. So that's what this expression does. And it just makes this kind of animation a lot more visually interesting and dynamic. This enters your brain in a completely different way, then a linear animation. And only have to do is just copy and paste it from this text file that I've provided. Now, let's say I want to save this animation for later use. What I can do then is go up into animation. And then I'm actually going to have to select the scale value because that's where the keyframes and the expression is going up into the Animation menu. I can save this as an animation preset with the topmost option. Then you can choose a location for this expression. So you can save it in the default folder or any other folder on your hard drive. Save it in another folder you will get a pop-up that says, Hey, you are saving and outside of the default folder, please keep track of where you save things. So you can just click through this. Now if I want to apply this animation preset, including the expression, I can go up into animation and then recent animation presets, and it will be right here at the top. So if you are charmed by one of these expressions, are the changes that you make to the expression which we will do in the next video. You can save those as an animation preset, so you don't have to actually work with this code anymore. You can just apply the preset and be done with it. 33. 3.8-Inertial bounce 2: In this lesson, we will be looking at the inertial bounce expression a little more comprehensively changed some of its properties and also apply to the rotation of the shape that we animated in the previous lesson. So here in the composition 3.8 inertial bounce too, I have this same animation as before. So just a scale bounce from 0 to 100 in about 15 frames or a quarter of a second, because we are working with a 60 frames per second timeline, which I can show you by pressing Control K. And here we have a frame rate of 6015 frames is a quarter of a second. Now, I'm going to get the scale property out by pressing S with the layer selected. And then I'm going to expand the expression. And then we're going to look at some of the properties of this expression. Like I said in the previous lesson, you don't have to know what all of this says. You just have to know that when you scroll all the way to the bottom, you have here three properties that you can edit, AMP, freak, and decay. The amp stands for amplitude, or how far the deviation is from 100%. Currently the maximum is about a 170%, so it's going to bounce out to approximately that value as a maximum. So increasing this property is going to make the bounce harder. So I'm just going to change this 0.052.09, almost doubling it. And what you will see is that the scale variation is now increased so it is allowed to become bigger. So now the deviation for the first bounce is about a 123%, which I can see here in the scale value. And clicking in the expression again, I'm going to look at the frequency or the frequency. So the frequency Freq stands for frequency, and that is the number of variations, the number of wiggles, let's say per second, the number of bounces currently it's set to four. I'm just going to change it to six. And that is going to make a lot more pronounced. So it's going to make the bounce harder because there's more variations per second. So playing the animation now will give me this result. Let me just play that back. Now we have a much harder bounds. And please note that we have not edited any keyframes. We are just changing some of these numbers and we are getting a completely different result while it's still looking natural and organic. The decay determines how quickly the animation normalizes to the end value. So how quickly it gets to 100% and stays there to complete the animation. So a higher value means the animation is over sooner, and a lower value means the animation lasts for longer. So I'm just going to take away this eight and then enter a six, so it's 6 O instead of 8. And please note that if you delete a character too many, or if you exaggerate these values too much, the expression, the expression is going to break. If I forget one of these semi-colons or an equal sign or change these values in any way, the expression will not work anymore, and After Effects will give you an expression error. So now we have an amplitude of 0.09, a frequency of six, and the k F6. So let's look at the animation. And that is pretty cool. And again, you would be able to keyframe this. You would be able to add keyframes for this increase in scale and the longer bounce with the frequency changes and the decay changes. But that is a lot harder to do and time it correctly and make it look organic than just changing these values a little bit. The amplitude, frequency, and the k determined how this expression behaves towards the end. Now, as I said in the previous video, the animation keeps playing after it hits the keyframe. And at this point I want to figure out what the first frame is, where the animation is complete. So when it is completely done, now, I do this exercise in my courses all the time, so I know where the animation ends. It's at 1 second, 15 frames. But I'm going to show you how you can actually discover when an animation is complete. Because here we see the scale value which is fluctuating. So first thing I'm gonna do is visually look when the animation appears to be complete. And it's about here, let's say. And then I can skip forward frame-by-frame holding control and using the right arrow key to find the first two frames where the percentage value of the scale stays at 100%. So that tells me that the animation is over. At this point. I also want to apply a similar animation to the rotation of this shape. So I'm just going to press R for the rotation. First. I'm going to make the animation itself. So I am going to keyframe here at 1 second 15 frames and then go to 1 second, 30 frames or 1.5 seconds, and change the rotation value to 45 degrees. So the second value will be changed to 45. And that gives us this. It just rotates on the center axis. And now I want to add this expression to it. So I'm going to Alt click on the rotation stopwatch and just paste in the expression. And this is the expression without the changes, by the way, zoom in a little bit by using the mouse wheel. And now when I play the animation, you will see that the rotation has the same bounce that we had for the scale. So it actually looks like it's stuck on something. And now clicking in the expression, I'm going to enter the same changes. So 0.09 for the amplitude than six for the frequency, and then another six for the decay. That is going to give me this result when I preview the entire animation. So I'm just going to play the timeline with space, and that is how it looks, especially at 60 frames per second. These animations look so nice. So I cannot recommend you using these expressions enough. And if this is a bit too complicated for you, rest assured that this is as complicated as this course gets, like this is as technical as we go. There's some 3D stuff that can get pretty complicated with coordinates and z-space and things like that. But this is as technically complicated as the course gets. Leaving out the bounce-back expression, which we will talk at, talk about in the next video. If you'd like these animations, you don't have to actually remember the expressions are copied, the expressions, you just have to save these as a, as an animation preset through the animation menu here at the top. So you can enter them whenever you want. 34. 3.9-Bounce back: Another very common expression is the bounce back expression, and it works similarly to the inertial balance expression that we looked at in the previous two lessons. However, while the inertial bounds fluctuates past the actual value of the keyframe as in its scale. For example, in the previous animation goes over 100%. The bounce back expression hits the keyframe value and then bounces back off of it. And I'm going to demonstrate this with an example of letting this rectangle fall to the ground. Let's say I'm going to make it bounce on the floor of the composition. So the first thing I'm gonna do is find the final frame of the rotation animation, which you will find in composition three-point nine, bounce back. So the expression is still active, like the animation is still active past the keyframe. And I'm just going to use control and the arrow keys to find the first frame where the animation actually completes. And that is two seconds and 28 frames. And from here, I'm going to animate the layers position. So I'm going to press the P key for position. I'm going to add a keyframe by clicking the stopwatch. Now, I'm going to skip 15 frames ahead. So that will be two seconds and 43 frames to 0.43. And then I'm just going to use the selection tool and drag it down to the bottom of the composition. Now, when something falls, it usually doesn't fall past where it ends up, but it can bounce back from that position. And that's what we are going to do with the bounce-back expression, which you will find in the text file provided with the course files of this chapter. So I'm just going to select E through the final Else value and then copy this using control C. And then I'm just going to add it to this position animation by Alt clicking the stopwatch and just pasting in with Control V. And now if I drag the timeline, I can zoom in a little bit here. You can play the timeline and it will bounce on the ground. Now, there are a couple of values that govern the behavior of this bounce. So I'm going to click inside of the code, inside of the expression. And as opposed to the inertial bounce, these values are actually at the top. So here I have e, which is the energy. G is for gravity, and N max is the maximum number of repetitions. So the maximum number of bounces, regardless of the energy and gravity. The energy governs how much energy of the bounce is left after each bounce. So 100% would be one, so 0.7 would be 70%, meaning it loses 30% of its height with each bounce. So let's lower this amount, increase this amount to 0.9 instead of 0.7 and make sure it's a period and a comma by the way, then it will bounce higher or it will bounce less low. With each repetition. The G stands for gravity, and that determines how high the object is able to bounce back. So decreasing the gravity to 2500 yields this result. So the balance is longer. And the N max determines how many bounces are required for the animation to complete. So if I just increase the work area here, and let's say I'm going to decrease the intmax to four. Now, despite it not being bounced out, let's say after four repetitions it stops. So after the fifth repetition, it comes to a halt. Let's say. Now I'm just going to put this back on nine, because in the end, we will not have enough repetitions for the timeline to complete. And now I'm going to change the energy value to a one. So I'm just going to delete the nine and the period and enter one. Now this means that Let's just going to bounce back to the same position each time. So it's not going to lose any energy on each bounce, and it's just going to keep bouncing nine times or until the timeline completes. There you go. Now, I can also give this an even greater value. So a positive decimal, let's say 1.1. And that's going to increase the height of the Bounce by 10% with each repetition. So I'm just going to press space bar here, and now it will bounce 10% higher with each bounce. I can also increase this to 1.2, let's say, where the increase will be more pronounced. And again, one of the most useful things about this is you could keyframe this. You could just add keyframes to get this balance. And you can go into the graph editor to edit the falloff of the increase or decrease in height. But just changing this expression realistically mimics how this object would react in the real-world. It's not exact because gravity is not as simple as this little equation here. But it gives us realistic behavior by just altering these values here at the top of the expression without having to animate everything manually. If you want to change the animation, you don't have to go in and edit the keyframes. You can just edit these values and the animation will change with it, along with anything parented to this layer, if that were the case, let's say. Now, another thing I want to demonstrate is that the behavior of this expression is also related to the speed of the keyframes. So if I decrease the speed of the animation by just moving this second keyframe to the right a little bit, it's going to fall slower, meaning that coming back up, it will have a lot less energy. So it takes longer for the position to increase above its original value. Now, if I increase the speed, let's say moving these keyframes a lot closer together, you will see that it hits the ground faster, so it has more energy to begin with, and it keeps increasing by 20% with each repetition. So that is the power of this expression. And it is exceedingly useful for when you want things to fall to the ground or collide with each other. 35. 3.10-Time: Another very useful expression is the time expression. And the time expression allows us to change a value of a property over time. Let's say I want the rotation value of this rectangle to increase over time. Now, that's something I could keyframe, but let's say I just want it to rotate infinitely. Then I'm just going to press the R key with this layer selected, I'm going to Alt, click the stopwatch for rotation to apply an expression. Then I'm just going to type in time and use Tab to auto-complete. And then I'm going to click outside of the expression. And now when I play the timeline, the rotation of the object will increase by one degree every second. Every second that the rotation increases by one degree. Now, let's say I want it to rotate faster. What I can do then is apply a modifier by adding an asterix for multiply. And then I can enter, let's say ten. Now it's going to rotate ten degrees every second. So now playing the timeline, you will see that it rotates faster. Let's say I change this value to 50. It's going to rotate by 50 degrees every second. And this will loop infinitely. So if I change the length of the composition, it will just keep rotating and rotating. And I don't have to really think about what I'm doing with the keyframes because there are no keyframes that are used for this animation. Now, let's say I also want to apply this to position. I want the position to change over time. What I can do then is press the P key and then Alt, click the stopwatch. But you'll note when I type in time autocomplete with tab and click outside of it. This is going to give me an expression error, which is this orange bar here, which indicates the expression error. I can click on the X to actually get rid of this notification. Or I can click the magnifying glass and that will select the property it concerns. So if I have the scale visible, let's say I click this magnifier icon. It's going to give me the rotation where the problem is actually taking place. And that's because position actually has two values that would need to alter change over time. And this expression cannot do that in this way. So I'm just going to grab P for position again. I'm going to Alt click the stopwatch to disable the expression. And now I'm going to separate the dimensions, which we have also looked at in a previous lesson. So I'm just going to go into animation here. And then I'm going to choose Separate Dimensions. Now, I'm going to just choose the exposition. So I'm just going to Alt click on the stopwatch and type in time tabbing to auto-complete. And now when I push spacebar, you will see that, well, it's only changing one pixel per second. So I'm actually going to increase this value a bit by adding an asterix. Lets say 50 pixels per second is good. And now it will change 50 pixels each second. I can make this even faster, let's say a 150. And not a keyframe insight to create this type of animation. So that is why the time expression can be very useful. You can just increase a value by whichever number you want each second without having to use any keyframes. 36. 3.11-Saving animation presets: Every animator has their go-to tricks and standard animations that they use very often. In this lesson, I want to show you that you can save animations along with their expressions, it as presets so that you can summon them from the program whenever you want without having to keyframe everything manually and adding expressions manually. So here I have composition of 3.11 saving animations. And let's say I want to save this scaling animation, this 0 to 100% over 15 frames with this inertial bounce expression for later use in another project or for another layer. What I'm gonna do then is get the scale property using S, and then click on Scale to select the actual animation along with the keyframes and the expression. Then I can go into the Animation menu here at the top and then choose Save Animation Preset. Now, this is going to bring me into a file browser, allowing me to choose a location where this preset will be saved. And let's say I'm just going to call this one scale bounce too. Because I think I already have a scale balance in there somewhere. So I'm just going to click Save. And then it's gonna give me a warning about the default location to save expressions. Just going to click through this with okay. And then the animation is saved. So now I can actually remove the animation by Alt, clicking the stopwatch to get rid of the expression and then clicking the stopwatch to actually remove the keyframes. And let's say I want to apply this animation then. So with the layer selected, I'm just going to go into animation. And then I can either choose Browse presets or I can look at the recent animation presets. Here I will have the scale bounce. So clicking this applies the animation immediately. So now I already have this animation on my layer. And it's also taking place at the exact same time because the timeline was set to 0 frames and 0 seconds. So I'm just going to use Control Z to go back for a moment. Let's say I want to apply this animation at 1 second. I'm just going to move the timeline to 1 second and then go back into animation, recent animation presets and then choose scale bounce. And then it applies the preset at 1 second. So it actually applies the preset wherever you have the timeline positioned. So you don't have to keep dragging around keyframes to get them to a certain point. You just have to put the timeline where you want to apply the animation, apply the preset, and then the animation is automatically generated for you. 37. 4.1-Shape tools overview: In this chapter, we will be focusing on creating an animating shape layers and their different properties. We've already seen that regular shape layers have a position, a scale, or rotation, and an opacity. But shape layers have many other properties that we can also animate. And that is what this chapter is about. The shape tools or the basic shape tools are here in the top toolbar and by default it's set to the rectangle tool. If you hold the mouse down on the rectangle tool, you can choose the different shape tools that are available. And here we have a rounded rectangle tool which has rounded corners. We have an ellipse tool which we can use to draw ellipses or circles. We have a polygon tool and we have a star tool. Now, you can switch to these tools and between these tools at anytime by pressing the Q key on your keyboard. So pressing Q activates the shape tool here at the top. And using Q, you can cycle through the different tools. Now, with the regular rectangle selected, I can click and drag on my composition. And that allows me to draw a rectangle of any size and any proportion. You don't actually see the size next to your mouse cursor, as you may have seen in Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop. But that is something we won't be missing in this chapter. Now, we're holding down the Shift key as I'm still dragging the mouse allows me to draw a perfect square. And this also goes for the ellipse tool, the polygon tool, the Star Tool, etc. So all of these tools are constrained to an equal proportion by the Shift tool key. I can also hold down the spacebar, which allows me to move the tool as I'm still drawing it. So if you start clicking and dragging in just the wrong place, you can always hold down the Shift key as you are still dragging so you can relocate the shape to a different part of your composition. You can also hold down the Control key or the Command key on Mac, which allows you to draw the shape from the center of your original click. So that without the control key, you will draw from the corner. If you hold down control, you will draw from its center, which is useful if you are drawing objects in front of each other and they have to line up perfectly. Now, using this, I can just quickly draw this rectangle in the center. And my rectangle currently has a red fill color. The fill color is set here at the top. I can click the color to set any color that I like. And I can actually click the word Fill to choose different kinds of fills. I can choose for no fill. I can choose a solid fill which we just saw. I can choose a linear gradient fill, which currently goes from white to black, and a radial gradient fill which radiates outward from its center. Now, we will be looking at these different fill options in a later video. But this is basically where you set up the colors applied to your shape. I'm just going to click OK. And note that now in the layers here we have a Shape layer and the shape layer has a contents. The contents is currently one rectangle which consists of a path which defines the actual shape of the rectangle. It also has a stroke and a fill. So we can actually access these options here. And most of these can be animated as you can see, because it has a stopwatch. So I could animate the stroke color, for example, or the fill color or different properties of the fill, which we will be looking at later in this chapter. Now, with this shape layer selected, I'm just going to hold down the mouse on the shape tools, and I'm going to grab the ellipse tool now with the shape selected. And this is important for this example, I'm going to click and drag and hold down Shift so I can draw a proportional circle. And then I'm gonna release the mouse. And as you can see, this shape is not on a separate layer because this shape layer was selected. The ellipse was added to the same shape layer. So I can animate them individually in the sense that I can go here to the transform controls for this individual shape and change the properties here, such as the position, the scale, etc. But the layer properties are separate from these individual settings. I can still access the individual contents of the Shape layer by just dropping down these, these triangles. Let's say that I can use to access these different properties. But the layer transform options apply to all shapes within a shape layer. Now, I'm just going to use Control Z to go back to before drawing the ellipse. It often happens that you want these properties on separate layers, that you want to be able to influence them individually. To achieve this, I'm going to de-select the current shape layer by just clicking on an empty spot in the layers panel here, you can also use Control Shift a to deselect everything, by the way. And now if I click and drag, you will see that it creates a secondary shape layer, shape layer two, which has separate layer properties as opposed to Shape Layer one. So this layer has its own position and shape layer one also has its own position, so these are no longer linked. I prefer to work with separate shape layers in most cases because the shortcuts are still available. And just to illustrate that, I am going to delete Shape layer to select Shape Layer one, and again draw an ellipse. Let's say I want to animate the position of the ellipse only while not animating the position of the rectangle if I press the P key on the keyboard. Now, this position influences both shapes together because they are part of the same layer. If we want to influenced them individually, I have to expand the content's going to ellipse one and then transform ellipse one and then animate this position separate from the position of rectangle one. So that makes it slightly less convenient to access these different layer properties because you have to go all the way into these drop-downs to access these properties that you want to animate. So for this kind of thing, I prefer to work on separate layers, but you can add them to the same layer while still having the option to animate them separately. 38. 4.2-Other shapes: In this lesson, we will be looking at some different properties of the different shape tools. In the previous lesson, we worked with the standard rectangle tool which you can use to draw rectangles obviously, now I'm just going to add, activate the rounded rectangle tool. The rounded rectangle tool. You can again just click and drag and get a rounded rectangle. Now I'm just holding down the mouse currently so I can still alter the shape as I'm drawing it. And I just wanted to show you that you can increase or decrease the rounding of the corners by using the up and down arrow keys. Holding it down actually decreases the radius of the corners. And holding the up arrow key increases the radius of the corners. So you can get a more or less rounded rectangle if you want. Again, you can hold Shift to draw a rectangle. You can use the space bar to move the shape as you are still drawing it. And you can use Control to draw from your original mouse-click if you so choose. I'm just going to delete this shape using the delete key twice. And I use the Delete key twice, because according to the current selection, I have here Shape Layer one and its contents rectangle one is selected. Now pressing Delete, once deletes the contents, and then pressing Delete again, deletes the actual layer, which is not required, but I prefer to start fresh. Whenever I switch shapes. Then I'm going to switch to the Ellipse tool. I can just click and drag to draw an ellipse. I can hold Shift to draw a circle. I can hold space to move this circle as I'm still drawing it. And I can use control to draw the circle from my original mouse-click if I so choose. So again, this is exactly similar to the rectangle tool. I'm just going to delete the shape and the layer and then switch to the polygon tool. The polygon tool initially gives us a five sided polygon. Holding Shift straightens out the polygon because it is always proportional like I cannot draw different proportions currently, so I can hold down Shift to keep it straight. And also note that this always draws from the center of your original mouse-click. So I'm not dragging from a corner and dragging from the center of the shape itself. And using control does not change this behavior. Now, I can still, while I'm holding the mouse down, change how this polygon looks. For example, I can use the up key or the up arrow key on my keyboard to increase the number of sides of this polygon. So let's say I want to draw a triangle. I just decrease the number of sides to three, and that gives me a triangle. I can press up three times to get a hexagon. So I can also change how the corners behave of the shape. So I can use the left arrow key to inset the corners in this way. And I can use the right arrow key to push them outwards to get shapes like this. So as you are still drawing, you can change these shapes to whatever you like. And these tools are a lot more versatile, then they would appear originally. I'm just going to release the mouse and press Delete and then delete again. And note that when I start clicking and dragging once more, it actually remembers the settings from the previous draw from the last time I actually used the tool. So that's something to remember. I'm just going to delete this shape here and then switch to the Star Tool. And the Star Tool works in a very similar fashion. So I can click and drag to draw a five-point star. I can use Shift to keep it straight because I'm already drawing from the center. I can use the space bar to move the shape around as I'm still drawing it. And I can use the up arrow key to increase the number of points in the star and the down arrow key to decrease the number of points. I can also use the left arrow key to inset the corners. And I can do the same with the right arrow key towards the other side to get these flowery shapes. Now, another thing I want you to note about this tool is if I hold down the control key, I can actually expand the length of the star points. So I'm not actually scaling the shape itself. I'm scaling the star points. In this case, I'm just gonna go back to a bit of a more conventional shape for a star. As you can see, holding down Control or Command on the Mac allows me to draw a star like so. So as you are still drawing, you have a lot of control over how the actual shape is going to look. And you can do those things as long as you have the mouse button held down. So as we were still drawing it. Now, looking at the layer contents, I now have here a poly star one. I can expand the options of Paulista R1 and then go into poly star path. The polygon tool and the star tool allow me to set the number of points here. So once you've actually drawn the shape, you are not stuck with those actual proportions. I can also change the inner radius, as you can see. I can also change the outer radius to change the length of the points. So if you don't want to use those shortcuts or you want to enter exact values. You can still change all of these in the settings once the layer is actually drawn. And please note that you can also animate all of these because they have stopwatches. So you can still animate all of these properties. The number of points, the inset, the radius for the inside and outside, and the roundness of the inside and outside when you have actually drawn the shape already. 39. 4.3-Adding fills and strokes: In previous lessons, we've already looked at adding fills and strokes, two different shaped objects that we can draw it in After Effects. In this lesson, I want to show you that you can actually add several fills and several strokes and animate different properties concerning those fills and strokes. So here in the composition 4.3, adding fills and strokes, I'm just going to press Q for the rectangle tool. And I'm just going to actually double-click this tool to draw a rectangle at the full size of the composition. And that's because I want a rectangle of a specific size with the anchor point is centered on the shape itself. So this is the easiest way of doing that. With shape layer one selected. I'm just going to expand the contents of rectangle one and go into the rectangle path. I'm going to unlink the width and the height. And I'm just going to enter 500 for the width and 500 for the height. So now I have a red rectangle with a two pixel stroke, which is currently white. Obviously we cannot see this white stroke currently because it's against a white background. But we'll get to that in time. So I'm just going to click the fill color here at the top. And I'm going to go into the blue spectrum and I'm just going to pick something like this. The hexadecimal color code for this is 217797 if you want to follow along exactly, but I'm just pulling these colors out of thin air at the moment. Then I'm going to go into the stroke and I'm going to pick kind of like a muted orange over here, something like this. C D 7934. And because this is currently only two pixels wide, It's not very visible. So I'm just going to click the pixel value here at the top and enter 50%, increase it to 50 pixels. Now note that strokes actually scale towards the outside and the inside of shapes. So if I click and drag here, you will see that it scales inside and outside along with the pixel value that you enter. Now that we have this shape with these color settings, we're just going to look at the contents of the Shape Layer. Currently, we have rectangle, one rectangle path. And this shape layer, or the contents of the Shape Layer, currently has one stroke and fill. Now let's say I want to add a secondary stroke to rectangle one. To do that, I'm gonna make sure that in contents rectangle one is selected. And then I can go up here into this Add menu, which is only visible once the shape layer is actually selected. Or alternatively, you can look at the contents of the Shape Layer and then click Add over here this little play button, which gives you the same options. Now again, makes sure that rectangle one is selected if you're following along because that's important for later. Why it's so important. I will show you in the next lesson. So I'm just going to click Add and I'm going to go into stroke. And that adds a two pixel white stroke to this same object. So now in the rectangle one contents, I can actually go into stroke to and I can make this kind of a bluish color like a cyan. 1983 b, f. And I'm going to increase its size to, let's say, 30 pixels. There we have a stroke over our stroke. And please note that the order of these strokes of these objects actually is important because I can actually drag stroke to down a spot and that's going to hide it behind stroke one. So stroke to is actually still there, but it's hidden beneath stroke one. Stroke two is still there, but it's hidden, but nice stroke one. So now I'm going to add a third stroke by again making sure rectangle one is selected the actual shape that I want to apply this to. And I'm going to add yet another stroke. Stroke three, again is a two pixel white stroke. So I'm just gonna go in here and I'm going to make it a read color. And I'm going to increase the width to half of the 30, so 15. And there we go. And note that stroke width is actually something you can animate. So you can key-frame these properties as you wish. I could animate the stroke 1 first, then animates stroke to interview by Keyframing the width of the stroke. And then stroke three to animate these strokes into interview individually. So let's do that as an example. I'm at the beginning of the timeline. I'm just going to put the stroke width of stroke one to 0. And for now I'm just going to hide stroke 23 actually by clicking the eyeball icon here. And then within ten frames, I want it to go to, let's say 15 frames. I want it to go to the 50 where it was originally. So I'm just going to click the stopwatch to add a keyframe from the stroke width. And then I'm gonna go to 15 frames. And I'm going to change the width back to 50. And that's going to animate the stroke width for me. So I'm just going to add some easing here, an Ease In for the final keyframe and an ease out for the first keyframe. And then I'm gonna go to about halfway the full length of this animation. So seven frames. I'm going to re-enable stroke to, I'm going to expand its options. I'm going to keyframe the stroke width and put it at 0. Then I'm going to go plus 15 frames. So I'm gonna go to 22 frames. Then I'm going to change it back to 30, which is also going to animate this stroke. And I'm just going to add the appropriate easing. So an Ease In for the final frame and an ease out for the first. Then about halfway through this one. So 15 frames. I'm going to go into stroke three, making that visible again. Expand the options for stroke three. Keyframe the stroke width, put it at 0, go to plus 15 frames, so 30 frames. And then change the stroke width back to 15. Add some easing. Keyframe assistant ease in and then ease out. Now playing the animation is going to look something like this. You can animate all of these individual properties of the shape layers. So you can add as many fills and as many strokes as you want. And you can animate all of their properties together or individually. Now again, in the next chapter, I'm going to show you how this works with applying strokes and fills to different levels of a shape layer. 40. 4.4-Adding on levels: In this lesson, I want to elaborate a little bit on why you need to be very specific about what you select in the layer properties when it comes to shape layers, texts layers as well. But we will be looking at that in a future chapter. So here in the composition 4.4, adding on different levels, we have here this shape layer which currently only has one stroke, the 50 pixel, light brown stroke, orange ish stroke. That's the only stroke that is currently present. Now, I want to show you what happens when I now add another shape to this same layer. So with this layer selected, I'm going to grab the ellipse tool, and I'm just going to click and drag holding Shift to draw a circle, which is added to this same shape layer. So I'm actually going to remove the animation of this stroke here. So I'm just going to click the stopwatch when it's already visible. So now they are the same. So these individual shapes within this layer actually have their own stroke options. So if I expand the ellipse, you will see the stroke which I can influence separately from the stroke of the rectangle. But there is also a way to add a stroke or anything to this entire layer, and not just the individual objects within the layer. So for this example, I'm going to make sure that the layer itself is selected. So not ellipse one, not rectangle one, but the layer itself is selected, so nothing else is highlighted here in the layer controls. Then I'm going to go into Add, and then I'm going to add yet another stroke. Now, the stroke is currently not visible because it's a white two pixel stroke, which is obviously not, not visible here. But note that the stroke is also displayed outside of the ellipse one and rectangle one like it was added to the shape layer and not these individual shapes. So I'm going to expand stroke one, and I'm just going to pick a reddish color here just as an example. And I'm going to increase the stroke width and as soon as it exceeds 50, because the stroke that's currently applied to these two shapes is 50. You will see that it's added to both shapes. So it's added to both shapes within this one layer. So that's something important to keep in mind. If you want to apply separate strokes to objects within the same layer, you have to make sure those individual objects are selected if you want to add something, because you can't just add fills and strokes, you can also add all these different modifiers which we will look at later. If you want to add those to all the objects on a layer, you want to make sure that layer is selected and nothing from the individual contents. So what you can also do is click and drag this stroke into ellipse one, for example, that removes it from the rectangle because it's now contained within this group of ellipse one. So that's one way of changing the strokes around and to correct any mistakes that you make along the way. I can grab the stroke here and just click and drag it to the rectangle. And I can just collapse, ellipse one and expand rectangle and just click and drag it to the contents. And that's going to apply it to everything within the shape layer all at once, once again. And just as another quick example, I'm going to show you how that works with one of the modifiers. So I am going to go into the Add menu, and I am going to grab the twist modifier. Now the twist modifier twists any object in this way. So it kinda just turns it around on its center. And I currently applied it to both of these shapes at the same time. Right now I'm just changing the center because I want the circle to be affected as well. And this is already a pretty cool little animation that you can create by just keyframing this. But it's currently affecting both shapes because it's at the top level of contents. If I click and drag it into rectangle one, it's only going to affect rectangle one. And if I click and drag it into ellipse one, it's only going to affect ellipse one. So that's how these different branches of applying effects and modifiers works. You just click and drag them to whichever group you want them to apply to within these shape layers. Or you can apply them to all of them. But just making sure it's applied at the top level of contents. 41. 4.5-Gradients: In this lesson, we will be looking at applying gradients to our shapes. And a gradient, color gradient is basically one color that fades into another color that transitions into another color as a gradient. And to apply that to a shape, I have here composition 4.5 gradients and I have the shape layer one selected. And to apply a gradient, you actually have to select some of the contents of a shape layer. So I'm just going to click rectangle one here. Then I'm gonna go up into the Add menu and then I can choose Gradient fill. Now, that's going to fill this rectangle with a white to black rake gradient that just runs along the x-axis here. We can alter this gradient by expanding the layer controls here for gradient fill. And then we have some options here. So I can change the type of gradient and you can choose between linear and radial. Linear just goes from one side to the other, and radial radiates from the center of the shape itself. I'm just going to put it back on linear. We have a start point which determines where the gradient starts to transition. You can influence that over the x and y axes. As you can see, you can actually rotate where the gradient starts. And you can also do this for the endpoints, so the black side of the gradient, and if you drag it into the minus flips to the other side, which is something to take note of as you are working with different gradients. We can also change the opacity. And what you will see is that the gradient fill is currently on top of the actual solid color fill, which is blue. So now, by lowering the opacity of the gradient, I can see through the gradient to the color, color that lies below it. So this is something you can use to create some interesting effects. I'm just going to put it back at a 100% for now for demonstration purposes, you can also edit the colors of a gradient by clicking edit gradient. And that brings you into the gradient editor, which you will be familiar with if you've ever worked with Photoshop or Illustrator, or even InDesign. What I can do then is click here on the white color, stop at the bottom left of the gradient ramp. And then I can just enter a color. And then I can click the black side, the black color stop and I can pick a different color. Yeah, it's just gonna be something like this. You can also add colors by just clicking at the bottom of the bar to add stops what? You can also give different colors, of course, and if you want to remove them, because often you will add one accidentally. If you click around a bit too much here, you can just click and drag down to get rid of those gradient stops. You can also edit which color is dominant by clicking and dragging this little diamond icon. So now the left side of the gradient is more dominant. And if I drag it to the right, you will see that the other color becomes more dominant. So the gradient becomes less pronounced, let's say, becomes more gradual and there's less of a hard stop if you increase the distance between these two. So then I'm going to click, Okay, and here we have our gradient. And as I said, you can edit the opacity for some interesting effects. You can rotate the gradient by playing around with these settings. And let's say I'm going to add another shape to this shape layer. I'm just going to click on contents in the Layer Controls click and drag to add another gradient and you add another shape. And you will note that the gradient is not applied to this shape. And that's because it's only active in that rectangle one group. Now, what I can do is select the gradient fill here, press Control C, select Rectangle tool, and then press Control V. Now initially, visually nothing happens and that's because of the stacking order of these fills. So when I paid something, the pasted object becomes the bottom most object in this group. So now if I click and drag it up above the fill one, you will see that it becomes visible again. So the order of these items is important. And if you apply something and you're not actually seeing it show up, it probably has to do with how the, how the operators are stacked within these individual shapes. So that's something to keep in mind. Also important to note is that you can always delete the specific items. So I can just click the gradient fill here and press Delete, and that just deletes it out of the group. I can also delete this stroke that's on there and this fill. And then I just have the single path which is left. So that's also something you can do. I'm just going to Control Z, those operations for now. You can also apply gradients to strokes. So let's say I select rectangle two here. Then I'm gonna go up into the Add menu and choose gradients stroke. And that adds a gradient stroke above the existing stock. So that's also something worth noting. If you already have a stroke, it just displays over the stroke that is currently there. Now, I can change the stroke width. I can rotate the gradient like so. I can also displace the gradient like so. And I can obviously change the colors by clicking Add gradient here or edit gradient care, and then fill in my own colors as I see fit. So that's how we work with gradients in After Effects when it comes to shape layers, at least when we come to the chapter about Effects, I'm going to show you some different ways of adding interesting gradients to your compositions. 42. 4.6-Merge paths: From this lesson on, we will be looking at some of the modifiers that we can add to shape layers, starting with the Merge Paths modifier. Merge Paths allows us to combine shapes into different shapes. And to demonstrate this, I have composition 4.6, Merge Paths. And in this composition I'm just going to select the rectangle tool and make sure that shape layer one is selected because I want to add the shape to the same layer. I'm just going to click and drag and draw a shape. And as you can see, the shapes just overlap. They are just part of the same layer. Meaning that with the Selection tool, I can influence them separately by making sure that I'm within the actual layer. And when I click the layer, I just move everything at the same time. So I can either individually select these shapes or I can select the layer in its entirety and click and drag that around or separately. Now, let's say I want to combine these shapes in a certain way. What I'm gonna do then is make sure that the layer is selected. And I'm going to go into Add. And again, you can do that down here in the layer controls or here at the top where it says Add and I'm going to add a merge paths. The first thing you'll notice is that where these shapes overlap, the strokes disappear because it's a unifying these shapes into a single shape. So what I can do here is grab rectangle two. And as you can see, wherever I place it, the overlap is expanded or contracted. Now, this Merge Paths operator has several different parameters that we can change. You can find it down here in the layer controls where it says Merge Paths one. And the mode is currently set to add, meaning that it is adding these two shapes together to function as a single shape. Now, I can also choose Merge, which gives us this interesting area of overlap, Let's say. So what is actually happening? They are not above or below each other anymore as they would be without the Merge Paths operator, they are now simply intertwined. I can also choose Subtract, and that is going to subtract the overlapping shape, giving me this L-shape or this little Tetris shape here. I can also choose intersect, and that is only going to leave the area of the shapes that overlap each other. So now only the overlap remains. So now if I select rectangle one and I drag that around, you will see that only where rectangle one touches rectangle two is still visible. I can also go into exclude. Exclude does the opposite, and it hides the area of the shapes that overlap. So now if I move rectangle tool around, you will see that rectangle tool is cutting out of rectangle one. So using this, you can create some interesting shapes. And especially considering that you can animate all of these parameters individually or together, allows for some interesting possibilities that I heartedly encourage you to experiment with. 43. 4.7-Offset paths: Another operator which can sometimes be useful is the offset path. And for this example, I've created the composition 4.7 offset paths. And what I want to demonstrate here is what happens when I want to scale these shapes, which are part of the same shape layer from their individual centers. Now, let's say that I start changing the scale of this layer. What you will see is that these layers are the shapes scale towards the center of the layer. So not their own centers. They will always scale to the center of the layer itself, which you can set, of course, with the anchor point tool. So if I put it here on this rectangle, and then I start changing the scale. Only the rectangle scales source its center. And these other shapes also scale towards the center of the rectangle, which is not useful in this case. So let's say that these objects have to be on the same layer for different purposes. Let's say you could always draw them on separate layers. I just wanted to show, show you what happens when you want to scale these individual shapes on the same layer. What you can then use is the offset paths. So with the layer selected here, I'm going to go into the Add menu and then I'm going to choose offset paths. And the first thing you'll notice is that the layers that the shape's scale a little bit. And that is because their path, the path is being off set. So here in the offset paths, which I can expand in the layer controls, I have an amount control, so I can increase the size of these paths. The paths actually don't increase in size themselves. You can still see the paths here just they are visually smaller or larger depending on the values. So I can click and drag this to the left to scale the paths down. And I can drag it to the right to scale them up to wherever I want them to be. And that is basically all that this operator does. The most useful case for it would be if you want to scale individual shapes within an individual layer at the same time from their own centers. 44. 4.8-Repeater: The repeater operator for me is one of the more interesting ones because it allows you to create some pretty cool stuff with some basic operations. So I have here composition 4.8 repeater, in which I have this simple polygon. And I want to apply the repeater operator to this polygon. So I'm just going to go into Add and then go into repeater. And what you will see is that we now have two copies of this shape in the back of it. So these copies are in the back of the original lets say, and how those operate and how many of them there are, and what the distance is, and what kind of transform options they get is determined in the repeater settings, which you will find in the layer controls. So currently it's set to three copies and that actually includes the original. So if I change it to one copy, it just gives me the one. So I can just click and drag this out and make as many copies of this shape as I want. And that's not all because I can also expand these transform controls for the repeater and cure. I have the position, scale, rotation, start opacity and end opacity for each of these copies. So what I can do here, for example, is increase the position and you will see that the spacing of each copy is then increased. What I can also do is increase or decrease the scale of each copy by just clicking and dragging the scale, which also gives me a pretty interesting effect. I can also change the rotation of each copy. And you will note that the farther away from the original it is, the faster the rotation will be displayed. Actually, here we have the start opacity. And if I lower this, the start of the repeater is going to become transparent. And as it goes to the right, let's say the opacity increases to a 100%. Again. If I put this back at 100, you can see that I also have the same control for the end opacity. So now the beginning is 100% opaque or nontransparent, and the beginning or the end is actually transparent here. So this allows us to create some interesting things. Just as an exercise for stuff that we've done in previous chapters, we're going to be making a little basic animation with this. So first thing we're gonna do is grab the selection tool and just click and drag this out to the left a little. I'm going to put the number of copies at six. And I am going to change the position of these copies to 0 initially for the start of the timeline. Then I'm going to keyframe the position. And then I'm going to go into, and note that this is not the layer position, so this is not the P key. This is not the setting that you want to change with the P key. Let's say this is the position of the repeater that we've applied. So not the layer position, but the position of the repeater. So then I'm gonna go to 1 second in the timeline, and then I'm going to increase the X position. So the first position to something like 250 pixels. Let's say 250 Exactly. Okay. Now we have this. I'm going to apply some basic easing to this. So Ease In for the end. And he's out for the start, and that gives us this result. Then I am also going to keyframe the rotation of these shapes by going to the beginning of the timeline, clicking the stopwatch for rotation. I'm going to use the arrow of the position here to jump forward to that same frame at 1 second. Then I'm going to increase the rotation value to one, giving them one rotation and then apply the standard easing, so ease in, ease out. And then we have something like this. And actually one rotation may actually be a little bit too much. So what I'm actually going to do is go back to 1 second. Instead of one. I'm just going to enter 90 degrees. And that's going to give me something like this. Pretty cool, pretty cool. I like this. So you can experiment by keyframing some of the other properties that you can play with the start and the end opacity, for example, um, but this was basically the whole exercise, not only applying this repeater, but also demonstrating that you can actually animate all of these different properties however you want. 45. 4.9-Trim path: The trim paths operator is exceedingly useful and it's used so often that you've probably seen it hundreds of times in real life without realizing it. It is used to make it seem like a shape is being drawn. And here in the composition 4.9 trim path, I have this shape layer containing, containing a polygon. And note that this polygon only has a stroke. It does not have a fill. Why it doesn't have a fill? I will explain in a little while. So here on this shape layer, I'm going to apply the trim paths operator. So I'm just going to go into the Add menu and then go into trim paths. And initially nothing happens because we need to go into the settings which you will find under the layer controls. So here I have trim path and here is something I really want you to pay attention to because it has a start value and an end value. This is something that is very common in After Effects. We're also when you're working with texts layers. So the concept of working with a start and an end is important. So pay attention. The start value is currently set to 0 and the n value is set to 100. Now, when I start changing the start value, you will see that the line starts to gradually disappear. The line completely disappears when both values are at 100%. However, it also disappears when both values are set to 0%. It just means that once the values are 0 and you start animating one of them, the animation runs counter at, the animation runs clockwise, no matter which of these two you change. If both values are at 100 and you start animating them, it animates counterclockwise. If you want to animate something, animate the trim path counter clockwise, you would both put both values at 100. And if you want to animate them clockwise, you start the animation at 0 and then work from there. I'm just going to go to 100 for now and I'm just going to show you how I can animate this, which is the same as any other animation. I'm just going to click the stopwatch for the start value. Then I'm gonna go to 1 second in the timeline and just click and drag it down to 0. And you can comfortably click and drag it from 0 to 100 without worrying that it goes past that value because 100 is the maximum value and 0 is the minimum value. So now I already have this animation here. You can also apply some easing to this animation. So the Ease Out for the start and the Ease In for the end. And you can very easily create animation such as this. Now, I want you to follow along with me and just deleting the trim path for now. I'm just going to press Delete to get it off there. And now I'm going to duplicate this shape. So I'm going to click on the poly star in the layer contents and press Control D or Command D on the Mac. And that duplicates the poly star. With this second poly star selected, I'm just going to click and drag off to the left. And I'm just going to move this one over to the right a little bit. And let's say I'm just going to duplicate this one again. So I'm just going to click on the polystyrene to press Control D to duplicate, select the third poly star and just click and drag here. So these are just about aligned. And now I'm going to add a trim path to the layer, not one of these individual poly stars. They're actually polygons. It's a bit of a weird story why it's called a poly star. In here. The Star Tool and the polygon tool used to be one tool. And you would have to specify here in the layer controls whether it would be a star or a polygon. Now, you can still actually do that. You can go into the poly star path and then choose polygon or star. But you didn't. You used to have a separate Star tool. So that's why it's called a poly star because it can either be a polygon or it can be a star. In any case, we have here these three polyesters, and I'm going to apply the trim paths operator to the layer itself. So with the layer selected, not these individual poly stars, I'm going to go into the Add menu and then choose Trim Paths. Now, when I go to Trim Paths and start changing the start value, you will see that they all animate at the same time, which can be something you want. But it can also be the case that you want these to animate separately, one after the other. So what I can do then is go where it says trim multiple shapes. And then I can switch it to individually. Now once I start changing the value, you will see that the third poly star starts animating first. The second star, polystyrene starts animating second. And the first polys are actually starts animating last. And that is because of the stacking order of these Paulista, ours. So let's say I'm going to put polys start to at the top and poly star three at the bottom. Now, you will see that we get the left 1 first. Oh wait, I actually switch these around. There we go. So now we have them animating one after the other first number two, then number three, and then number one. As I have clearly just demonstrated, you want to keep an eye on the stacking order of the shape objects within each layer. But this allows you to create these little cool hand-drawn animations. Let's say. You don't want to overdo the duration of these animations, like when you have like a drawing, you want to animate things into frame pretty quickly. But it's something I very often use. It's very flexible in many situations. So the trim path is something I definitely recommend that you experiment with. One final note on why these objects only have a stroke and not a fill. That's because the effect kind of breaks when the objects have a fill. So I'm just going to click on the shape layer here. And I'm gonna go into the fill color, and I'm just going to actually go into this poly star here. And I'm going to go into Add, and then I'm just going to add a fill. It doesn't matter what the fill is actually. And now I can copy this fill Control C and then paste it over here in the poly star three and a poly star one. Now, when you start using trim paths on objects with a fill, you get this. And that doesn't look good at all. Like the effect of the stroke being drawn is completely overshadowed by this fill shape filling in over time. So I would recommend that you don't use a fill when you use this effect. 46. 4.10-Wiggle transform: Another interesting operator is the wiggle transform. And for that I have here the composition four-point ten wiggle transform. And with the layer selected, so not the contents, even though it only contains a single poly star. I'm gonna go up into the Add menu and go to wiggle transform. Now the wiggle transforming initially does nothing. So I have to go into these settings here. And the wiggle transform actually allows us to create animations without using any expressions or any keyframes. So if we can wiggle the different properties that a layer has by just changing these values. We have here wiggles per second, wiggles per second. A correlation, a Temporal Phase, a spatial phase, and a random seed. You don't actually have to understand what all of these values mean. You just have to know which ones you have to change to change the animation. Now, initially, like I said, nothing actually happens until I expand the transform controls here, which gives us anchor point, position, scale, and rotation. The only one we are missing, let's say between brackets is the opacity because that does not have any thing, that does not have any spatial data, let's say an anchor point, position, scale and rotation do. So. Let's say I change the y position here. And I'm gonna put that at about 50. Oh wait, this is the anchor point that I'm changing currently. So I'm just going to change the Y position to approximately 50. And now, once I start playing the timeline, I already have a wiggly animation. In the previous chapter, we already looked at the wiggle expression. So this is a way to make a shape behave that way without actually having to use the expression. And yes, this is only applicable to shape layers, but many animations only consist of shape layers. So this is something very useful to know. I'm also going to change the scale value to, let say, about 40% and the rotation value to about 45%. Let's say. Now when I play the timeline, I already have this animation, which isn't particularly fancy, but there is something happening on the screen. And that is often something you want for, let's say, background elements or icon sets that you are trying to animate. So that is something that you can use to put some random animation without having to think too much about where the keyframes should be and how they should behave. Now, once I start changing the wiggles per second, it will start animating a lot faster. So now it's at nine times per second instead of two. And if I put it at one wiggles per second, it will behave a lot slower. Now, the correlation relates to the values here at the top. It's going to jump to these values exactly when it's set to 100%. And it can deviate between any value, between 050 for the position value. For example, if it's set to, if it's set to 0, the temporal phase kind of displaces where the wiggle takes place. And the spatial phase does the same for the actual position, rotation, and scale of the object. A random seed applies a randomizer to all of these values to make it a bit more random, let's say, but if you want more exact control, leaf the random seed at 0. So that is the wiggle transform, which you can use to randomly transform any shape within your shape layers. Now, you can apply these two individual shapes within a shape layer or to the shape layer in general. So if I would create a secondary shape within this shape layer, I could have one conform to a wiggle transform and the other one not by placing it within the group, by just clicking and dragging. Or I can apply different wiggle transforms if I apply them to the shapes separately. 47. 4.11-Other operators: In this lesson, we will be looking at the remaining operators that we can add to our shape layers because they do not contain a lot of options and settings. So we can talk about several of them in one lesson. I have here the composition 4.11 other operators which contains this five sided polygon. And what I'm gonna do is go up into the Add menu with the Shape Layer selected, of course. And then I'm gonna go to pucker and bloat. Now, the pucker and bloat is added to the layer controls. And what you will note is that the corners of the object are already rounded, like the sides are slightly being inflated. And that's because they are being bloated. Dragging this slider for the amount to the right, It's going to bloat the shape layer and dragging it to the left is going to pucker the shape layer. So clicking and dragging to the right gives me initially this flower shape. And dragging it past that, past the boundaries of the stroke, It's going to give me some funky looking fractal thing like this. Now clicking and dragging it to the left, puckers the shape. And that kind of squeezes the edges of the shape together until you go past its boundaries. And then again, you get this fractal looking shape once you start animating this. And of course you can animate this by just using the stopwatch as we've done with many previous settings in the past. I'm just going to delete the pucker and bloat by clicking on it and pressing Delete on my keyboard. And then I'm going to go back up into the Add menu and then look at the round corners. Now, the round corners operator rounds the corners of objects so I can expand its options here in the Layer Controls. And I have a radius slider here. And if I click and drag this to the right, it's going to increase the roundness of the corners. And clicking and dragging it to the left decreases the roundness of the corners until I get back to the original shape. So not a very interesting operator, but if you want to round the corners of an object with straight corners, this is something you can use. Just going to delete this operator by pressing Delete again and then back into the Add menu. And then we're going to look at the twist. The twist kinda puts the shape in a blender, trailing along its edges. So I'm going to expand its options here and here we actually have two settings that we can change. Here. I have the angle which is going to increase the amount of blending, let's say. And here I have the option to change where the effect is centered. And that's gonna give us something funky looking like this. So you don't have to actually draw the shapes manually. You can just create them and transition between them by using these settings. And of course, you can key-frame these because the setting has a stopwatch. Now I'm going to delete this twist by pressing Delete and going back up into the Add menu, we're going to look at the wiggle path, which works very similarly to the wiggle transform that we looked at in a previous video. It's going to make the edges around this shape more wiggly. And I can expand its options. And here we have quite a few more than in the previous ones. I can change the size to change where the points end up from the effect. I can change the amount of detail and that's going to increase the number of edges that the object has. I can change the corner to smooth to create a more smooth shape along each edge. And here we have the animation controls. So now it says here, wiggles per second. So that means once I played the timeline, we already have an animation. I can change this number to one. And that's going to slow the animation down. So now we already have this bacteria germ kind of thing just floating in media air here, which can give an interesting effect or can be an interesting background element, let's say. So I'm just going to delete this wiggle path because the rest of the settings just work the exact same way as the wiggle transform of which we've already looked at in a previous video. And I'm gonna go back into the Add menu and then we're going to look at the last one, the zig zag, which works in a similar way as the wiggle paths and wiggle transform, but it doesn't animate for you automatically. So expanding the options for the zigzag we have here the size property which is going to make the edges more pointy. And if I want them to be rounded, I can change the points from corner to smooth. And that's gonna give me this effect. Note that things like this don't always look as good with a thicker stroke. So let me just decrease the stroke size to something like five. Let's say. That looks a bit different. I wouldn't say necessarily better, but it looks different. You can change the ridges per segment and that's going to increase the number of points that are expanding from its center. Those are all the operators. Now, not all of these are useful or practical in most cases, but I did want to show you all of them for completeness sake. 48. 4.12-The Pen: In the previous lessons, we've looked at the default shape tools that we have at our disposal in After Effects. There is also another tool that we can use to create shapes, and that is the pen tool. Most Adobe programs have a version of the pen tool, and I must say, I am the least impressed by how the pen tool works in After Effects. It's not very flexible. It lacks some of the finesse that the pen tool has in programs like Photoshop and especially Illustrator. But it's still part of the program. We still use it for certain things and that's why I want to highlight it in this lesson. The pen tool here is this fountain pen icon that you will find in the toolbar to the right of the irregular shape tools. And when I click this, we have the same settings as we saw for the other shape tools. We have a fill and a stroke that we can change. So you can click here to change the color of the fill, and you can click on the word fill to change the type of fill, and the same goes for the stroke. Now, the pen tool can be used to draw either straight lines or curves. When it comes to straight lines, the tool works exactly the same as in other Adobe programs. The problems arise when you start drawing curves, which we will get to in a little bit. Now to draw straight lines, all you have to do is click in the composition and that is going to create an anchor point. So one single point currently. Now clicking up here is going to draw a line between these two points. And once I add a third line, so when we go from one dimension to two dimensions, you will see that after effects starts filling in this shape, which is the fill color that we set here at the top. Now I can keep clicking to continue drawing my shape. You can also draw it over itself because it jumps to the next point. And here the first vertex. So the first vertex that we actually click, the first anchor point is highlighted here. And once you hover your mouse over this, you will see a different cursor. You will see small little circle icon next to the cursor. So when you click, you actually close the path and now the shape is complete. Once this shape is drawn, you can select these points and just click and drag them around. If you want to add points, you can actually hover over the stroke and just add one here, which I can then also click and drag. And if you want to delete points, you can hover over one of the points holding the Control key on Windows, command on Mac, and then click to delete the point, and then the connection is made with the next point in the line. Now, before I show you how to create curves from scratch, I'm going to show you how we can convert these straight lines to curves. So I'm going to hold the Alt key or the Option key on Mac. And that is going to give me the convert anchor point tool, like this empty little triangle. And clicking on one of these corners turns it into a Bezier curve, or what is known as a Bezier curve. Now, the left part of this curve is governed by this handle that I have here on the left. And the right part is governed by the right handle. And once I start clicking and dragging this around, you'll see that it's very difficult to influence one side but not the other. Let's say I want this part of the curve to stay the same, and I just want to change this curve. Now using the Shift key, it gives us a little bit more control over this. So you have a little bit more control over which one you influence, but it's exceedingly difficult to actually do this properly. So often when I need to use something that I have to draw with a pen, then I choose to draw it in Illustrator and then just copy and paste this shape into After Effects, which I will show you in one of the next lessons. Holding Alt, you can click on these anchor points to convert them to curves. And conversely, you can Alt click on them again to convert them to straight lines. So that's something that you can do. If you accidentally click and drag one of these, you can always Alt click to turn it into a straight line or a curve. Now, I'm just going to delete the shape layer by clicking on it in the layer controls and pressing Delete. And now I'm going to show you how to draw curves. And this is very inexact compare to how it works in Illustrator, as I've said before. So I'm just going to click here once to draw a single point and then move slightly to the right to approximately the middle of the composition. And then instead of clicking, I'm going to click and drag. The behavior of this tool is a bit odd at first. It takes some getting used to. Because if you drag to the bottom right, the curve is actually going to go to the top left. And drawing to the top-left is going to displace the curve to the bottom right. So it takes a bit of practice to really get a feel for this holding shift, you can draw the line exactly diagonally to create an even curve, such as I have here. Now, in the other Adobe programs, you would now see a preview of what your next click is going to do. So there would be what is called a rubber band element, which would display the next curve. As once you click and drag an anchor point like this, it doesn't just get one handle for this side. It also gets a handle for the next curve. So I'm going to click a bit further on here. And that's going to make the curve go down like this because this handle is expanded to the bottom right. Now, I can try to click and drag this back in here. But that's also going to affect the other line if you're not careful. So this is not very easy to work with in my opinion. So I can just keep clicking and sometimes clicking and dragging to give the objects some curves. Let's say something like this. And clicking and dragging on the first also allows me to change this curve, but it's also changing this curve. And that is just very inconvenient behavior for this stool. That's just how it works here in After Effects. In a later chapter, I'm going to show you how you can use the pen tool to create masks over actual video. But this is basically how the tool works. The after-effects version of the pen tool is not the best or most comprehensive version. But if you need to freehand draw a shape, this is a tool that you can experiment with. 49. 4.13-Copy from Illustrator: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how we can copy a shape from Illustrator into After Effects. So in the exercise files of this chapter, you will find this file 4.13 copy from Illustrator.ai. And in this document, I've created this relatively simple shape, which would be more difficult to draw in After Effects because of how the pen tool works, as I've explained in the previous lesson. Now here in Illustrator, I'm just going to copy this shape by pressing Control C or Command Z on the Mac. And then I'm going to go right back to After Effects in the composition 4.13 copy from Illustrator. Now, this initially cannot just be pasted, so I can't just press control V and get it into this composition. For this, I need a shape layer to apply this shape too. So what I'm gonna do is grab the pen tool here at the top. And I'm just going to create a single vertex by clicking approximately here, that just creates a single point in a shape layer. And now I'm going to paste in the shape using control V. So now I've used Control V. And if you look at the contents we have here, shape one and path one that I can just edit as I see fit here in After Effects. So I can actually delete anchor points if I so choose, I can convert anchor points if I so choose by just Alt, clicking on these. And that actually converts all of them in this case. But you can get those shapes from Illustrator into After Effects, provided that they are not too complex. If it's a more complex shape, there is a different, more productive way or a more efficient way of converting your illustrator layers into after-effects shapes, which I will show you in the next lesson. 50. 4.14-Shapes from vector layers: Drawing your artwork in Illustrator before you import it into After Effects and start animating. It is a very pleasant way of working because the After Effects composition is actually linked to the Illustrator file. So any edits that you do to the Illustrator file will also be reflected in After Effects. But sometimes you wish to have the shape editing tools of After Effects available for things that you've drawn in Illustrator because you want to animate certain properties or apply these different operators that we've looked at in the previous lessons of this chapter. So what I'm going to show you now is importing an Illustrator document and then converting that Illustrator artwork into After Effects shapes. So what I'm gonna do is just double-click on an empty space in the project panel here. And that's going to open the import dialog box. And in the exercise files you will find 4.14 shapes from vector layers. And I'm just going to click Import here. And then I'm going to import it as a composition with Footage Dimensions, layer size. And once I click Okay, that's going to give me a new composition. And what you will also see in the project panel is that this folder was created and this folder contains all the individual layers of this Illustrator document. So I'm just going to open this composition by double-clicking it in the project panel. And here we have these illustrator layers, which you didn't see the illustrator layers in a previous lesson about parenting? I believe it was, um, but though, that document was based on an Illustrator document, which you can see here. So here I have all these different layers. And having these items on different layers allows me to animate them individually in After Effects. Now, let's say I want to create actual shapes from these illustrator layers within After Effects. So I can use all the shape editing tools and operators that After Effects has. What I can do then is select all of these layers by either clicking and dragging or Control a or Command J on the Mac to select everything. And then I can right-click on either of them and then go into Create. And then I can choose Create Shapes from Vector Layer. And once I click that after effects actually traces the illustrator layers and turns them into After Effects shapes. Here. And I now have the option to change this object, fill or stroke, or add different operators if I so choose so I can apply a pucker and bloat to it to get kind of a different ring shape here. So you can use all of those default tools for shapes on these illustrator layers because they are now converted to After Effects vector. What I'm doing now is just selecting these illustrator layers which are automatically hidden when you use this function when you convert to aftereffect shapes. Because I don't need them in my composition anymore. So I'm just going to select all the illustrator layers and then press delete to get rid of them. And then I just have my aftereffects, shapes. 51. 4.15-Shapes from text: In this final lesson of this chapter, I just quickly want to show you that you can also convert editable text into actual shapes so that you can apply operators to them or animate their various properties. So here in the composition for 0.15 shapes from texts, I have this text layer which just says After Effects, as you can read. Now, I want to show you that you can just edit this text by double-clicking in it if you so choose. Like I said, more about that in the next chapter. But for now I'm just going to switch back to the Selection tool so that the layer is selected and not the text itself. Now, to convert this text into shapes so that we can start applying our operators and animations. We can right-click on the layer, in the layer controls, then go into Create, and then you can choose Create Shapes from text. There's also create masks from texts, but we will be looking at that in the chapter about adding masks. So create shapes from texts. It actually hides the texts layer itself. And now it's displaying this after-effects outlines. And After Effects outlines is the name of this layer because that's what the actual text says. Said, at least because now it is no longer editable text. It is just a collection of shapes which look like text. So if I expand the contents of this shape layer because it is a shape layer. Now you see the individual letters here. Now these individual letters are actually comprised of several shapes due to how masking or building shapes works in After Effects. So this a is not just the shape of an a, it also contains a triangle for this hole in the a, Let's say composite shapes like that actually contains several different aspects. So expanding this a, you can see that I can hide this top one. And that is going to just show me the triangle. And I can hide this bottom one. And that's actually going to hide the triangle. So this is a composite shape, which we already looked at the different modes of adding shapes to other shapes. And that is how these shape layers are comprised. So now that you have these Shape Outlines or these texts outlines, you can change their fill color. You can go into the Add menu and add different modifiers if you want to add some funky effects to it. And it just gives you a bit more flexibility for animating certain kinds of things that are different from what you can actually animate using the text animators, which we will be looking at in the next chapter. 52. 5.1-Type tool overview: In this chapter, I'm going to be teaching you all about working with text in After Effects. And to get started, I have here the composition 5.1 text layer overview in the project file, Chapter five, main file. Now, before we get started with texts, I just want to make sure that our text is going to look the same when we start entering it. So what I'm gonna do is just activate the Type Tool here at the top. And if you are in the default workspace, you will have a character panel and a Paragraph panel. And what I want to do is reset the character and paragraph panels that we have to default formatting for text. So to do that, I can go into this little hamburger menu at the top right of the character panel and then go all the way to the bottom where it says reset characters. If you do that, you get the default Times New Roman regular in 36 pixels. And the default text color should also be set to black. If it's not set to black, you can always click on the fill color of the text and just put the color picker at the bottom-left. I'm going to click OK out of there. And then I also wanted to reset the paragraph options. So I'm going to go into the paragraph panel, go into the menu, and then choose Reset paragraph to get the default options. Now, by the way, you can hold down the mouse on the type tool here at the top, and also choose a vertical type tool. So if you want to type text vertically, that is something you can do using that tool instead of having to put every character on its own line with the horizontal type tool. Now, there are two ways of entering text in After Effects. What I can do is either click in the composition and that's going to give me an infinite line of text. So this line will keep going to infinity and it doesn't break to a new line. Let's say I'm just going to cancel my text input for now by pressing Escape. And that just deletes the text layer. So that just gets rid of the texts that I was entering. What you can also do instead of just clicking is clicking and dragging for a text frame. So this is a paragraph text and the text is going to break to a new line, to the next line. When it hits the edge of this text frame, you can still change the size and orientation of this extreme if you want, while you are still entering the text. So that's something useful if you want the text to only cover a certain area. For now, I'm going to press Escape again and then click once. And then I'm just going to type After Effects, CC 2022. Now, let's say I want to format this text a little. What I'm gonna do then is click within the text three times to select all the text on this line. And then we're going to look at the character panel. The Character panel contains many of the same options that you might know from Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign with a few exceptions. Now, the first dialogue here is to choose a font. You can expand this list for a gigantic list of fonts, all the fonts available on your system or through Creative Cloud, Adobe fonts, which I will get to in a later video. You can also do is just click inside of the current font and then search for fonts. So I'm going to look for Myriad Pro, and that's m, y are a D. And I'm going to scroll down to Myriad Pro Regular for now. And then show you that you can also change the text color over here. So I can click on this black fill that's gonna give me the color picker pop up and then I can pick a lighter blue like so. What you can also do in After Effects, and I'm just going to zoom in a little bit using the mouse wheel is apply a stroke texts so that there is a stroke along each character. So for that, I'm going to put the stroke at the front here by clicking it and then clicking it again to get the color picker. And I'm just going to pick a lighter red here and then click Okay. And as you can see, the text is now outlined with a red stroke. The thickness of this stroke is determined a bit further down in the dialog box. It's currently set to one pixel. You can also change the size of the stroke. For now, I don't really want a stroke over my texts. I'm just gonna get rid of it by dragging it all the way to the left. Now we have here the text size, which in After Effects is pixel-based. So it's not based on points like in the other Adobe programs, but it is based on pixels. And I can increase the text size to something like 125 pixels. And that's going to give a slightly bigger text. The dialog next to the text size is the line-height, which currently we cannot see because we only have one line. So to demonstrate this, I'm just going to go into the text frame by clicking once so that the text cursor is right in front of CC and then press Enter to put this text on its own line. Now, selecting these. Lines. Again, I can now increase or decrease the line-height by just clicking and dragging this value or entering something manually. And I'm just gonna go back to steps using Control Z. Then we end up at the kerning of the text. And kerning is a bit of a strange concept for most. Basically with kerning, you can determine individual character distances. So let's say, I think that these two letters are too close together. What I can do then is just grabbed this value and click and drag it. And then I can change the individual character distances. So if the text doesn't look quite right to you and you want to change the individual character distance. That's something you can use with the kerning dialog box. Now, you can also use the Alt keys for this. So if you hold down Alt and then use the left arrow key and the right arrow key. You can also change the kerning as long as the texts is not selected. Now, selecting the text again by clicking three times, I am going to look at the tracking of the text. By changing the tracking, you change the distances of all selected characters. So now I can space them out at the same time. When you have a selection of texts, as I currently do, you can use Alt and the arrow keys to change the tracking of the text. So it's a contextual shortcut that depends on whether or not you have any text selected. We already looked at the stroke options. So now we're going to look at the scaling options, which is something that I have never used in any of the Adobe programs. They all offer the option to scale characters. But if you don't scale the width along with the height, then you will get distorted text. That doesn't look right. So if you want larger texts, just increase the pixel size and don't use the scale values. So let's say I'm going to put the vertical scale at 120%, or let's say 150. That's just going to stretch the text vertically by 50%. The same goes for the horizontal stretch. So I can enter a 150 and that's just going to scale the texts over the horizontal axis. Here we have a baseline shift enabling me to put the text higher on the baseline. And that's not particularly useful in this particular situation. But if you want certain texts to stay higher on the baseline, That's something you can do by just selecting the relevant text. Then we have a Zoom, a value which is unique to After Effects. And it is basically like tracking and kerning. It's this based on a percentage, percentage value instead of a pixel value. So the Summa is currently set to 0%. If I start increasing this value, you will see that the individual character spacings are decreased by 100 percent. So they are 100% closer together than they are at a value of 0%. These are all dropdowns by the way. So you can also choose exact values if you don't want to enter them manually. Now, we have some toggles here at the bottom, which you might also know from other Adobe programs, I can enable faux bold, which just makes the text a bit thicker. We also have faux italic, which rotates the text on the baseline. So if you don't have a bold variant of a certain font, or the boldest, not bold enough. Or if you don't have an italicized variant of a text, a font, then you can use these options. I would advise against it. If you want to use italic text, just use the italic version of the font. If you really don't have one available and you insist on having italic text, you can use this toggle. We have here all caps, which turns all the letters into capital letters. We also have small caps, which keeps the capital letters as regular capital letters and small letters as smaller capital letters, which is something I use quite often because I like the way it looks. We also have superscript which puts the text higher on the baseline and decreases the scale by 70%, I believe it is. And then we also have a subscript which puts the texts lower on the line and also scales it by 70%. So you would use these for like source listing sources or you would use the super script for measurements, for example, square meters or cubic kilometers or whatever your fancy. Now, we also have some paragraph options here to demonstrate these is pretty straightforward. Currently the text is left aligned, and that means that if I want, I'm going to do is just control C. The texts, just copy it. Enter a new line by pressing Enter. And I am just going to remove the cc from the bottom line and effects from the middle line. Just so we have some different formatting here so that you can see the differences in formatting. Now, the paragraph rules are applied to the paragraph that you are currently in. Here, I essentially have three paragraphs because each heart enter is a new paragraph. So what I can do here is center the text and that makes it jumped to the left, which is a bit odd, but that's just how texts alignment works in Photoshop and After Effects. I can also write align the text and that makes it jumped a bit further, meaning you have to actually move the text frame to get it where you want to be. We also have the justify options which are currently not available because I'm working with point text. So the line texts spread over several lines. If I had a text frame, those options would be available. Now, we have here a few options for indentations. So I can indent the texts from the left. I can also indent the text from the right, which currently doesn't actually work because this is essentially an infinite text frame all the way to off-screen. I can also indent the space before a paragraph, which I can demonstrate by putting the text cursor in the second paragraph. So increasing this increases the spacing with the previous paragraph. And then we also have a space after, which increases the space after the current paragraph. Now, I don't recommend working with a lot of text or large texts, texts in After Effects because you want to keep it legible and you don't want to make people read too much. I mean, video is a visual communication tool that you can use and relying on a lot of texts tends to tire people out. So I would recommend against using large areas of texts. But if you do have to use a lot of texts than these options are available to you. Now, once you're satisfied with your texts, you can switch to any other tool and that is going to commit the text. You can also press Control Enter to confirm a text. So if I'm inside a text frame, I can press Control Enter, and that confirms my text entry. If you want to edit the text, you can either double-click the text layer here in the layer controls. You can also, when you have the selection tool active, Double-click on a text to get into the editing. Or you can just grab the type tool and click in the text once. And that also puts you in the text editing. Those are basically the text options that we have in After Effects. In the next video, we're going to get into actually animating our text. 53. 5.2-Animating text: In this lesson, we're going to start animating our text. And animating texts can be done in a few ways. Inside of After Effects. I have here the composition five-point to animating texts. And here I have this text frame that we made in the previous lesson. And I'm going to look at the layer controls where we have two drop-downs for this text layer, we have a text drop-down, which we will be looking at later, and a Transform drop-down. Now I can expand this Transform drop-down. And here we see the same layer controls that we've had for any other layer in this course so far. We have anchor point, position, scale, rotation, and opacity. So these are the T key for opacity. P for position, S for scale, R for rotation, and a for anchor point. So these are no different than any of the other layer controls that we've looked at so far. So you will see once I start changing the opacity, the opacity of the entire texts layer changes, so everything is influenced all at once. Now, what is often done in After Effects for a bit more of a dynamic type of animation is animate based on characters or words or lines. And that's something you can absolutely do without adding any real effects to this layer by looking at adding animators to our texts layers. Animators can be added by clicking this button here in the layer controls where it says animate. And when you click Animate, you can choose different types of animators. I have here, the spatial and rotation and opacity animator. So Opacity, position and scale skew. Skew is actually tilting it on the baseline. Or I can add an animator for all of these properties. I can animate, fill color, stroke color, stroke width, and different texts properties such as the tracking or the line spacing, which you can also use to make animating texts more dynamic. For now, we're going to keep it simple and I'm just going to choose Opacity. So I want to animate these characters, interview one after the other and not all at once, like I wouldn't be able to do with the layer controls. So now I have here an animator, and the animator contains two items, the Range Selector and an opacity value. The currently the opacity of all the characters is set to 100%. So when I start decreasing this, you will see all of the characters disappear. And that's what we want. And that's also actually not what we are going to keyframe here because I want to animate them separately and not all at the same time. So now we're going to look at the range selector. And this hearkens back to what I was telling you with the trim paths operator that we worked with in the previous chapter, because we have a start value and an end value. Now, when these properties are disparate, so when they are not the same, the text just has the opacity value that we've chosen here. But when I start bringing these closer together, so when I start bringing the start value up, you will see that it increases which percent, what percentage of the text is actually visible? So when I put it at 50, 50% percent of all the characters are currently in view. And this is something we can keyframe because we have a stopwatch here. So at the beginning of the timeline, I'm just going to click the Start stopwatch. I'm gonna go to 1 second in the timeline and then I'm going to change the value to 100. And now when I play the timeline, you will see that all the characters animate one after the other, instead of at the same time, these animations work like any other animation. If you want to lengthen it, I can just move this keyframe to the right. And if I want to shorten the animation, I can move it to the left. Though. I'm just going to undo those last two steps using Control Z. Now I'm going to add a secondary animation for which I would like to have a secondary animator. So I don't want this animator to have the same range selector because I might want to do something slightly different with the timing of the animation. And the range selector is what we keyframes. So I cannot have two different range selectors for the same animator. So what I'm gonna do is go up to where it says animate and make sure that the animator here is not selected. So I want this animator not to be selected. So I'm just going to click on the text here at the top. Then I can go to animate and I can choose position. Now, I get a secondary animator here in the layer controls with its own arranged selector. And what am I gonna do is placed all of the texts slightly higher than it is now. Just for clarity sake, I'm going to move the timeline forward a little bit so the text is actually visible. So after where the opacity animation takes place, so I'm going to click and drag the y value. So the secondary position value. To the left to about minus 140 to place it further upwards because a lower y-value for position means that it's higher in the composition. And now I'm gonna move back to the start of the timeline and grabbed the Range Selector. And when I move the start value, wait, let me just go a bit forward so the character is actually visible. You will see that I can animate them downwards by using this start value. So bringing the start and end values to the same value basically undoes what you do with these animators. So I'm going to keyframe the start here. At 0 seconds. I'm gonna go to 1 second, and then I'm going to change the start value to 100. And what you will now see is that while the opacity animation is taking place, the position animation also takes place. So both of these animators are working at the same time. Now, what I could do is start the position animation slightly later than the opacity animation, which will give us this kind of effect like the Texas really dropping down out of nothing. So this is a cool little trick that you can do and you can add animators for any property, property that you want. It's still animate their position. I could still animate their scale if I wanted. You can add these animators and just play around with the keyframes that you add to the range selector to get varying results. And the variation that you can make with this is basically infinite because you can add several animators with the same property, for example. So I could first animate their position in this way, and then later on in the timeline, I can animate their position another way using a different animators. So this is very flexible, a bit in transparent as a new user. But once you get the hang of what this range selector actually does, so the start and the end value, it becomes so useful that there's basically nothing concerning texts that you can't animate. Another thing I want to show you is that currently we are animating based on characters. Each character is animating individually. It's also possible to animate based on words or based on lines. And to do that, you have to go into the advanced options of the range selector. So I'm just gonna go into the Advanced tab of the range selector. And here I have based on set two characters, which is the default. So I'm just going to expand this and then I can choose words. Because there is a secondary animation. I also want that animator, that range selector to be set to words. So I'm going to expand animator to go into advanced and also set this from characters to words. And now we get this effect. It's not very smooth. I could add some easing to this position, for example. But this is the basics of how these animators work in After Effects. Now, just for clarity sake, I'm going to remove animator, one animator to actually, so I'm going to click, Animate or two, press Delete, and then we only have our opacity animation. Now, I want to show you what happens when you go for different values with these start and end. So let's say I'm going to delete, delete the keyframes for the start. So I'm just going to click the stopwatch and watch what happens when I click and drag the end towards 0 instead of start towards 100. You will see that I'm animating from right to left. So that is also absolutely something you can do. Once these values are both at 0, you can then again animate the start to make it go from left to right again. So as long as you put some keyframes on these values, you can just play around with them and get them into view and out of you in different ways. 54. 5.3-Presets: After Effects contains a large library of text animation presets that you can use from within the program. And you will find those in the Effects and Presets panel, which should be part of your default workspace. If this panel is not present in your interface, you can always go into the Window menu and then choose Effects and Presets to get it part of the panels here on the right. So the texts presets, you will find in the animation presets the top folder here. And then you can go into presets, and then you can go into text. Then you can go to any of these different categories. But we're going to focus on animate in. Now, these effects, unfortunately cannot be previewed. You have to actually apply them for you to see what they actually do here in After Effects. So what I can do here is grab center, center, spiral for example. And I'm just going to click and drag it to this text frame here. And that is going to automatically apply the animation. That animation looks like this. This is not something I would ever use in a practical context, but this is just an example. You can't tell what they actually do before you apply them unless you have Adobe Bridge installed. By the way, I just use Control Z to undo applying the effect. Now, I want to show you how you are, how you can be able to preview those instead of going through the whole list looking for something that you like. And by the way, there are not many in this list that I like. I find a lot of them too busy, a little bit PowerPoint, if you know what I mean. But they are available to you in the program for different purposes. So I just want to show you this for the sake of being comprehensive. So to access the preview, I'm going to go into the hamburger menu of the effects and presets panel. And then I can choose Browse presets. And that's going to open Adobe Bridge and bring me to the Effects folder, the presets folder. Here I can click on Text and animate in. And now I have here these different items and I can click these to get a preview in the preview panel. Here, I can look for something that I like. Let's say I am going to choose the fade up characters, which is a simple opacity animation. And when I want to use this, I can then go back into After Effects and just look for fade up characters. Then I'm going to click and drag it to the text layer. Now the animation is already applied. So when I play the animation, we get this and it takes place over two seconds. Now, what I would like to show you is that these presets are based on the exact same principles that we looked at in the previous lesson. So these are animators and range selectors that are automatically applied for you. So here when I expand the text menu, I can go into the animator. And here I have a Range Selector. And this is the value that is actually keyframes. So it's basically exactly the same animation as we made in the previous lesson. Initially, at least with the opacity animation, except that it takes place over two seconds instead of one. So if I want to increase the speed of the animation, I just click and drag the secondary keyframe out to 1 second. And let me be a little more exact with those values. Okay, there we go. Now, even though this preset is applied, I can still add extra animators to get different results. So let's say I choose Animate and then I choose scale. Now I have a separate animator and I'm going to animate from 0%. So I'm just going to change the scale values to 0. And if you change one, you can change the other automatically because of this chain link icon. And then I'm going to go into the range selector and I'm going to keyframe to start. Go to 1 second, and then just go to 100. You will see that now the characters scale from 0 to 100% individually. However, it does scale from the actual center of our composition. You can't really tell because the animation takes place so quickly. But these characters, like from the left side of the animation, they scale in from over here. And when we get to the 50% mark, they start scaling that way, which is not exactly what I would like. So what I'm actually going to do is go into the path options here. Excuse me. We're going to go into more options. And I'm going to change the anchor point grouping from line to character. And now they scale individually. That's something I was actually planning to show you in a different video, the point grouping. But this actually works quite nicely. I can also choose a word. And what you'll see then is that they scale from the center of the word, which can also be a cool effect. As long as the words aren't too long. But I think for now, I prefer them on character level. This actually only applies to animation and rotation because the anchor point grouping determines where each individual characters anchor point is. So with it's set to character, it's at the bottom of each individual character. And when its head toward it's in the central of the word. And when it's at the line, it's set to the center of the line. So a bit of an addendum as, as you can see, but it's useful to know where these animations are actually coming from and what these presets actually do. I don't use these presets. I have other ways of animating texts also besides what we've seen so far. But I will show you those in the chapter about plug-ins for after effects, where we will look at animation composer. 55. 6.1-About 3D in After Effects: In this chapter, we're gonna be working with 3D. And in this first lesson, I'm just going to give you a quick introduction on how 3D in After Effects actually works. Essentially, what we are getting is a third axis along which we can transform objects. We've already looked at the x-axis for the horizontal values and the y-axis for the vertical values. So the third dimension, the dimension is going to give us depth in our compositions for layers that we make 3D. And that's something we have to actively do, which we're going to start with here in the composition 6.1 about 3D in, After Effects. To make a layer, 3D layer, we are going to look at this little switch here in the layer controls, It's this little cube, the final column of these icons, let's say once I toggle this and the shape is actually selected, you will see this widget pop-up. Now, this widget allows me direct control over the object in all three dimensions. I have here the green arrow for the y-axis. I have the red arrow for the Z, for the x axis, we have here a blue arrow, which is currently not very well visible. It's pointed towards our camera. So it's pointed towards our view, which is why we cannot accurately see it at the moment. Now, before we continue, I'm going to take a look at some of the layer controls. So first I'm going to press P for position. And you will note that in addition to an X and a Y value, we now have a third value for the zed axis. Now the Z position actually moves objects further away from us if we increase it and closer towards us or towards the camera when we decrease it. So when I start increasing this zed value, you will see the object shrink. And that's not because it's scale is being changed. Its position in Z space, in 3D space is being changed, so it's being moved further away from us at the moment. Once I start moving in closer, you will see that the size appears to increase and that's because it's being brought closer to the camera. So I'm just going to Control Z, those steps to get back to the previous Z position of 0. And now we're going to look at the rotation. And once, once we press R for rotation, you will see some very different values. The rotation value for 2D layers just has one rotation value for the number of rotations and one value for the number of degrees. Now, here we have orientation and x rotation. Now, one of the examples in this chapter, I will elaborate a little bit about the difference between orientation and extra rotation. Orientation is basically a way to orient several objects towards a certain angle. And it also caps out at 360 degrees. So after 360, it goes back to 0. And the rotation value can be any value that I want. Now, what you'll note is that once I start rotating this object along the y-axis, for example, you will see that it has depth. So now it's rotated 68 degrees over the y-axis. And that gives me an angle of view on the object, and that's something we haven't seen before. And that also allows us to see the z axis arrow here. So with the selection tool, I can click and drag this arrow and I can move it along this axis. I can also rotate it along any axis that I choose by grabbing this part of the widget, the circle. I can also do that for the y-axis and the x-axis. So I can rotate it in 3D space. I can also scale it in 3D space. So I can scale it up with this little cube icon. I can also do that over the zed axis, but that doesn't work with our current composition settings, which we'll get to in a later video. But I can scale it along the axes to get different results. And that's basically what 3D is. We're adding a third dimension along which we can transform objects. Now, you can always disabled 3D on a specific layer by just toggling this and that turns it back into a 2D layer. Once you re-enable it, it doesn't remember its previous transformation options. So that resets all the transforms and possible animations that you have applied with key-frames. Once you disabled 3D and then re-enable it. So it's just like adding key-frames. Once you click stopwatch that has keyframes, you will delete those keyframes and the same goes for 3D transforms. So that is the basics of thinking in 3D, adding a third axis. And in the next video, I'm gonna talk to you about navigating in 3D space. 56. 6.2-Navigating in 3D space: When you're working in a 3D scene, not everything is always as it seems. And to demonstrate this, I have created the composition 6.2, navigating in 3D space, so we can actually start moving around in 3D space. Now, I have here this rectangle that we also saw in the previous lesson. And it's already a 3D object and its transform options are all set to the default. Now, what I want to show you is that there's actually something here in the composition that we are currently not seeing because of our perspective, because we are looking straight at this rectangle. And once we start changing our angle of view, you will see that there's actually something else in the scene. You wouldn't be able to tell initially by looking at the layers panel because I have put in some options to hide the layer as best as I could. But what I'm gonna do here is grab this tool at the top, the orbit around scene tool. You can also grab the orbit around cursor or camera point of interest tool. But we're just going to, I'm just gonna go with the orbit, orbit around siem tool for now. And using this tool, I can click and drag and change my perspective of the scene. So here we see that there's actually a second rectangle in front of this rectangle, which is slightly smaller, but it has a lower z position. So it's actually closer to the camera. And depending on your angle of view, it just appears to be the same one rectangle, but it's actually two rectangles with one of them moved in 3D space. Now, I've done this actually buy making the shy guy here active. So once I click this little shy guy, the layer becomes visible again. And I had also locked the layer to make sure that you didn't select it. Using the orbit around scene tool. I can just orbit around the scene and look at it from different views. Now, there's no real quick way to reset this default camera to the default position. But I can go into the layer menu here at the top, and then choose camera, and then reset default camera. And that's gonna give me the normal default view. So if you're orbiting around the scene with this tool, just to have a different look at where things are in 3D space, you can always get back to the default camera by going to layer camera and then reset default camera. Now, there are also different views that we can approach here in the composition view port. So currently the 3D view pop-up is set to the active camera. So that's just the default After Effects camera that we have very little control over. One of the next videos I'm going to teach you all about adding our own cameras and changing their properties. But I can go here to a top view. And that gives me this view. And here in this view I can also see the separate rectangles. So here is the larger rectangle and the ERC smaller rectangle, which is moved towards the active camera. Here in these views, I can also manipulate them as I so choose, so I can move it closer or further away from the active camera. I can rotate them. I can scale them, whatever I like. You can also look at a scene in two different views. So I can go where it says one view and I can go to two views. And initially that gives me a top view or a front view. But what I can then actually do is go here where it says Default. And I can choose a top view for one and the front view for another. And I can navigate within these separately. So I can look at the scene from different perspectives to see what my layers are actually doing. So here I have an orthographic view, and here I have the top view. And if I start moving it in the top view, you will also see it move in the other view. So that is very useful if you're trying to build a more complex scene. And you want to see exactly what the distances of objects are in relation to each other in 3D space. 57. 6.3-Setting up a camera: It's time to go through how we set up our own cameras in any given scene. I have here the composition 6.3, setting up a camera. And I have predefined the parameters of this scene in a way that we will recreate later. Basically what we're gonna do is take this Photoshop file, which consists of a background along with a few dice, and make it look like these dice are being thrown towards the camera in slow motion. So that's something we're gonna be doing in this chapter as a final exercise. But what I want to show you is how to set up a camera in a scene like this. And to just show you what's going on in this scene, I'm going to go into a top view. So I'm gonna go here where it says active camera and then I'm gonna go to top. And I'm just going to scroll down a little bit to zoom out. Here you will see the actual background image and I can click on that and then confirm in the layers panel that this is actually the correct layer. I have here, the dice number four, 321. So the lower the number, the closer the object is towards the camera, according to how I built this scene. And how I built the scene actually is through Photoshop. I had several images of my friend here throwing these dice, and I isolated the dice in Photoshop and put them on their own layers, allowing me to animate them separately in After Effects. Now, to set up a camera that we can move through this scene, I'm going to go into the layer menu here at the top, and then go to new and then choose camera. Alternatively, on Windows you can press Control Alt Shift C or Command Option Shift C on the Mac. And that brings us into this new camera dialogue box. And this dialogue box can be a little intimidating, especially if you don't know anything about cameras. But it's really not as complicated as it might seem initially. The first thing we want to do is determine what type of camera that we want. And we can choose between a one node camera and a two-node camera. Now, a one-node camera orients around itself. So if you rotate, the one-node camera is just going to rotate in place like it's on a tripod. Now, the two-node camera orients around a so-called point of interest. And that is the camera that I prefer to use because it's just easier to manipulate this point of interests instead of manipulating the camera itself. So I usually go for the two-node camera. I encourage you to experiment with both types and just play with their rotations to see how they actually work and what you can do with them. The second important option is the preset that you choose. The preset allows you to choose a focal length. The lower numbers are very wide angle lenses. The higher numbers are more zoomed in. So with a lower number such as the 20 millimeter, for example, you will get a much wider field of view. So you will get more in frame then with a 50 millimeter camera. Now, 3D in After Effects is very often about hiding the seams of your illusion, Let's say. So I tend to go for a 50 or 80 millimeter preset. So you don't really have to spend a lot of effort of hiding the fact that it's not actual 3D, because 3D in After Effects by default is creating basically a cardboard cutout version of a 3D object. It's not actually 3D. It's what we call 2.5 D because it doesn't actually have any dimensions over the z axis. These 3D objects, at least not in the classic 3D renderer, which I will talk about in a future video. So I tend to be a little more zoomed in, not to break the illusion of the 3D effect, but for demonstration purposes, I'm just gonna go with a 20 millimeter preset and that determines the zoom, the film size, the focal length, etc. It's all predetermined for me in that way. So now when I click Okay, we will switch to this other camera. And the view also switches to this camera. The camera that we just added overrides the default camera. As you can see, we can see a lot more of our scene in this way. Once I grabbed the orbit around siem tool, you will see that we have a very wide field of view. And even despite the fact that we're super close to this dice, we can still see a lot of the background going on. I'm just going to Control Z, that camera movement. I also could have gone to layer camera and then reset camera one. And now I want to show you what happens once we switch to a 50 millimeter preset. We don't have to create a new camera for that. I can just double-click the camera that's here in the layers. And then I can go into the presets and choose a 50. And then I'm going to click Okay. And now we have this setup here. The camera is a little bit to punched in. So what I can do is grab the camera's position and just click and drag it to the left until everything appears to fit in the scene again. So don't wanna go too far. I don't want to punch out too far because then you start seeing the seams, as I said earlier. But you will note that when I click and drag it to the right, again, it looks like we're moving through this scene and that's something I'm going to teach you how to do in the next video. 58. 6.4-Setting up a scene in 3D: In this lesson, we are going to set up a scene in 3D. So I have here the composition 6 for setting up a scene in 3D, which is basically the same document as before. It just has these Photoshop layers, but these layers are not yet 3D. The scene does not contain a camera. And because these objects are not in 3D yet, they also don't have different Z positions. So that, but we can animate through the scene. That's what we're gonna be doing in this lesson. The first thing I wanna do is create the 3D layers. So I'm just going to click and drag over the 3D column here to make these layers 3D. By the way, this is a Photoshop document that I have placed in after effects and that puts the orientation points, so the anchor point of the object in the center of the composition. And that actually helps us for this particular scene. And you will notice why in a moment. I'll also just gonna go ahead and create the camera because then I can see where I actually need to place these objects. So I'm gonna go into layer new camera. And I'm just going to choose the 50 millimeter preset and name it Camera one in a two-node camera setup. So then I'm just going to click Okay, so now we have our camera. We also seeing through this camera currently, which I can also see here in the camera controls. And now I want to go to a top view of the scene in a second window for a moment. So I'm just gonna go here where it says one view and then I'm gonna go to two views. And the other view is automatically a top view. So that's useful in this case. All of these layers have the same position at the moment, which is 0 pixels. And I can visualize that by selecting all these layers, by clicking and dragging in the layer controls and pressing P for position, they all have the exact same position. So 960 over the x-axis, 640 over the y axis, and 0 on the z axis. And to create these, this parallax 3D effect, about which I will talk a bit more in a future video. We need to move these layers in 3D space. And what we're gonna do is put the background layer, the actual image of my friend Michael throwing the dice all the way to the back and then create depth by placing this, these dice on several different Z positions. After which we will move the camera through the scene. So I'm gonna click on the original layer, the background layer. And then I'm just going to click on the Z position. And I'm going to move this to initially, let's say a thousand, and that moves it further away from the camera. And I'm noticing that I could move it a bit further away. So let's go to 2 thousand actually. Now, obviously, this image no longer fills the frame and that is something that we have to take into account and correct. And by the way, here, on the top view, you will now see that this layer is all the way to the back. So to correct this, I am actually going to scale the layer until it fills the frame again. So I'm going to press S for scale with this original layer selected. And I'm just going to scale it up to fill the frame again, side-to-side. Okay, and that's our first layer setup. Then I'm gonna go to the first dice and I'm going to be working from top to bottom for these layers. So I'm going to give die one a very low, As I said, position die to a slightly less slow, slightly higher here is that position. And the same goes for these other three. So I'm going to create different layers of depth to emphasize the effect. So I'm gonna go to die one, and I'm going to put this as minus 1 thousand. And that's going to move it closer to the camera, as we will see here in the top view of our scene. Then I'm gonna go to die too, and I'm gonna give this minus 750. So it's slightly closer to the camera. And then I'm gonna give die three minus 500 and die for minus 250. These values, values are arbitrary. They are not exact, Let's say. But I also need to correct their scales to fit this scene better because with dye one selected, I can zoom out here a little bit in this front view of camera one. And I will see that the bounding box of the layer is much too large. So I'm just going to grab the scale for this layer. And I'm just going to scale it down until it fills the composition in the width of it again. Then I'm gonna go to die number two, and I'm going to press S for scale. And I'm going to scale it down until it fills the width of my scene again. Then I'm gonna go to die three and do the same thing. Scale it down, and die for, requires the least scaling because it's furthest away from the camera. And now we have our scene setup. And in the next video, I'm gonna show you how to animate the camera. 59. 6.5-Animating the camera: In this lesson, we're going to start animating our camera through the scene and also give some animation to the dice to make it look like they are spinning a little bit. For that, I'm just going to grab the camera here and I'm going to grab its position. And because a camera is a 3D object by default, we have an x position, y position, and a z position. Now, the zip position of this camera is a lot lower than these position of our layers here at 20 minus 2666.7. And that's because of the cameras settings that we chose with the 50 millimeter preset. Now, what I'm gonna do is just keyframe the position here and then move to five seconds and the timeline, because let's say I want to make a 5 second animation. I'm also going to then grab the Z position. And I'm just going to keep clicking and dragging it to the right until both dice at the front or almost out of frame. So to about here at minus 1900, let's say. So I'm just going to enter minus 1900 to keep things simple. And now what you will see when I play the timeline is we look like we're moving through the dice, or the dice are moving past us and we are moving slightly towards them. And you will also see this here at the top of the composition, at the top view. So we are moving through the dice layers to the background, Let's say. Now to give the dice a little bit of rotation, I'm just going to start with dye one and grab the rotation value. And what I want is not to rotate them around the center of the composition. I want to rotate them around their own center. So what I'm gonna do is grab the anchor point tool. And I'm just going to move the anchor point using the on-screen widget to what would be approximately the center of gravity for this die. Then I'm going to keyframe the z rotation. Why the z rotation and not the x and y. I will show you when I start rotating the x value, it appears flat because this is an actual 3D. It's like a cardboard cutout, like I said in the previous lesson. So the same goes for the y-axis. And I can play with these values a little bit, but as soon as you go too far, you break the illusion of it actually being 3D. So you don't want to overdo that. And speaking of not overdoing it, I'm just going to keyframe the Z position from the beginning and then go to five seconds. And I'm just going to rotate it ever so slightly. So let's say something like 15 degrees. Approximately 15 degrees. Then I'm just going to preview, preview the animation by going to the beginning and playing it. Okay, That is fair enough. Then we're going to go to die number two. So I'm just going to grab the rotation. And again, I want the anchor point to be at the center of the die. So I'm just going to click and drag this over. Now I can rotate it in place. So I'm going to keyframe the zed, zed rotation and just go to five seconds and just rotate it a bit. This one, I'm gonna go to about 60 degrees, something like that. And then playing the animation makes it look like the dye is rotating. I'm gonna do the same thing for die number three and number four. So I'm just going to grab the rotation keyframe, the z rotation. But first we have to correct its anchor point. And I'm just going to double-check which die, die it actually is by disabling the icon for di three so that I'm sure that I'm working on the right layer. Then I'm just going to click and drag the anchor point to the proper location that you want to do this before you start animating the position or rotation of an object. So I'm going to keyframe the Z position at 0 seconds, move to five seconds, and I'm going to rotate it, let's say about 60 degrees as well. Let's say 45. Okay. Then we have this. And the final die, die number four. I'm just going to grab the rotation with R. Then I want to correct its anchor points to the proper die. The singular of dice is dy, which a lot of people apparently do not know. Then I'm going to keyframe the z rotation of die number four. Then I'm just going to rotate it the other way, I guess, by about 45 degrees. Now we have this animation. 60. 6.6-Depth of field: In this lesson, I want to tell you something about depth of field in After Effects. Depth of field is a relatively complex topic that has to do with how actual cameras and camera lenses work. Basically debt the field allows you to blur a background or a foreground, depending on the camera settings and in After Effects, you can simulate those settings and change how objects appear to be in or out of focus. Now what you should know about this image is that it already has a lot of depth. The depth of field. I photographed this on a, I believe, a 12th millimeter lens. So that is extremely wide angle with aperture of f 2.8. If those terms mean anything to you, like, it's a very wide angle lens with a relatively large amount of depth of field or a wide depth of field. So I'm going to show you how to simulate that in After Effects. And what we're gonna do is make this dye, this dye here, the focus objects. So I want this object to remain in focus. Now, the first thing I have to do is go into the Camera options of camera one, then enable depth of field which is currently set to off. It's off by default. And then clicking this value and nothing initially seems to change, Even if I zoom in, you don't really see the focus of the scene changing. Now, that is determined by the amount set for the aperture, which is currently set to 25.3 pixels. Now, notice what happens when I start increasing this value. So the scene appears to get more and more out of focus. So the amount of blur is determined by how, how high the aperture is currently set. What is being focused on is dependent on the focus distance. So I can change this focus distance to get objects more or less into clear view. With a lower distance. The dice at the front here will become more in-focus. And once I start increasing the value, the actual background becomes more in-focus. So you have a lot of control over the depth of the focus. Now, note that the focus will not change or the focus distance will not change by default, at least when the objects appear to move through space. So the focus distance remains constant regardless of the position of the cameras. So we are moving through different levels of focus because the focus distance is set to this value. And if the position of the camera changes, that does not change the focus distance because there's no auto-focus here, like there would be on a camera. In other 3D programs such as blender, you can actually very easily create an autofocus. And after effects has some, something similar. But it works in a less, slightly less flexible way because it's dependent on expressions. So what I'm gonna do here is press Control a and then U to collapse all the layer options. And I want to link the focus of the camera to die number two. So I won't die number two to always be in focus. Or actually what we could do is connected to the background, let's say. So I'm going to select the camera which has the depth of field enabled, and then select original. And what I'm gonna do now is go up into the Layer menu and then go to camera here at the bottom. And then link focus distance to layer. And then when I click Okay, you will see that the dice are extremely out-of-focus and the background is as in-focus as it can be. It doesn't appear to be in focus, but that's just how the photograph was taken. So what I'm gonna do now is change the aperture a bit to decrease the blur on the dice because I want them to kind of be in focus, then move out-of-focus as they get towards the camera. So I'm going to expand the camera options again. And I'm going to decrease the aperture until the dice are in-focus again. And as they move past the camera, pass the focus of focal plane, as it's called, they will become more out-of-focus, which is the effect that I'm going for. And towards the end, at five seconds, the effect is still a bit too much. So I'm just going to decrease the aperture a bit more. Something like this looks okay. So now when I play the animation and zoomed out view, you will see that at first they are relatively in focus and then move out-of-focus as the camera gets closer towards them. Because of what we just did. Linking the focus plane to the background layer, to the original layer. The original layer will always remain in focus regardless of the settings. 61. 6.7-The Cinema 4D renderer: So far, we have only worked in a 2.5 D world, meaning that everything was a cardboard cutout. And while we could place things in three-dimensions, we couldn't actually apply a third dimension to an object to give it more depth, for example. And that's where the cinema 4D render engine comes into play. Because where we've been working with classic 3D so far, we're going to switch the 3D renderer to cinema 4D and look at some of the options that we have available. So here in the comp 6.7, the Cinema 4D renderer, I have this text frame and I'm just going to turn this text frame into a 3D layer. And as you can see, we have a third dimension available to us now so I can rotate it along the y-axis, for example. And you will see that it's 3D, albeit flat 3D. So I'm just going to Control Z, that rotation. That was just to give you a demonstration of what's actually happening. We now have a 3D layer. Now, I'm going to switch to the Cinema 4D renderer by going where it says classic 3D and expanding this menu, then switching it to Cinema 4D. Now, initially nothing changes. And depending on your system, it can take a second or a few seconds to change this renderer to cinema 4D because this is more processor intensive, let's say. But now when I expand the layer options, I no longer just have text and transform. I also have geometry options and material options. Now, the first thing we're gonna do is actually rotate this text a little so that we can actually see what's going to happen. So I'm going to press R for rotate. And I'm just going to rotate this along the y-axis. So, so we can actually see the depth being applied. So it's at about 75 degrees. Then I'm going to expand the geometry options of the layer. And here we will see a bevel style of bevel depth, a hole bevel depth and extrusion depth. And the first thing we're going to be looking at is that last one, the extrusion depth. So once I start increasing this, you will see that a scaling is applied to the y-axis or the z-axis. So it's actually getting some depth. And if I grab the orbit seen tool, you will see that the text is now actual 3D. Now it's not very visible yet. It's not very legible. And that is because there is no lighting applied to the scene. When you're working with Cinema 4D, you need to add a light to make things look realistic so that we actually have some shadow and some drop-off and some other things that are required to make things actually look 3D. So what you should imagine it, imagine is that currently the scene is being lit to the exact same amount from all directions. So everything looks completely flat. So I'm going to add a light to the scene and I'll be talking about lights further on in this chapter a bit more. But this is just so that we can see what's actually happening to our text. So I'm gonna go into the layer menu here at the top and then go to new and then choose light. I'm going to leave this set to 0 light in a white color. And just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to set the intensity to 100% and then choose cast shadows just for demonstration purposes later in this chapter. So I'm going to click Okay. And now we have some actual lighting falling onto our scene. And the light is not exactly where I would like it. So what I'm gonna do is grab the selection tool. And I'm just going to bring it a bit closer so that now we can actually see what is happening. So now the text has actual depth. As you can see. One of the other options is to add a bevel. And a bevel basically cuts off the corner of each shape or each letter, each character in this case, in a certain way. So I'm going to change the bevel style to Angular. And as you can see, we now have a little corner here. I'm on each edge of the shape and that changes how light interacts with it, which I can demonstrate again by switching it to none. And then Angular. So these corners, these bevels, actually catch the light in a different way, making the shape in 3D more pronounced. So that's also something that you can use. You can change the depth of the bevel to extrude the texts from the background even more. You can also change the style of the bubbles. So Angular is just a straight-up edge. Then we have concave which cuts out the unbundled part out of the main shape. Then we have convex which does the opposite. And that for our purposes, looks about right, That's what I wanted to achieve. I'm going to change the extrusion depth to about 20 to make it a little bit thinner. And you can just animate this in 3D if you like. So I'm just going to grab the rotation of this layer, of these Cinema 4D text layer. I'm going to animate the rotation to make it rotate in place like this. And then actually now I'm going to grab the y rotation within two seconds. Let's say I'm just gonna go to two seconds in the timeline. I'm going to give it a one rotation. So I'm just going to rotate it once. Now you will see that our 3D texts actually rotates, and this is quite processor intensive. This is a lot harder for your system to render than classic 3D because it's actually calculating the light values when it hits each pixel. So I'm just going to switch the preview resolution to a third. And that's going to decrease the render time, but also decrease the quality obviously. But this makes these animations a lot easier to preview. It's already taken me about ten seconds to render a 2 second animation. But that's just how it works in After Effects in 3D. I must say, as far as rendering goes, After Effects barely uses the graphics card, even for things like this. So if you have a beefy graphics card that's not actually going to help you all that much when you're trying to render scenes like this. If you want to do more with 3D and especially this kind of 3D. Other programs such as Cinema 4D or blender, or a lot more suitable for that. So that was the geometry options of the 3D layers in the Cinema 4D renderer. In the next video, we're going to look at some of the material options which allows us to further change how our text looks and how it interacts with light and shadows. 62. 6.8-Material options: In this lesson, we are looking at the material options with which we can change how our 3D objects interact with light and shadows. For that, I have the composition and 6.8 Material Options. And I'm just going to expand these layer controls and we will be looking at these material options. Now, the first toggle can be an important one. It's for cast shadows and it is off by default. So this object currently does not cast a shadow on other objects. And just to show you how this works, I'm going to duplicate this layer using Control D or Command D on the Mac. And I'm going to move this copy back a little bit along the z axis. As you can see, the front object is currently not casting a shadow on the back object, but it should according to the position of this light and the layers themselves. So what I can do is go into the material options of this copy and then choose except shadows is on. I was just double-checking that. And then cast shadows should be on for the front layer. Now when it's on, you can see that it casts a shadow on the layer to the back, and that is because of the position of this light. So once I move this light around, you will also see the shadows change and how the bevels and the shapes themselves catch the light. So that is what the except shadows does. I'm just going to hide the second layer for now, the cinema 4D. We might get back to that in a little bit. So we have cast shadows and accept shadows, and these have to be in tune with each other for separate layers. To get lights, to cast actual shadows. You can choose whether or not an object accepts lights. And when you disable this, you will see that we just get the ambient light. So the same light values from all directions. So that's generally something that you do not want. You can enable reflections if you want, because you can determine how reflective an object is by playing with these settings here at the bottom. We can determine how much an object is affected by the ambient light. But to demonstrate this, I have to disable, accept lights here at the top. So ambient, if I start decreasing this value, you will see the object becoming darker. So that's not something that we require for this particular scene. We have a diffuse value and with a higher diffuse value, you will see that the object actually reflect more light, so it appears brighter. We have a specular intensity which makes the objects shine brighter and lights, so it becomes a lot more contrasty. You can determine the shininess of these specular highlights. What you will see is that the actual position of the light is better reflected in the actual layer, so it becomes more reflective. We have a metal values so we can determine the metallicity of an object. Metallicity basically determines how an object reflects light. If an object is 100% metal, the reflection will take on the color of the object itself. So if you are reflecting something in a perfect metal sphere, the reflection will actually look like that color. Now with a metal value of 0, this will not be the case. And you will actually see the light color reflected and not the color of the metal itself. So that's what that means. You can change the reflection intensity so you can make an object more reflective. And that actually takes out the color of the object itself. And you only see the color of the environment because it's perfectly reflective. You can change the sharpness of the reflection and the roll-off. Those are settings that you usually don't have a lot of stake into change, but those are the general material options. Now I just want to show you something quick about reflectivity. So I'm going to change the scene resolution to full. And I'm going to re-enable this other layer. And I am going to click the back layer and move it forward. So in front of this other layer, then I'm going to play with the reflex toxicity or the reflection value of this first layer. And you will see that it is actually reflecting the other layer. Now, if I rotate this layer, for example, or just place it slightly differently. Oh wait, that was the wrong layer. Actually. I'm just going to grab this layer. You will see that it is now reflecting the other layer. Once I start rotating this layer or placing it differently, you will see that it also changes in its reflection. So this also allows you to do some pretty cool things, especially considering that you can also animate all of these values because they have a stopwatch. And of course, you can still animate the regular properties of any 3D layer as well. So rotation, position, scale, etc. So that was a quick look at all the material options that you have available within After Effects Cinema 4D renderer. 63. 6.9-Importing 3D files: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to import Cinema 4D files into After Effects so you can use them in your compositions. And this way of working comes with a few limitations. First of all, you cannot edit any 3D artwork directly in After Effects if it's made in cinema 4D. And something about cinema 4D is that it's very comprehensive 3D program, which is basically the industry standard for 3D animation. So this is a very extensive program that has a very steep learning curve, though I must say out of all the 3D programs, next, the blender, it's probably the most easy to learn. But you need to have a basic working knowledge of Cinema 4D to work with cinema 4D files in After Effects. So that goes beyond the scope of this course, but I just want you to see what happens when you do import cinema 3D Cinema 4D files and how you can still edit them in After Effects, limited as that editing capacity may be. So for a 3D file, we can only use Cinema 4D files. And that is a fairly standard industry format that you can find pretty easily, generally speaking. And a site that I use for free 3D models is turbo squid.com, which is owned by Shutterstock nowadays. So I searched for plane and then I filtered for free. And then for the Cinema 4D file format. And then you can download this file or any other free file and then import it to After Effects. So I'm gonna go back into After Effects and I'm going to double-click on an empty spot of the project panel to get the Import Options. And then here I have this plane Cinema 4D file. Then I'm going to double-click. And I'm just going to add it to my active composition, which is 6.9 importing 3D files. So I'm just going to click and drag it down into the layers. And that's going to give me this 3D object, which is pretty cool. Like I can actually see this grid which comes from cinema 4D. Actually. What I can now do is actually change the camera to the comp camera, because otherwise, I cannot even influence my angle of view on this airplane because it's just copying what is in the Cinema 4D file. So I can choose Comp Camera and then add an actual camera for me to use. So I'm going to press Control Shift Alt C and add a to node. Let's say 24 millimeter camera. So I'm going to click on Okay. And that camera is now actually placed below my scene. So I'm just going to grab the orbit tool and I'm going to rotate to a different spot. Then I'm going to pan out a little bit. So I'm going to grab the pan camera tool and just move back a bit. And then use the orbit tool to get the plane into view. As you can see, this is already not an ideal way of working. And what we also do not have is a lot of control over the position, rotation, et cetera, of this plane. What I'm going to do actually is just grabbed the camera controls and then the Camera Options. And I'm going to zoom out a little bit by dragging the zoom into the minus. There we go. Something like this. Note that this also actually changes how the camera functions. So maybe a better option is to go back, grabbed the transform, and just change the position of the camera to move it back a little bit and then rotate it to where I want it to be. So I'm using the rotation value to actually get the plane into view. So that was very difficult. In other programs. It's a lot easier, like I said, such as cinema 4D and in Blender. But this is just how After Effects works. So what I could do is open this Cinema 4D file and then for example, rotate the propeller. And that animation is then going to be directly reflected inside of After Effects. Now, as I've said, the Cinema 4D part of that process falls outside of the scope of this project. I just wanted to show you how you can import these files and how you can actually use the after-effects camera instead of the Cinema 4D camera. If you're a native Cinema 4D designer, then you would obviously choose to remain to keep the cameras set to cinema 4D because that's where you do your animations. But those animations can then be used inside of After Effects. And that was the whole 0.1. Final thing that I want to mention is that once I grabbed the transform controls here, you will see that I am extremely limited in what I can actually do. There's not even a third dimension to speak of. And you cannot turn these Cinema 4D, these layers into 3D layers because it's just displaying what is happening in that Cinema 4D file and nothing more, nothing else. You have no additional control over it. There are certain plug-ins that gave after effects more functionality when it comes to 3D, such as Element 3D. But I will give a brief overview of that in the plugins chapter. 64. 6.10-Light options: In this lesson, I'm going to tell you something about the different lights that we can use in After Effects in the Cinema 4D renderer. So here I have the composition 6.10 lights, and here we have the same point light that we worked with in a previous lesson. Now, first thing I wanna do is show you the different types of light that we have. So I'm just going to double-click on this point light, which allows me to change the light settings and also to change the type of light that we have here. It's currently set to 0. I'm first going to change it to a spotlight. And that gives me a cone of light that I can influence. I can move this cone around if I press OK in the pop-up. And then I can take this red arrow here and I can move it further away. And as you see, the light cone ends at a certain point. And that changes which area of the scene is actually lit by this cone of light. So let me just move it a bit closer again. And you will see that now the cone of light is actually filling out this cinema text. If I grabbed the point of interest here, I change what is actually being illuminated. So this is what the light cone does. And sometimes you, the spotlight does. Sometimes what you want is actually going to a top view of a scene so you can see which area is actually being illuminated. And so you can move the light around more easily and its point of interest. So I'm just gonna go back to the active camera. Here we go. So then if we look at the options that we have here for the light in the layer controls, we can change its intensity. We can change its color. We can change the angle of the cone so to increase its size. So at a 180, it is shining light on basically everything in front of the light. So that's something to keep in mind. So by increasing the cone size, I increase how far the light is radiating outwards from this cone. You can feather the cone to create a falloff effect so it becomes darker towards the edges of the cone. You have a radius for the cone as well. And you can change whether or not it casts shadows. So if you have different objects in the scene, then you want shadows. Then you're going to want this to be on which it is by default. So those are the most important options for the light cone, the spotlight. So I'm just going to double-click this light source here and then go into light type and choose parallel. Now, parallel is basically the same thing as the spotlight, except that there is not a cone. This is just an area that is emitting light from the entire surface of the light source. The rays are actually parallel to our scene here. So I can change the position of the light. But that doesn't actually do much. But you will see once I start changing the point of interests of the light, then I can change how this object is being illuminated. Now, I can double-click the light source again and choose the final different light that we will be looking at, which is the ambient light. Ambient light, as we've seen previously, is just light that is naturally in the scene. So let's say you are outside, the sun would be creating the ambient light. That is not very useful in this case. But I just wanted to show you that you can actually change the intensity of the ambient light so I can decrease it, for example. And click Okay, and I'm going to duplicate this light, which doubles the amount of light. But then I'm going to change the ambient light to to a spotlight. And what you will see is that the shadows are darker because the ambient light in our scene has been lowered by certain amount. So that's something you can control with these different settings. And you have some control, a measure of control over the amount of ambient light in a scene by just adding your own ambient light. And that overrides the default ambient light. 65. 7.1-Track motion: In this chapter, we are going to be focusing on camera tracking and motion tracking and camera emotion tracking allow us to put things into videos teams that weren't there when the video was created. To get started on that, where we're going to work with the most basic form of motion tracking based on a drone shot that you will find in the course files for this chapter. So here in After Effects, I'm just going to double-click in the project panel to get to the Open dialog box. I'm going to chapter seven, track tracking motion. In the course files we have 7.1 camera tracking and I'm just going to import this. And now I'm going to create a composition based on this footage. So this footage is 2.7 k at 60 frames per second. And I want a composition that matches those settings. Otherwise, the tracking of objects in a scene can get compromised. So you always want your footage to match your composition settings when it comes to motion and camera tracking. So I'm just going to click and drag this footage into the new composition button here at the bottom of the project panel and release the mouse. And this is what the shot looks like. It's just a basic rocket shot of a drone taking off and it's not playing back to smoothly. So I'm just going to put the resolution at half to get through it a bit quicker. So the drone is about two. Okay. I'm just going to scrub through the timeline for now. I'm not sure what's going on with my laptop should be able to play back this footage. So it's a drone shot taking off. And then the camera's going to roll down and aimed back at the island, the island of bled in Slovenia, by the way, one of my favorite places on the planet. Now, what we're going to do is attach something to the church spire. So I'm going to put an object here and I want the object to stay in place as the camera is moving. So basically that means I need After Effects to analyze the motion of what is actually happening in the shot. And pick a spot on the spire that the tracking is going to stay stuck to. And to do that with this footage selected here in the timeline, I'm going up into the Animation menu and then choosing Track Motion. And that opens up the layer controls. So we are now in the layer. I can always get back to the composition by clicking here for the composition. But then we have this very small little target here. Now, this target is very important because we're going to have to place this target on what we would like After Effects to actually track the motion of. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit with the scroll mouse. And one thing that's important for this tracker, if you want to move it around, you need to find this black mouse cursor. So the white cursor is no good. You have to find the black cursor, which is often why you want to zoom in, because that only shows up when you're inside the bounds of these little boxes. So I'm gonna click and drag this. And it's actually going to give me a preview next to the mouse. And I'm going to place it on this little window on the church spire and then zoom in a bit more. And now I can actually increase this little search box by grabbing one of the corners and dragging it out a little bit and changing a position a bit further. So this is what After Effects is going to try and track. And this larger area is what? The area is where after-effects will be searching for that object. This is the object and this is the search area for the object. So now before we continue, I'm going to actually create an object that is going to be tracked, that's going to get stuck to this marker once we composite it. So I'm going to go back into the composition and grab the type tool. I'm going to click once in the composition and then type tracking. The text formatting. Formatting doesn't really matter. I don't want it to be a lot bigger than the area where the that I'm actually tracking. So I'm just going to decrease the size of it to let's say 75 pixels. That's it. And what I also want to do is place the anchor point where I want the object to remain. So the tracking point determines where the object is going to be centered once the tracking is applied. So I'm going to grab the pan behind tool and I'm just gonna go over here and I'm going to place it on the left side of the text box. Now back into the layer controls for the video. And here we have our tracker. Don't have the tracker panel in frame here on the right, you can just click tracker and that's going to bring us back. Now clicking the video re enables the tracking module. There are different types of tracking that you can look at. We will look at one other type of tracking in this chapter. For now, we're just going to leave it to transform. And I only wanted to track the position, not the actual rotation of the object, because this is not going to rotate, we are only going to move through space. So what I can do now is click this button here for analyze forwards. And I'm just going to zoom out a little bit because while it is tracking, you are not able to zoom. And I'm just going to play here. And I'm going to keep an eye on whether or not After Effects is tracking it accurately by determining whether or not it's moving with the footage. Now, this is over 20 seconds of footage. So this is going to take awhile. But you will see as the drone goes up, this track, 0.1 is staying in the same place on the footage. So it's not staying in the same location in the composition. It's actually moving along with what is being tracked. And we're just going to keep this going. What's important for placing your tracker points is that there's a lot of contrast and that's why I picked this specific window on the church buyer. Because there's a lot of contrast. For example, if I had picked the top of the spire, the video would have started out with a lot of contrast because it was against the sky with the sunrise there. So there would have been a lot of contrasts between the spire, but as it passes through the land, there is a lot less contrast. So it would have lost the tracking at some point. So that's why I picked this specific window on the spire. I'm going to let it go until we hit about 20 seconds. When it hits 20 seconds, I'm going to click the stop button to stop the tracking. What you'll note is that the window is still just barely in frame, but then the camera pans down and the track point is still locked in place, which is fantastic. So once we hit 20 seconds, I'm going to click stop. And that's going to be our track. Now, we still need to confirm the target for the tracking data that was just generated. So I need to edit the target. And there's only one other layer in this composition currently. But here you have an overview of all the layers in the comp. So that's the tracking texts layer. So I'm just going to click Okay, and I'm not going to apply it yet. I want to just quickly show you what happens in a slightly zoomed in view. And I'm going to play the timeline or scrub through it rather. And you will see that this tracking point is just locked in place on this window, even when it's almost out of frame and the camera pans down. Now after 20 seconds, it loses the track because I stopped at a 20 seconds. So what we're going to do after I apply the transform to the target, we're going to shorten the composition to 20 seconds. Now, we have our tracking data, we have our target defined. Now I can just apply the tracking data and it's going to be x and y. Then I'm going to click Okay. And then I'm going to shorten the composition to the final tracking keyframe because it just adds a bunch of keyframes for the position of the track point and the position of the text layer. I'm just going to click and drag the work area to where my timeline is. Then I'm going to cut trim the comp to my work area by right-clicking and choosing trim comp to work area. Now, I'm going to play the footage and I'm going to play it at a third of the resolution just for brevity sake. And what you will see is that as the drone takes off, the text is going to stay firmly in place. I'm just going to let this play out until it hits 20 seconds. It's not playing off in real time. I think I have to actually restart my laptop a bit to clear some memory. But the tracking worked out really well. So the text is completely locked to this area telling me that the track actually worked. It's not jittering around, it's not jumping around. It doesn't lose the track at any point. So the tracking remains accurate throughout. So far, at least, just keep an eye on it. So it's rendered about 13 seconds. Just going to zoom out a little bit. 15. I just want to take a look at the panning motion to see if the texts still stays in place. And that does appear to be the case. There we go. And now it will play smoothly because the scene is now pre-rendered. And as you can see, the tracking texts is just floating there in mid air. And it looks like it's part of the scene because it's moving along with the camera or with the motion of the object rather, this isn't camera tracking yet. We will look at that in the next lesson. So that is how basic motion tracking works. You define a target area on what you want to track. You create an object that is going to be stuck to that point. You place its anchor point where you want the object to be placed. And then you just click track. And after effects just figures out for you what the position of this object should be in relation to the tracking point. 66. 7.2-Track camera: In this lesson, we're going to start working with camera tracking. And camera tracking is a process where after effects analyses the camera movement of a piece of video and then is able to replicate virtual camera that follows the same movement. Now for this in the exercise files, you will find a file called seven-point to track camera. And I'm just going to import this and create a composition based on this piece of footage by clicking and dragging it to the new composition icon here at the bottom of the project panel. Now, this is a piece of reversed drone footage. And when I play this, you will see that the water is actually going up. So I edited this beforehand. I think I posted this on my Instagram at some point for this pretty cool effect. So the drone is actually not taking off, it is actually landing, it's going down. And I reversed the footage later. So what we're gonna do is just grab about 15 seconds of this clip starting from when the drone starts moving up. So what I'm gonna do is put the timeline at about 7.5 seconds. Then I'm going to clip it from the start by just clicking and dragging the start point. I'm going to drag that to the start of the composition and then trim the work area. So I'm just going to decrease the work area to whatever the footage is. Actually, let's go back a bit further. Let's say too. When my wife there just disappears off screen. So at about 14 seconds, then I'm going to decrease the work area and then trim the composition to the work area by right-clicking here at the top and then choosing trim comp to work area. Now, I want to work in peace and quiet. I'm just going to mute the audio of this clip by clicking this Mute button here. And now it will play without audio. Now, to start tracking our camera, I have to go up into the Animation menu and then choose track camera. And this is going to start a process that can take longer or shorter depending on your available system. On my system, it takes a couple of minutes actually time it for now for this instance, I'm going to pause the recording until it is done with this analyzing in background, step one of two. Okay, there's about 15 seconds left. And indeed this took about two minutes to analyze this 14 second clip of video. Once this process completes, Once this hits 100%, it's going to switch to an orange notification saying solving camera. And that is where it actually analyzes the camera movement. And what the after-effects camera I would have to do to replicate it. And this, again can take a minute, but it's a lot shorter than the initial step of the process. So we're just going to wait for the camera to solve. And after it solves, we get these tracking points on our video. And if I play the video forward, you will note that these tracking points, most of them stay in place on the video itself. It's not going to smoothly because this is still a render intensive process. But these points tend to stay in the same place. Someone that some of them would disappear, new ones will appear as the footage progresses. But these tracking points are an indication that there is a good solve. If they stay in the same place, a good self would be where these tracking points actually stay in place. We don't need all of these tracking points, but there's no real point in deleting them. Because I am looking for something very specific, which I will probably find on this wall. Now as I'm mousing over this area, you will see this target, this bulls-eye. And what I'm looking for is a bulls-eye that has the correct perspective. On this rock face. I would look for something that is tilted slightly upwards and that is exactly what I'm seeing here. So this is where I placed my target by clicking once. Now what we get is these three target points that I can still edit if I so choose. I'm not gonna do that at the moment. But the next step would be to add a camera and also an object to analyze whether or not the track is actually active or accurate. So what I'm gonna do is just find this target again and then right-click. And then I can create text and a camera, a solid and a camera, or a null and a camera. For now I'm just going to create a solid and camera. And what that does is create a solid layer, which is just a place holder layer, just so I can look whether or not the track is actually correct. So what I'm gonna do then is just play the video. And you will notice that this solid is actually stuck to the wall, which is fantastic because that is exactly what I would want. The solid is in place and it stays in place and it actually rotates along with the camera because it is a 3D object. And that indicates, that tells us that when we add 3D objects, two scenes like this. And if we get their position right, mostly on the z axis, we will get a pretty cool result. So what I'm gonna do is just go into the position of this layer. And I'm just going to copy it for now. So I'm just going to click on position and I'm going to copy the position. Now, I'm going to hide this solid layer, which is just a control layer for me. Like I just use it to see whether or not the track is actually good. And then I'm going to grab the type tool, click once and type in tracking. I'm going to increase the text size a little bit and confirm that with Control Enter. Then I'm going to turn this into a 3D object. And initially it is actually placed off-screen. So what are we going to do is press P for position. And I'm going to paste the position of this solid onto the texts. So now it should be in the same place. But because it's farther away from the camera, because the z position of this layer is now over 41 thousand, it appears a lot smaller. So what I'm going to do is press S for scale and just scale it up to whatever I like in this scene. And now, when I start playing the timeline, you will see that this text is just perfectly in place on the rock face. So even though the drone is swiveling back and forth, it is still staying perfectly in place on the rock face and that is exactly what I was looking for. That's a bit more difficult to actually blend objects like these with the background itself. So what you can do is, for example, look at the blend mode of the layer. Blend modes is a very complicated topic. After Effects has more blend modes than any other Adobe program. You can usually try something like overlay, which makes it look part of the scene, Let's say, even though it also makes it a bit too transparent. So I can actually duplicate this layer to get a better result. Or I can look at one of the other blend modes. I can maybe go for multiply. Yeah, that looks a little bit better so that it looks like it's actually written on the wall there. Which isn't perfect because it doesn't have any individual distortion along each character. But it does appear to be part of the scene as far as the color goes, at least I'm not actually able to wrap it around here with this effect. For that we can use other effects, but this is the gist of it. So this is one of my favorite things to do in After Effects actually to put things in scenes that aren't there. One of the most powerful tools to do that is the camera tracking. And whether or not you are able to track footage accurately depends very much on the quality of the footage, how fast it's moving, the frame rate of the footage, and the camera movement, because this is a very simple camera movement. This is just a pan up. So the camera is just going upwards and that's it. But if the camera is also rotating along one or more axes, the tracking becomes a lot more difficult. And After Effects will be less, will be able to, won't be able to track it as accurately as it can for something simple like this. This is why when you film stuff like this, you either use a drone or gamble, so the footage is nice and stable and tracking is a lot easier in After Effects as you just saw. 67. 7.3-Masking basics: Another very powerful tool that we can use within After Effects is masking. Masking allows us to hide certain parts of a footage layer while keeping other parts of the footage layer visible. And to demonstrate this in the exercise files, you will find two videos which aren't going to open now by double-clicking on an empty part of the project panel. And those clips are called 7.3 masking clip, 1.37 masking clip to, and I'm just going to select both of these clips and import them as is. Now, what I want is that the composition that we will be working at in matches the settings for the video, which is 1920 by 1080 at 30 frames per second frame rate. So what I'm gonna do is click and drag one of these clips into the new composition icon at the bottom of the project panel and their release the mouse. That's also going to import the footage to the timeline. And this is just a 10-second clip of my daughter walking away from the camera. Now, the other clip that we have here is my daughter walking towards the camera in the same setting. This video was shot from a tripod or a locked gimbal as the case was, so that the footage matches exactly as according to the angle and position of the camera by the way. So what I want to show you is what happens when we draw a shape layer, when a layer is selected here in the layers panel. So when a layer is not selected, and I can do that by just clicking on an empty part of the layers panel. I can just grab one of the shape tools such as the rectangle tool and just click and drag to draw a shape as we've seen in a previous chapter. I'm just going to undo that with Control Z. But when the layer is actually selected, we are able to click and drag. And then everything except the areas that overlap this shape that I am drawing are being hidden by a mask. So what I'm gonna do is this is this function has the same way as strong shapes. So I can hold the Space-bar to actually move the shape around as I'm still drawing it. So before I release the mouse, and I'm gonna go at about halfway across the footage and then release the mouse. And just for clarity sake, I'm going to enable the transparency grid here at the bottom of the composition panel, just so we can clearly see what is actually transparent. So I drew a shape. Well, this layer was selected. Now everything outside of that shape is being hidden by a mask. And this is also visible in the layer controls. I have here mask one, which has several different options, which we will be briefly looking at. The first option here is the Mask Mode, which is currently set to add. Add means that whatever is within the mask, whatever's inside of this shape is currently visible. When I expand these mask modes, I can also put it out, subtract, which is basically going to invert the mask. So now everything inside the mask is being hidden while everything outside of the mask is displayed visibly. We also have some different modes which we will look at later in this video. They basically work the same way as the shape modes that we had with ADD, intersect and such. So I'm just going to leave it at ad for now. We also have the option to invert the mask, basically putting it in the Subtract mode. So I can just enable this to flip the mask to the other side. Now I'm going to expand the mask controls. And mask path is something we will be looking at in the project chapter where we put everything together. We will be animating the shape of the mask. I can give you a brief example of this by just enabling the stopwatch here to keyframe the mask path and then go to 1 second in the timeline and switch back to the selection tool here. Now, I can move the mask around by going here to one of the corners and just clicking and dragging the corner out. As you will see when I play the timeline using the spacebar, the mask path. So the shape of the mask is animating. I'm just using Control Z to actually go back. The mask feather gives us a gradient along the edges of the mask, so it blurs the edges of the mask. So when I click and drag this upwards, you will see that the edges of the mask are being blurred. So if you want a smooth transition between layers, this is something you can use and you will want to have an overlap of the layers that expands beyond the mask. But that's something we will be looking at in the project chapter. I'm just gonna put these back at 0. We have a mask opacity slider allowing us to partially make a layer transparent or the contents of a mask transparent. And we have a mask expansion slider, which allows us to increase or decrease the size of our mask. So I can click and drag this to the left to decrease the size of the mask. And I can click and drag it to the right to increase the size of the mass. So those are some settings that you can change when you're working with masks. And you can also animate all of these properties because they have a stopwatch. Now, I want to show you what happens when we add our second clip. So I'm just going to press the UK to collapse all the layer options here for clarity sake. And then I'm going to click and drag 7.3 masking clip one down into the timeline. And I'm just going to place it below masking clip one. And now we see that we have these different halves of the footage being visible. So when I hide, mask, mask and clip one by clicking the icon, you will see my daughter disappear. When I hide the bottom layer 7.3 masking clip two, you will see this transparency again. So this video layer is below that video layer. And because half of the top video layer is being hidden, we can see the rest of the video here on the right, on the left. So when I actually play the video, you will see a clone of my daughter walking the other way. So if you've ever seen this effect, this is how it's achieved. One part of the video is actually being masked in a top layer, and then another layer is placed below it, in which the other section of video takes place. Now we've done this with a regular rectangle, but you can do this with any shape that you choose. So I'm just going to make sure that 7.3 masking clip tool is selected. And then I'm going to switch to the pen tool. I'm going to grab the pen tool. And with this layer selected, I can then draw a shape, any shape that I want, and close the shape by clicking on the first and then everything outside of that shape will disappear. Now, I'm just quickly going to show you that I can still switch to another tool, the ellipse tool for example. And click and drag here. And that's going to add a secondary mask to this video. So I now have two masks active, which you will also see in the layers panel. So I have here mask two. Now I can change the mode of this other mask to subtract, and that's going to hide what ever is inside of the mask. And I can then grab the Mask here and drag it around and that's going to hide whatever it is being placed on. That is how those different modes work. And this is also something we will use in the project chapter to remove something from a mask that we already have. If you wanted to delete the mask, you can just click it here in the layer controls and press Delete or Backspace. And that's going to just get rid of those masks so that we have our final result. And I'm just going to play this one more time for demonstration purposes. And finally, I want to tell you about creating videos like this. Like I said, this was shot from a tripod, essentially a gimbal that I can lock so that the camera remains in the exact same place. But that is not sufficient for creating videos like this because, because you also want to manually lock the focus, it's on autofocus, your camera. It will change focus as a subject walks away from the camera or approaches it. So I want the focus to remain consistent between shots. I also want to manually set the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO if you know something about cameras at least so that the footage matches exactly and there don't appear to be any seams in the video. When I shoot both clips, you want the settings for recording to be consistent between shots so that you can combine these shots in after effects later. So that's also something important when you want to create shots like this, that the settings between clips are actually consistent. 68. 7.4-Stretching footage: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how we can stretch our footage so that it appears to be in slow motion. And in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to do that for an entire layer. And in the next one about time remapping, I'm going to show you how to do it for only parts of our layers. So only part of the timeline. In the exercise files of this chapter you will find 7.4 stretching footage. And I'm just going to import that by double-clicking it here. And I'm not going to base the composition on this clip because it's 60 frames per second. And I actually want a 30 frame per second timeline. So I'm going to click the new composition button here in the Project panel. And I'm going to set the frame rate to 30. Make sure the resolution is set to 1920 by 1080, and that the duration is actually 20 seconds instead of ten seconds. So I'm going to click Okay. And then import this footage to this timeline. Now, note that this footage is 60 FPS and we are placing it on 30 FPS timeline. The footage is actually only ten seconds long, so half of our timeline is currently empty. Now, what I want you to notice is that here at the bottom left we have these four switches. And these four switches determine which layer controls are actually active. So I can actually take out the track matte column. I can add the add or remove the layer switches if I want to give myself some more screen real estate here in the timeline. But what I want you to focus on is the in-out duration, stretch pains. So enabling that gives us these controls here, the end of the layer, so the start point of the layer is currently set to 0 seconds, 0 frames. The out is nine seconds and 29 frames. So ten seconds, the duration is ten seconds and the stretch is currently set to 100%. And I want you to focus on this stretch item here because that allows me to slow this footage down or speed it up. So let's say I'm going to increase the stretch to a 150%. That is going to slow down the footage by half. So clicking this value here for the stretch, I can put this out of 150. And the new duration of the footage is already displayed here at 15 seconds because it's gonna be slowed down by 50%. So clicking Okay, you will see that this item also becomes longer on the timeline, so it's now up to 15 seconds instead of ten where it was previously. And now watch what happens when I play back the footage. My daughter is walking 50% slower, and because we have 6060 frame per second clip, the motion is still acceptable, so it doesn't appear to choppy. And we could use this footage as slow motion footage. And with a 60 frame per second video, you can actually go up to a stretch of 200 before you really start to be able to distinguish the individual frames. So putting in this stretch at 200% and pressing Enter will allow me to create slow motion footage such as this. Now this also requires that you are able to shoot footage in slow motion. Most camera phones nowadays are able to shoot up to a 120 frames per second, allowing you to slow down the footage four times to get the 30 frames per second. So that's something to take into account when you're actually creating the video. Now, this is something that we currently cannot animate. The stretch value doesn't actually have a stopwatch. We cannot determine that certain parts of the video are going to be slow motion and other parts are going to be regular motion or even sped up. And that's something we can do with time remapping, which we will look at in the next lesson. 69. 7.5-Time remapping: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to animate the speed of a video using time remapping and after effects. And for that, I'm going to double-click here in the Project panel and I'm going to import the clip 7.5 time remapping, which is essentially the same video as we just saw in 7.4. So I'm going to import this video and I'm going to create a new composition here in the Project panel. And that's gonna be 1920 by 1080 at a 30 frame per second frame rate with a duration of 20 seconds. And then I'm going to click Okay to create that composition, I'm going to import the clip 7.5 time remapping to this composition by clicking and dragging it down into the layers. And here we have the same video as we saw in the previous lesson. Now, let's say that after two seconds, I want this video to slow down to about half of its normal speed. And then I want it to remain slow motion until the video hits eight seconds. And then I want it to go back to its regular speed. For that, we're going to use time remapping. And for that we have to actually enable time remapping for this layer. So what I'm gonna do is right-click the layer and then go up here where it says time. Then we have a toggle for enable time remapping. And that's going to add two keyframes for the time remap. These keyframes aren't important because this first keyframe signifies the start of the time for the layer and this keyframe, this second keyframe, or the last keyframe that will be on this timeline, indicates or represents the end of the video. So if I click and drag this to the left, you will see that the video becomes shorter. So I am going to go to about five seconds, and this will now be the end of the video. So all the video is now compressed in time to this 5 second keyframe. So now when I play the timeline, the footage will be a lot faster. Now I can determine where this effect starts by changing the second, the first keyframe. If I click and drag this to the right, you will see that the video is not moving. Then it starts moving when it hits this initial keyframe. Where this keyframe is determines when the video starts and where this keyframe is indicates where the video ends. Meaning that if I drag the second keyframe to the right, you will see that the footage actually slows down as it, as if I was stretching it. So when it hits ten seconds, this layer is going to end. But because we have time remapping enabled, the video will actually keep going. If we increase the length of it. Until we hit this point of the timeline, we can actually increase it a bit further. Because here it actually stops. So it functions as a freeze-frame at the end, but that's not something that we want currently. So what I'm gonna do is go to two seconds in the timeline, and then I'm going to add a time remapping key-frame by clicking the keyframe icon here. And then I'm going to go to eight seconds in the timeline and add another keyframe. And now moving the value of these keyframes around is going to give us different results. So let me just put this keyframe back at ten seconds and decrease the layer length to about ten seconds again. Now, the footage is already slowing down here when it hits this keyframe and actually speeds up to make up for that slowed down. So I would actually like to increase the length of the video a bit. Now let's look at these values. Here. I want the time to be exactly two seconds. Here at the 8 second keyframe, I want it to be exactly five seconds. So between the second, second, so between 2 second 8, it will actually only playback to five seconds. So it's going to slow the footage down to make up for that. I also because I want it to go back to its regular speed. After eight seconds, I have to actually move this last keyframe to about 13 seconds. So I'm going to go to 13 seconds in the timeline. I'm going to zoom in a little and make sure that the layer ends and that this keyframe is out exactly 13 seconds. So now when I play the timeline, the footage will slow down. Actually. This should be exactly two seconds. That's five. So now playing the footage, it's regular speed. Then it slows down. And it will play slowed down until it hits eight seconds, and then it speeds up again to regular speed, hitting the end of the video at 13 seconds. So just clicking and dragging these keyframes around and changing the time remap value allows you to animate the speed of your footage. 70. 7.6-Roto brush: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how we can cut a subject out of a video. So isolate a subject from its background by using the Roto Brush Tool, which essentially works as an automatic masking tool in certain situations depending on the footage that you are using. The Roto Brush actually requires a very clear subject in a video so that, so that its movement can be accurately tracked. But thankfully, we have such a piece of footage in the course files of this chapter in 7.6 roto brush. So I'm just going to import that footage. This time. I'm going to create a composition based on that footage. So I'm gonna click and drag it down into the new composition icon in the project panel and release the mouse. Now, this is another slow motion video of my daughter just walking through frame. It's slowed down to about 50% speed. And note that at some point there is a foreground subject which occludes the visibility of hers. So she is hidden behind this lamppost at some point. That's going to be something we will be talking about later in this slightly longer than usual video. I want to isolate her from the background so I can place things behind her, which I will also show you in this lesson. So what I'm gonna do is grab the Roto Brush Tool here or the second tool from the end. And then I need to actually open the layer in layer view. So I'm just going to double-click the footage here in the Project panel, in the timeline panel. And that's going to bring me into this view. Now, the Roto Brush Tool actually gives us a green circle for a mouse cursor. And the circles size is important because it's currently set to quite a small size. You might want to vary this size depending on what you are actually trying to wrote a scope, because that's what what we're doing right now is called rotoscoping, cutting a subject from a video. To change its size, I can hold the control key on my keyboard and then click and drag to the right to increase the size. And click and drag to the left to decrease its size. And I'm going to make it about this big. And what you will see is that there's also a green plus sign in the mouse cursor indicating that we will be adding to our row once we start clicking or clicking and dragging on our footage, what I'm gonna do is start here at the top and then click and drag over her head. And that is going to put a pink outline around this area. Now, there's also, once I zoom in a little bit and grabbed the space bar to move to the top. There's also a part slightly above her head that is currently selected, which I don't want my end result. So I actually want to paint this out of the Roto. So to switch to the minus. So removing from the Roto, I'm just going to hold the Alt key, and that changes the cursor to a red minus, allowing me to click at the top here. And that's going to put the selection around her head again. I can zoom in and out and use the mouse holding the spacebar to actually move around. And again, I clicked and dragged here and it select a part of the background. So I'm just going to hold Alt and click and drag over this area and that's going to remove it from the selection. So I'm just going to keep clicking on separate areas of the footage to increase the size and making corrections using the Alt key and just keep growing it. And depending on the footage, this can actually be quite a lengthy process. But the whole point is that for each subsequent frame, we will get better results depending on how well we did with our initial row. For this section, for her toe, I actually want to decrease my brush size, holding control and dragging left, and then just clicking and dragging over this area. Then I'm going to grab her back leg and just paint over this in one go. And that actually gives me a relatively accurate selection. And there we have our initial selection. So once I actually go back to the composition here, you will see that on the first frame, she has already cut out of this video for the first frame. And all I need to do to get hurt cut out of the subsequent frames, of the next frames is play the timeline. Before you start playing the timeline, you actually want to make sure that you have all your footage visible because she is going to move through the frame and you cannot zoom in and out while the Roto is actually being applied. So you want to make sure that everything is visible so you can assess as the footage plays, where the track. Might be going wrong. So I'm just going to press the space bar and that's going to play the timeline. And you will see that the pink outline is actually being traced for each frame. So after Effects is tracking what is going on in this pink outline. And it's doing its best to keep this pink outline around our subject. Now this can be quite a time-consuming process depending on the video that you're working with and the speed of your system. But this is much easier than animating a mask around a subject manually, which we will also be doing in the project chapter that I've referred to already a couple of times. Now, this footage is relatively easy to track. We have a very clear subject in the video, it slow motion, so there's not a lot of motion blur or there's no motion blur at all actually. But there are some problems that can arise. And that is something we will see once we get to approximately eight seconds when this lamppost goes through the frame. Because After Effects will not be able to follow our subject when it disappears behind another subject. So we're just going to wait until we get to about eight seconds. And then correct. The problem as it arises. Track is still looking good. Even her feet are being tracked relatively well. You will see in the end result that this actually works quite well once we see the actual isolated footage. And we're coming up on our lamppost here we are at seven seconds. And once we get to just about eight, we will see the lamppost appear. And what you will see is that as she disappears behind the lamppost, that the pink outline will also disappear. So it's just going to crumple and go away. Now, what I want to do is actually continue the track. When she appears from behind the lamppost, I pause playback using the space bar, and I'm just going to hold down Control and press the arrow keys to jump one frame forward until I see her foot appear from behind the column. There we go, There it is. Now I'm going to zoom in a little and making sure that I didn't have the Roto Brush active. I'm just going to paint over her foot again. That's going to give me a new area that is going to be tracked. And you can always zoom in a little for some more detail. Change the brush size if you want. And I'm going to skip a frame forward again and another one that gives me another part of her foot. So I'm just going to paint over this, skipping forward until we get more clicking and dragging to add this to the Roto. Going up a little bit, holding Spacebar, and then it grows a bit too much. So holding Alt, I can drag over this area and that's going to make it jump back. Skip forward another frame. Click and drag to add this to the area. And I'm not going to do this pixel perfect. I'm just going to grab the rough outline because the edge of the light post is actually quite blurry. There we go, skip forward a frame and another. There she comes. And I'm just going to take out this little bit of an edge here, skip forward a frame. And that will actually put most of my daughter in frame again, so I can grab the back leg here, this area, and it might go a bit too far because the shadow areas are overlapping, but actually it looks pretty good. Skip forward a frame using control and the arrow keys. And another one and another. That's gonna give me a full outline once I click and drag over her foot. Now I think I may have grabbed a little too much now. Okay. That looks okay. Okay, so now we can start tracking again by just playing the timeline using the space bar. And we're just going to let this complete towards the end. Tract looks pretty good. There we go. So now I can go back to the composition by just clicking here. And you will see that she is now cut from the background. And this is being rendered live by the way, depending on your settings. So this can play a bit slowly. But she is now isolated from the background. Now let's say I want to put something behind her in this video. I want to add something seen that wasn't there. What I can do then is duplicate this footage by pressing Control D. And then I'm gonna go to the bottom layer and expand the layer controls and go into Effects. Then I can click the Roto Brush and refine edge and just delete this by pressing Delete. And that should. Once the effect is actually rendered. Because the Roto Brush is currently propagating AB of a 136. So once this is complete, it should give us a view of the layer with its background. And there we go. So now she is cut from the footage. So she is on a separate layer on top of this video layer. So what I can do then is grab one of the shape tools, make sure that no layer is selected and then just click and drag. And that's going to create the shape on the top. So what I can do now is dragging down in-between these footage layers. So now it appears that she is standing in front of this shape layer. So this is how we can add things to footage that weren't actually there, which is going to be the actual project. Once we get to the project chapter, the footage isn't tract, so it's not motion tracked and this is not a 3D object yet, so it will remain in the same place within the composition, but it does look like she is walking in front of an object while this object initially it wasn't there. So that's how rotoscoping works. You can always go into the layer again by just double-clicking it. And then making a, actually this is the bottom layer that I should be looking at. So no, actually it's the front layer that the effect is applied to. And then activating the Roto Brush. You can change this effect again once you click here and make changes as the timeline progresses, if you saw some mistakes that the program made as the timeline was playing. But this is essentially how you cut a subject from a background. 71. 7.7-Content-Aware fill: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how we can remove an object from video footage using content aware. Fill for that in the course files of this chapter, you will find the video 7.7 Content Aware Fill. And I'm just going to import that to this project here. And I'm going to create a composition based on this footage by just clicking and dragging it to the composition button at the bottom of the project panel. Now this footage is actually 60 frames per second for brevity sake. And to speed things up, I'm going to change the frame rate of the composition to 30 frames per second. So I'm just going to press Control K or Command K on the Mac and go into frame rate and then enter 30 and press Enter. So now it has to analyze only half the frames. So in this footage, we have these two hot air balloons. And what I want to show you is how we can remove one or more of these air balloons by using Content-Aware Fill. And to use Content-Aware Fill, we first have to draw a mask around what we want to remove and then animate that mask to follow the object that we want to get rid of. So because this is a relatively simple object with a simple background, I'm just going to grab the ellipse tool, making sure that the Content Aware Fill video layer is actually selected. And I'm going to click and drag an ellipse over this hot air balloon. I'm going to put the mode on none for now because I want to see the mask and the actual video. And now what I'm gonna do is animate the mask to follow the hot air balloon. And that is exceedingly simple. I just expand the mask options here and I'm going to keyframe the mask path at 0 frames and 0 seconds. And then I'm gonna go to the end of the footage and then move the mask to wherever the hot air balloon is now. So I'm just going to grab the selection tool and I'm going to click and drag the mask over the hot air balloon. And when I scrub through the timeline, you will see that the mask is following the hot air balloon exactly because the hot air balloon is on a set trajectory. It's on a straight line. So the mask path doesn't have to have any complex animation. When you're working with cutting out a person or a vehicle and the angle changes on the subject that you want to remove. You might want to use the pen tool instead of the one of the shape tools. So you can draw a frame or a mask around them more accurately. So we have our mask path animation and now we're going to go into the Content Aware Fill panel on the right of the After Effects interface. If you don't have this panel, you can always go into Window and then Content Aware Fill to get to the panel options. And just for now I'm going to switch the mode of the mask to subtract so that I get an accurate representation of the mask within this preview, let's say. So scrubbing through the timeline, it will give me a preview of what the mask is actually doing and what is actually transparent. Be what it will be filled with, Content-Aware Fill. Content-aware Fill is actually a Photoshop function. After Effects can lean on this to fill in the individual frames. And that can be a pretty computer intensive process, which is why we changed the frame rate of the composition to 30 instead of 60. Because that means that after effects only has to go through half the frames to half the number of frames to use content aware fill. But it's still going to take a couple of minutes. At least. What we can then do is choose what we actually want to use as a fill method. And Jen, neurally speaking, you want to go for object because this function is used to delete objects from a scene. You will also want to do, in most cases, is choose for lighting correction, which by default, you can leave set too strong. And that's because when there are lighting changes in the scene, you want After Effects to take that into account when filling this masked area. And I want to go for the entire duration of the clip. So I'm just gonna leave it set to entire duration. If you have a more complex scene, you can create a reference frame which is going to bring you into Photoshop. And there you will have to edit out the object that you want to get rid of, which after Effects will then use as a reference frame. But for most cases, you're not going to need this unless it's a very complex scene. Now, I'm going to click fill layer, and that is going to start the actual process. And that's going to create a fill layer at the top here. Now note that we have ten seconds of video at 30 frames per second. So after effects still essentially needs to edit 300 images, 300 separate frames for this process to actually complete. And that's why it's still going to take several minutes to complete. So I'm just going to pause recording until this process is completed. Okay, The process has apparently completed. And just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to switch the mask mode from Subtract back to none. And you will see that this mask is now empty. And I don't actually need to mask anymore, so I'm just going to click it here and delete it. So the hot air balloon has disappeared. But what you will notice when I scrub start scrubbing through the timeline, it will appear again. And also when I start playing the timeline, it's actually going to stay in frame. And once I actually put the timeline somewhere and wait for a little bit, you will see that content aware fill actually catches up. And it's going to fill in this area here. But this can take several seconds, even on a strong laptop like mine, it can take a little while for this to actually fill in. So that can be a bit confusing when you start using this for the first time, when the object doesn't actually disappear. The fact is, it will disappear if you just wait a little bit. Now, this also makes it difficult to preview whether your results are accurate. So usually once I complete this process, I create a render. So I create an actual video, a reference to see if this actually worked properly. So to do that, I'm going to go into the File menu and then I'm going to go to Export and then add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. That is going to open Adobe Media Encoder, which we use to create actual videos out of After Effects. Then it's going to load into this panel after a few seconds. Depending on the speed of your system. And I'm just gonna go over a few of the render settings. This file format by default is set to H.264. Don't mess with this. Pretty much everything you see on YouTube is exported in H.264. It's a very efficient and very qualitative file format that you can use for basically everything. So you don't have to actually go in here and mess with this. I will tell you what the settings in this panel actually do in the file in the chapter about exporting. But you don't have to actually change anything here to get good quality video. What are you going to change is the final destination. So I'm just going to click here for the filename. And I'm going to render this out to my desktop. 7.7, Content Aware Fill. And H.264 is actually an MP4 file format, which is also useful to know. So I'm just going to click Save and then click Play. And that's going to render my video as soon as it connects to the Dynamic Link Server, reading X and P. And now it's actually going to export the video file. And it's going to take another five seconds or so. And once it completes on my desktop, I will have a video file here, 7.7 content aware fill. Once I play this file, you will see that the hot air balloon here has completely disappeared. So it is no longer part of this video. So our results were actually accurate. So it takes a little while to previous stuff like this within After Effects until the complete timeline is actually rendered as a preview. I find it useful in many cases to create an export like that just so we can see our results a bit faster. So that is how you remove something from a video. You draw a mask around it. You animate the mask to follow the subject for the entire timeline. You go into Content Aware, Fill, and play around with the settings. You generate a fill layer which can take a long time, and then the footage will be filled. And results like this are exceptionally easy to achieve. 72. 8.1-Tracking our footage: In this chapter, we are going to create a full project with some basic animation camera tracking, rotoscoping and masking. So a lot of the aspects of after effects that we've looked at in previous chapters. The end result will look something like this. We have a 3D camera tracked scene of my daughter. She has cut out of the background using the Roto Brush Tool. The background contains these animations which are limited to these triangles on the wall. So they are masked to these areas. And obviously they are 3D objects because they are moving along with our camera. So this is approximately what we will be creating. If you look in the course files for this chapter, you will find an After Effects project. And the only thing that's after-effects project contains or those liquid animations that we just saw in the background. At the end of this chapter, we will be able to insert any animation that we choose in this background. I just chose to use the stock assets for brevity's sake, but you can insert any animation once our project is complete. So step one is to import the footage to our projects. So I'm just going to double-click on an empty part of the project panel and I'm going to choose main clip from the exercise files. Mine is called main clip one. I just reinterpreted the footage to be 30 FPS instead of 60 FPS. But for you this will be called main clip. And I'm just going to base a composition on this clip by clicking and dragging it to the new composition button in the project panel. So going into the composition settings pressing Control K, I can see that it's 1920 by 1080 pixels at a frame rate of 30 with a duration of ten seconds, so that matches the clip exactly. The first step now is to 3D camera track our footage. So with the footage layer selected in the layers, I'm going to go up into animation and then choose track camera about halfway down. That's going to analyze the footage. It's going to have to go through 300 frames. And I'm going to pause recording until this tracking is completed. Okay, there's about ten seconds left on the clock here. It's still analyzing and background. It's about to switch to solving camera. Once it has solved the camera, we will start seeing these tracking points that we also saw in the previous chapter on the drone footage. And again, what I'm looking for is a target, a bulls-eye, that seems to correlate with the correct camera angle. So what I'm actually looking for it because I want to animate something on the wall is a, an exact front view of this bulls-eye. That appears to be the case about here. I could also choose a different location, but this looks about right. So I'm just going to click once to place the bullseye there. And then I'm going to right-click and choose create solid and camera. Now basically, I only need a camera, but I want the 3D objects that I'm going to add to the scene in a one of the future videos. I want that to correspond in the correct position. So I wanted to have the same distance from the camera as this object. So what I'm going to do now is just play the timeline and see if the footage tracks accurately and it's almost completely stuck to the wall. So that is perfect. I don't need this tracking solid in my composition anymore, so I'm just going to hide it. And once we select a different layer, now we have a 3D tracked scene that doesn't contain any actual 3D objects yet. That's something we will do in one of the future videos. For now, we're going to start rotoscoping my daughter out of the background so we can place objects behind her. 73. 8.2-Rotoscope the model: The next step in our process is going to be removing her from the background using the Roto Brush tool. That works exactly the same way as we did in chapter seven with this particular clip. So the first thing we're gonna do is duplicate the clip on the timeline. So I'm just going to select it here in the layers and press Control D to duplicate it. And we will be rotoscoping the top one. So I'm going to double-click it here in the layers to get in the layer view. And then I'm going to grab my Roto Brush. Again. You can change the size of the Roto Brush by holding Control and clicking and dragging left and right on the mouse. Then I'm just going to start painting out the first frame. And this works exactly the same way. So I'm going to zoom in where necessary and delete some of these extra areas holding Alt when I have to. I'm just going to paint over her silhouette so that she will be out. And where necessary, I can just Alt drag over the footage to delete any areas that I do not need. Just going to grab our hair hair over here and then move on to her legs and feet. For this area, I want to decrease my brush size a bit. So holding Control and click and drag left. Just grab the tip of her toe here. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. Then moving on to the other leg, you can be pretty generous with your strokes here actually, because there's a lot of contrast between our subject, my daughter, and the background. Then all I have to do to track the footage is to play back pressing the space bar. And I'm just going to let this process run until we hit about eight seconds where the light post is going to come into view. So until then I will pause recording. Okay, we are at about 7.5 seconds and the light post is about to come into view here. And I'm just going to wait for her to disappear behind it and move on a little. And here I'm going to pause the footage and holding control and using the arrow keys, I can move through the clip frame-by-frame until her foot appears here on the other side. I'm going to pick one frame forward from this point, actually, and then start painting over her foot again. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit. And in this zoomed in view, you can use the spacebar. So hold down the spacebar. Actually move across the footage. Okay, now I'm gonna go forward a frame holding control and the arrow key. Then we get some more of her foot and leg, which I'm going to paint over with the Roto Brush. And in the next frame, we can also grab more of her leg and part of her dress. I'm keeping an eye on whether or not the Roto is still accurate by the way, that it doesn't select any of the background here. We can move up her torso and grabbed her arm. We can just go ahead and take part of her face. And now I'm going to move on to the next frame, holding control and the right arrow key. And it's already starting to track it pretty accurately. So I'm just going to click and drag over here to grab some more of her dress. Just part of this. Moving on to the next frame. She is in frame almost exactly, almost completely. Now it's actually grabbing some of the background here. So I'm just going to Alt, drag over this area to get rid of that, this little part over here. And then move on to the next frame. It's grabbing her leg pretty accurately. And now I can just paint in the right foot along with her toe. And now the program goes way too far. So I'm just going to Alt drag over this area. This is not great yet, so I'm just going to keep improving. And the more you improve actually, the more you make changes to this, the more accurate the program actually becomes. So that's something to keep in mind. I just saw a little problem with her left foot, so I'm just going to go back a frame and check if that is still accurate and it does appear to be. And then just grab her leg again because when you go back a frame, it actually forgets the next frame. So that's also something to keep in mind. And then I'm going to track out the rest of the footage, zooming out a little bit and then pressing Spacebar to keep playing. And I'm going to keep an eye on her silhouette to see whether or not the track is still accurate. And that does appear to be the case. So now the truck is complete and now we can go back to the composition. So out of this layer view, I'm just going to hide the background layer for now. So we see her separately and playing the timeline, we can see that she is pretty decently cut out from the background. So the next step is going to be to add the compositions where the actual animations are going to take place in 3D space. So let's move on to the next lesson to start that process. 74. 8.3-Adding 3D precomps: In this lesson, we will be adding the pre compositions which we will use to create our actual animations for the background. So in the project, I'm just going to re-enable visibility on the main clip. And what I'm gonna do is actually create a shape layer that comprises the entire composition so that it's the actual size of the composition itself. So I'm gonna go up into the shape tools and choose rectangle, making sure that no layer is selected. And then just double-clicking the tool to create a shape, the size of our composition. And the first thing I'm going to do is pre-compose this composition. And that enables us to just change the content of the pre-composition at anytime without affecting how it appears in our final animation. So I'm going to right-click this shape layer one and choose precompose. And I'm just going to name this animation one. And then click, Okay. Now what I'm gonna do is create a 3D object here. I'm going to turn this pre-composition into a 3D object so that it starts being affected by the camera. I then want to give this pre-composition the same position as our truck solid from the first lesson. So I'm just going to click the track solid and press P for position. Then click the word position and press control C to copy this position. Then I'm going to click on animation one, our new pre-composition and press Control V to give it the same location in x, y, and z space. And playing the footage, I can see that the composition is actually tracking quite accurately. Now, it's a bit bigger than I want the composition to be. In the end. I'm just going to go into S for scale for animation. And I'm going to put this at about 80%, let's say 70% thereabouts. Let's be exact and make it exactly 70%. Now, with the selection tool active, I'm actually going to move it down a little bit and a bit to the right, and then up a little bit because I want it to mask it on this triangle in the background. Well, behind here is actually not a triangle, but a more complex shape, but I want to mask it to this shape in the next section. What I'm going to do then is duplicate this composition in the composition in the project panel. So I'm just going to duplicate this twice because I want to animate on three rectangles. Then I'm going to move forward in the timeline a bit like so. Grab main. Actually I grabbed the wrong pre-comp for this. So I'm just going to go to animation one and duplicate this. Then I'm going to take animation to, and just drag it down to the layers. I'm going to turn this into a 3D object. And then I'm going to grab its position and paste the position that we copied previously. Now, moving on into the timeline, I'm going to move it to the correct position. So I'm going to move it to the right and down. And as I said, we will be masking this later in this chapter so that it only appears within the actual triangle. And I'm going to scale it down to 70% again so that it's slightly smaller and then move it down a little bit more. Then I'm going to hide it so we can work on animation three. So I'm gonna move forward in time again. Then I'm going to grab animation three and place it on the timeline. I'm going to turn this into a 3D layer. And then I'm going to paste the position. And again, then I'm going to move it to the left, move it down, and then scale it down to 70% so that it kind of fits within this triangle here. Now, I'm going to re-enable visibility on these pre compositions. And you will see that they will track accurately because they are 3D objects in a scene with a 3D camera. Now obviously my daughter is still behind these pre compositions. I can change that very easily by clicking and dragging main clip, one, which has how our rotoscoping result to the top of the layer stack. And that will put her in front of these pre compositions. The next step is to mask the pre compositions. And then in the video after that, I'm going to show you how to insert any animation that you want. In the next video, we are going to be masking these objects to the actual triangles in the background. 75. 8.4-Masking the precomps: In this lesson, we will be masking our background shapes, these pre compositions to the actual wall panels on this wall. And I'm just going to get started with animation one, the pre-composition animation one. So I'm going to hide number two and number three. And then I'm going to grab the layer opacity of animation one, and I'm going to reduce it to 40%. So I can actually see the background that I want to trace. To mask out only this area on the shape. I'm going to grab the pen tool. And I'm just going to get started here on this corner. And then click here right before this clamp because we also don't want the animation to overlap this clamp. And I'm just going to chase a trace around this. Moving onto the next one. And I'm not clicking and dragging to create curves, I am just creating straight lines. Then I'm gonna go forward a little bit until this clamp is visible. And because it's already 3D motion tract and these are 3D objects, we don't have to worry about these masks staying in place because they are 3D objects that are already camera tracked. So just working around this clamp here. Then I'm going to click at the bottom. Then I can close out the mask by clicking here. And now the visibility of this precomposition is limited to this area that I have just drawn. So now we can move on to pre-comp number two. So I'm going to find a frame around three seconds where this whole triangle is in view. And then re-enable visibility on the animation to pre-comp. And I'm going to lower its opacity to 40% so that I can start tracing the panel. Click once on this corner here, and then moving on to this clamp, tracing around it. Moving on to the next clamp, tracing around it. You don't have to be super accurate here. Obviously being more accurate gives better results in the end, but these edges are not going to be visible because we are only going to be creating our animations in the center of the pre-composition in one of the next videos. So it just moved on it in time a little bit to actually see where I want to place these masking points. And because these objects are already tracked in 3D, we can just move around until my daughter is either in front of them or pass them already. Then click on the first one to close the path. And now we have a mask for animation to. Moving on to animation three, again, I'm just going to make it visible and then get the opacity out for animation three and lower it to 40%. Then again, we're going to just outline the shape of this panel. So tracing around the clamp, clicking on the point. Then I'm going to move forward in time a little bit to get a view of this clamp here and trace around it. Next clamp. There we go. Then I can just close out the path by clicking the first one. And now it's only visible within the mask. So playing the animation now you will see that these stay in place nicely because of our camera tracking. This all works pretty well until we get to eight seconds. Because these pre-composition, despite that they have masks are on top of the actual background footage. And that means that they are going to display over the light post moving through the frame. And that is a problem for pre-comp three and pre-comp to four. So for both animation layers. So I'm going to have to fix that. So I'm going to disable the visibility on animation too, so I can just focus on animation three. And then I'm going to find a point in the footage where it starts being a problem. So lets say exactly eight seconds. I'm going to click Animation three, and I have the Pen tool still active. And what I'm gonna do now is add a secondary mask that is going to cut out of this mask. So what I'm gonna do is just very simply trace the shape of the light post and then move forward a few frames. And then I'm going to grab one of these corners. And just a way, actually, what we need to do is go into masks and then mask two. And we have to keyframe the mask path. So I'm just going to go back to eight seconds exactly. Keyframe the mask path, and then move forward a few frames. Then I can just either click and drag the mask around, or I can just grab the selection tool, click on an empty space here, and then click back on the mask to be able to move around these individual corners. I'm going to move forward a few frames and then click and drag around the points again. And what you will see is not representative for our final result because the mask is currently set to add, meaning that everything within this mask is going to be visible. Now that's something we will be changing to subtract once we actually finish this process. And this process is actually manual rotoscoping because we are cutting something out of a video based on a mask animation. So just moving on. And every time there's a big skip in position, I stop playback. I stopped skipping forward and I correct the mask because the mask path is key framed. We can just click and drag these points around to correct wherever the timeline is. Now it's about to move off screen. Quick autosave. I'm just going to keep clicking and dragging these points around. You don't have to be super accurate because the light post is actually quite blurry in the foreground. And it's about to move off screen one more. Now it's off screen and so as the mask. So what we have now, once we switch mask to, from add to subtract mode, is this result here. So now the shape actually disappears as the mask moves through frame. Now, this is also a problem for the animation to precomposition. So I'm just going to collapse everything in animation three. Go-to animation to and re-enable its visibility. Then I'm going to find the point where it starts becoming a problem and that's around eight seconds and 12 frames. Then I'm going to grab the pen tool. And again I'm just going to click to trace the shape of the light post. Now, before we move on, I have to actually animate the mask path of mask to. So I'm just going to add a keyframe. Then I'm going to skip forward to where the overlap starts happening, which is about here. And with the selection tool, I can click on an empty spot and then click on the mask. Then I can just move it over. You will see that if I add this, if I put it on subtract, the shape is actually going to disappear instead of up here. So moving on a few frames, I'm just going to click and drag the mask around. You don't want to skip too far ahead because you won't be aware of any problems until you actually go back and play the footage. So I'm just clicking and dragging your thankfully, I walked at a pretty consistent speed. So I can be relatively certain that this mask will stay in place properly. And it's about to move off screen. So I can then move the mask off screen. I'm just going to scrub through the timeline to make sure this worked correctly. And that does appear to be the case. So now, playing back the footage, you will see that around eight seconds, these two pre-comps will start disappearing behind the light post because we animated a mask set to subtract mode. Okay. Currently still working at full resolution. Okay, here we go. So it's going to disappear behind the post and so does the other ones. So our masking actually worked. One more thing that I noticed as I was going to export this tutorial is that at some point the track becomes less accurate. And that's because the scene is actually hidden behind the lamppost for the most part. So what we can do to fix that is manually animate the position of these main masks, Let's say on both Mask ones, on both of these animation layers to get around that. Because as you can see, once I get to about eight seconds and five frames, you will see that it starts overlapping with the creases between these areas. And that's not something that we want. So I'm going to go to the frame where it actually starts losing the track. And that is going to be, let's say, I would say it starts acting up around six seconds and 17 frames. Then I'm just going to animate the mask path for mask one. Then I'm going to move forward a bit. With the selection tool. I can actually select the entire mask and just move it into place where I need it to be. And I'm gonna do that again a bit further on. Currently, I'm only doing this for the animation to layer. And then it appears to be pretty much correct for the final frame. So I'm just going to play the animation. And now it actually stays where it should. Say I saw one frame where it's too far away over here. So let's see how that looks here. Okay. On this frame, it's too far off. So I'm just going to click and drag it around until it is where I need it to be. Go back a frame, make sure it's okay. Okay. Now, this black, this blue background is going to be hidden in the animation, will be playing inside of these areas. So it's not going to be a big issue, but I just wanted to show one of the common problems that you can run into when you're trying to animate stuff like this. I can see we have the same problem for animation three. So I'm just going to grab the Mask, which is mask one. And then I'm going to find the frame where it starts losing the track. And that's approximately eight seconds and 32 frames for this layer. And I'm going to grab the Mask Path and animate it by clicking the stopwatch. Skip forward a few frames and just click them, drag it back into place where it should be skipped forward a few frames. Here we go. Now it's slightly off-center again, so I'm just going to click and drag it back. Skip forward a few frames. And again, it's not where it should be. Some just moving it to the right a little. We want to make sure that at the end, when it becomes visible again, that it is in approximately the right place. And here at the end, we don't seem to be having any major issues. So I'm actually going to just move it a little bit and then preview the animation. Jumps around a little, but we're not gonna be able to see that in the final result. So this was basically manually rotoscoping out this pole. And this pole affects the accuracy of the tracking. So you have to make sure that your masks at least stay in the same position that they were before. So that you don't get any strange results once you actually start animating these backgrounds, which we are going to do in the next lesson. 76. 8.5-Adding animations: It's time to add some actual animations to our 3D tracked and masked pre-comps. For that. First, I'm just going to organize my layers here a little bit. I'm going to press Control a to select everything in the layers and then press U to collapse everything. So press the Uber key to just collapse everything. Now, because we duplicated these animation pre-comps in the project panel, they are actually separate items. So what we're gonna do in animation one will not be reflected in animation too, so that we can animate them separately. And what I'm gonna do now is go into animation. Actually. Let's get rid of this track solid because we no longer needed here just to clean up our project a little bit. So now we only have six layers. So I'm going to go into the Animation one pre-comp by just clicking here and here we just have our blue rectangle. I don't actually need this rectangle anymore, so I'm just going to delete it. And now when I go back to the main clip, by the way, this area will appear blank, but it is actually still just the same precomp and it's going to reflect whatever we put in here. Now, we could just manually start creating animations in here. But for brevity sake, we're going to use these animation composer pre-comps about which I will tell you a lot more in the chapter about different plugins. So here I have these folders with liquid one, liquid 79111624. And we're going to just click and drag these into the layers in order so that we can fill the timeline with animation. So the first thing we wanna do is just click and drag down liquid one. And that is this transparent liquid animation. I'm going to press O to move to the final frame of this animation and then open the folder liquid seven. And then I'm going to click and drag to the timeline and I'm going to hold Shift to snap it to the end of liquid one so that when one animation ends, the next one, we'll begin. The same for liquid seven. I'm just going to press O to move to the final frame and expand the group liquid nine. Click and drag it into the timeline and hold Shift to snap it towards the end. And the shift is very, the snapping here is very limited, So you have to get quite close to where the playhead is to actually snap it in place. Press O again on liquid nine and then import liquid 11. Press O on liquid 11 and go to liquid 16. And I'm dragging the pre-comp and not the folder into here, by the way. Then liquid 16, I'm just going to click and drag this in. And there we go. So now we have this animation here of these different liquid shape elements animating in the background. And I'm actually, I'm going to go back into the main clip composition to see if that actually works properly. So now you will see that these are actually animating in place over there. Now we're gonna do the same for animation to, so I'm just going to open up this pre-comp by double-clicking it. Delete Shape Layer one. Then just start dragging in these pre-comps. And again, we could place any animation here. I just want something quick that looks fancy for the background. And that's why I'm using these pre animated shapes. Liquid 16. There we go. Back to the main clip and now we have this result. And I just wanted to make sure that it looks okay towards the end. And that does appear to be the case. So moving on to animation three. Just delete the shape layer and start dragging in the pre-comps 179 and I'm holding Shift to snap it to the end of the layer. In this case actually we go liquid 16. Okay. Now back to the main clip. Let's say I want the animations of animation through a 23 to start slightly later. I'm just going to select these and just drag them forward in time a little bit. And the same for animation three. So just select the layers, click and drag them forward a little bit so they don't all take place at the same time. Now the opacity of these pre-comps is still set to 40%. So I'm just going to select all of them and press T and then change the opacity to 100%. I'm going to change the resolution of my preview to half, so the preview renders a bit faster. Then I'm actually going to play the whole timeline here. And the Roto Brush is making things a little bit difficult for live playback. But you will see that these animations take place within their respected respective masks, which is the intended result. For the rest, I'm just going to scrub through a little bit to spot any issues. Don't appear to be many. So I think we're just about ready to create a final render of this composition of this project. So what I'm gonna do is go into File and then Export and then add this composition to the Media Encoder Queue. That's going to open up Media Encoder, which again can take a little bit of time depending on your system. It's going to show up here in the queue. And once it's imported, I'm not going to touch this file format. I just want to choose a different location. And we're just going to render this out into my AE folder as project results. Now, I'm going to be very curious about the results of your project. So feel free to send those onto me. And maybe I can even give you some feedback. I just click the play button and that's going to render out the project. And this can take a bit longer because there was quite a bit going on in this project. So I'm just going to pause playback until the render is complete. Okay, the render is about to complete. So now I can just click this export file that's going to open the folder. And here's our project results. Basically working exactly as intended. So congratulations on your first full animation in After Effects. 77. 9.1-CC vignette: In this chapter, we are finally going to work with some effects within After Effects. And to get started, I have in the exercise files which you can open by double-clicking in the project panel, this video 9.1 vignette. And if you import that and create a composition based on those, based on that video by clicking and dragging it to the new composition icon in the project panel, you will see the same reversed drone video that we've seen in a previous chapter when we started working with camera tracking. And what I want to show you is that there are actually a few ways of applying effects in After Effects. One of the ways is applying effects directly to the layer itself, which applies it to the entire layer. So if I go into the effects and presets panel here on the right, which if it's not visible for you, you can always go into Window and then go to effects and presets. And I'm going to search for vignette V, d and e t. And that's going to give me CC vignette. And this is in the stylized category. And that means that if I go into the effects menu and then go to Stylize, I will find the SCC vignette there as well. Now, I can click and drag this onto the layer itself. I can do that within the composition or in the layers panel. That's going to apply the effect. And the effects become visible here in the effect controls panel. So once you apply an effect, generally speaking, it will automatically open the effect controls. And I'm just going to reset this to the default value and the vignette. A vignette is basically usually it means instance style points for your video because it just adds a darker border, which is cylindrical, knocked cylindrical. It's elliptical in nature around the edges of your video to make it more stylized. Let's say here I can change the amount of vignetting that is taking place. So this is basically simulating what some more wide angle lenses do. And this is used very often. You see it everywhere. A lot of people add this to their video just to make the footage a bit more stylized, I can change the angle of view, which is going to squeeze the vignette towards the center. The center, by default, is set to the center of the composition, but you can also click and drag this around to get a different version of this vignette. And pin highlights means that it tries to leave the highlights alone. So at darkens the highlights less, but it's still adds a vignette to the video. So now you will see once the pin highlights is at 100 and increasing the amount doesn't really affect the lightest points of this video because pin highlights is at 100. And if I decrease that value again, you will see that we get this result. Now, the amount basically determines the opacity of the effect. But what I prefer to do when working with effects is actually apply them to adjustment layers. Adjustment layers are basically invisible layers that you place on top of footage layers and then apply effects to it. And to decrease or increase the effect, you can always play with the opacity of the adjustment layer to make the effect more or less visible when you want. So you don't have to dive into the Effect Controls of the individual footage layers. But you get the benefit of being able to influence the, the effect layers of opacity and that it affects every layer below it. So let me show you what I mean. I'm just going to delete this CC vignette effect by clicking on it in effect controls and pressing Delete. That gives me the footage as it was before. And then I can go into the Layer menu and then go to new and then create an adjustment layer that creates the adjustment layer above the layer. And by default, it lasts for the entire duration of the composition. Now I can just rename this layer by pressing the Enter key and say vignette. Then I can apply the CC vignette effect to this adjustment layer by just clicking and dragging it over. And then I have the same controls as we had before. But I have the added benefit of being able to go into this vignette layer's opacity and decreasing it and even keyframing it. If I want to decrease or increase the effect over time, I can even apply. I could even apply expressions such as a wiggle to this opacity value to make the vignette flicker a little bit as the timeline progresses. So this is another way of applying effects. And in many cases, this actually has my preference because it's just a little bit more flexible than applying effects directly to the layers themselves. Now, before we continue to the next lesson, I just wanted to show you a quick use for this kind of vignette. When you're just doing some motion graphics, when you just animating some text or some shapes. I'm going to make. I'm just going to delete these layers here. Then I'm just going to create a shape layer that fills the whole composition. I'm going to go into the color of this shape layer, and I'm going to make it just a bright orange. And then click Okay. And I'm gonna get rid of the stroke by Alt clicking on the stroke color three times to get to cycle it back to no stroke. Then I'm just going to apply the effect to this particular layer. So I'm just going to click and drag it into the composition. And you immediately get this cool little gradient that is a lot more visually interesting than a standard fill solid color. And again, I can play with the amount to either exaggerate or pull back the vignette. So this is just a quick, interesting little trick that you can use to make your more flat compositions a bit more visually interesting. 78. 9.2-Curves: Before we continue in this chapter about curves, in this specific lesson, I would like to explain something about effects in After Effects. There are hundreds of them and they all have different results based on what you apply them to. These chapters are always very difficult to develop in the sense that it's difficult to choose what to actually talk about because there are so many of these effects and their results always vary depending on what you apply them to. For this chapter, I've actually chosen to just talk about the effects that I use in a practical sense, the most compared to the other effects. And I'm going to leave the rest of the effects for you to experiment with on your own footage or the footage that I've provided you for this course. So without further ado, let's start looking at curves. So I'm just going to import the footage for that lesson and that's going to be 9.2 curves. And I'm going to basic composition on this by clicking and dragging it to the new composition button. And here we have the same footage of my daughter walking in front of the blob in Eindhoven, which is one of the iconic buildings of my city, which is mostly obscured. But it's very pretty, I assure you. So I am going to apply the curves effect and I find that the easiest way to get to the effects that you want to apply is the Effects and Presets panel. You can also go into the effects menu at the top, but you need to know exactly what you're looking for and there's no search function up here. So it's much easier to go to effects and presets. So I'm going to look for curves and that's gonna be in the color correction tab. And one thing I want to point out about these numbers here is that you need a specific version of Windows to be able to access these effects. So this as 32, meaning you meet, need a 32-bit operating system to be able to use those. So if your system is old enough, you wouldn't be able to use effects such as this one. And I am first going to actually create an adjustment layer that we are going to apply this effect to. So I'm just going to go into layer here at the top, new and then choose adjustment layer. I'm going to press Enter and just name this curves and then apply the curves effect to it by clicking and dragging it into the layer here at the bottom left. And that's going to apply the curves effect also opening the Effect Controls. Now, curves is in the color correction tab, meaning that this is a color correction tool that we can use. We can correct lighting, we can increase contrast and even edit individual color channels if that's something we want to do. Now, here we have this diagram and this is a representation of all the light and dark values of this particular video, of this particular image. The bottom-left presents the darkest point of the video. So this would be absolute black. And the top right actually represents the lightest point of the video, or absolute white when it comes to this particular image, you can actually edit all of these values. So if I start clicking and dragging this bottom left point to the right, actually going to map more of the darker tones to absolute black. So it's actually darkening the entire video. And the same goes for the light values. So I can pull all the light values to the left. And it's actually going to map more and more of the lighter tones of the image to absolute white until we blow everything out to white when we drag it all the way to the left. So that's how this diagram works. Essentially. What you usually want to do is just add a point to the middle and drag that around a bit to get a bit of a more contrast he looked to your footage. So what I can do here is click once to add an anchor point. And then clicking and dragging this line around will actually allow me to increase the lightness of the image. If I click and drag to the top left, or darken the image when I go to the bottom right. What I can also do is move this point up a bit and put it about here within the corner of the first one from the top right. And then I can go down here to the darker tones and just click and drag this to the bottom right a bit to get like an S curve kind of idea, giving us more contrast in the image. So I've darkened the shadows and brightened the highlights of the image a little to get this more contrast he look. And just as for demonstration purposes, I'm just going to hide this curves adjustment layer. So this is my before image, and this is now the afterimage, which is a much more visually interesting image because it has more contrast, the colors pop a bit more. And this is a correction that you will use all the time if you work with video, not necessarily even in After Effects. Premiere also contains a curves adjustment that you can apply for color correction. And this is usually how you want to use this tool. The curves Effect also has an auto button which automatically corrects the contrast and the brightness values of the image. So in this case, it brighten it up quite a bit. And I actually prefer my version here. So I'm just gonna go back a step to get that more contrasty look that I had before. And again, because we are using an adjustment layer, I can just grab the opacity of this curves adjustment layer and just click and drag this down if I ever want to tone down the effect. What you will find when you're shooting video with a professional level camera is that the colors and the lighting are actually usually very flat when you're shooting with certain color profiles. And the curves adjustment is one of the ways to get that more interesting look and feel to your image because you have a lot of control over the contrast. So curves should definitely be at the top of your list if you want to make your footage a bit more visually interesting and color corrected to a specific look. 79. 9.3-Lumetri color: An absolutely essential effect when you are working with color correction is lumetri color, which was first introduced into Premier Pro and is now also available in After Effects. And it's basically a catch all for almost all color and lighting corrections to your footage. So let's import the footage we will be working with. And you will find that in the exercise files 9.3 Lumetri color. And this is a slightly smaller video because this was actually a proxy file based on an longer edit that I did. It's Apple ProRes four to two. So it's a very high bit rate video, which has an unusually large file size for this kind of format as well. And that's because this was essentially shot in a video raw format. And you will see what I mean once we actually get to editing the colors. So I'm just going to click and drag this to New composition. And here we have the video. Video is a slow motion shot of me just grabbing some camera gear in Croatia. And what you will note is that the, the footage actually looks extremely flat, like they're almost doesn't appear to be any color except orange. Maybe a little bit of blue in the sky up here. But the footage looks incredibly flat. And that is because of the file format that this footage was shot in. These flat color profiles, which you can usually select if you have a semi-professional level camera like a Sony A7 or something like that, allow you to do a lot more with the colors when you're actually in the editing room, which we will be going into. Now actually, I'm just going to create an adjustment layer so that we can apply the effect to a separate layer. So I'm just going to go up into layers and then New and then choose Adjustment Layer. And I'm going to name this one Lumetri by pressing Enter and just typing in Lumetri. And then I'm going to search for the Lumetri effect in effects and presets. Lumetri. Lumetri has actually so expansive that I could dedicate an entire chapter to this effect alone. We're not gonna go into all of the details. We're just going to look at basic correction and some of the fancier buttons and dials on this effect. So Lumetri Color Yours is applied and initially it does nothing because all the settings are set to default. So I'm just going to expand the Basic Correction panel here in the effect controls. And here we have the option to choose a lot or a look up table. Now I don't have a lot specific for this kind of footage, but basically, a lot is a way to automatically correct video when it comes to color and lighting based on the camera that you've shot it with. For example, canon releases lots for most of their color profiles. So to Sony, you can actually find them on their own website or through affiliate websites of theirs. If you'll look for Canon lot or Sony lot on Google, you will usually find a site that where you can download these. I'm just going to show you what a lot actually does. This is not the correct lot for this specific video, but it basically just changes the colors and the lighting and already gives us a much better looking image. Actually, this Alexa profile, which is kind of a joke as a default. So I'm just gonna go back to none to get rid of that lot. And here we again have this flat looking footage. First we have here a white balance correction. So what you can do here is if you know that something in this video is exactly a grayscale value. So perfectly black are perfectly white, or any grayscale value in-between. You can use this color picker to correct the footage based on that. That doesn't give us a very dramatic result in this case. Because there is almost no color in the image as of yet. But this is something you can use to automatically correct white balance. The temperature and tint also have to do with white balance. So I can just click and drag to increase the temperature or decrease the temperature and increasing it makes it more warm and decreasing it makes the footage colder, so it makes it more blue and gives it a blue color cast. If the white balance on your camera was set incorrectly, you can get footage that looks green or purple depending on the settings in the environment that you were filming in. And you can correct that using the tint slider. So going to the right, actually it gives it a purple color cast. And going to the left gives it a green color cast. And purple negates a green color cast, and green negates a purple color casts. That's why these sliders are there. And that's what they do. I can also saturate the colors a bit more and that's something I'm actually going to do at this point. I'm going to put this at about one sixty, one fifty. One sixty to give us a bit more color in the image. And already the footage looks a lot better because we have more stronger colors here. And then we're going to look at the light category. I can change the exposure and just increasing the exposure makes the footage brighter altogether across the image by the same value. So I'm currently overexposing the shot with a 1.8. I'm just going to put this at about 0.5, I think. Oh, no, not 0.5 comma five. Something like that. I can increase the contrast, which is something I'm going to do and I'm gonna put the contrast at about 40. And these values are pretty high for standard footage. But when you're working with raw images like this, with a flat color profile, these values are nothing to be intimidated by. I can make the highlights brighter or darker if I so choose. And I'm actually going to darken, now, brighten them up a little bit. Let's say up to 20. And then I'm going to make the shadows a bit darker to get even more contrast in the image by putting it at minus 30. We can also change the brightest tones of the image with the whites. I'm going to leave that alone for now. And I can also influence the darkest colors by decreasing or increasing the blacks. And I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna put this up minus ten to give us this results. Now, try to think back of how this footage looked when we first imported it. And now we're actually going to look at that by just clicking this fx button in the effect controls. So this is what we started with, and this is what we have now just by twisting some dials here in the Lumetri Color panel. This is insanely useful and insanely powerful, especially when you apply it to an adjustment layer because you can influence the individual opacity and you can still break it up into different sections. Actually, you can create several different adjustment layers for different parts of your footage. So this is just exceeding you Lee useful and it replaces most other color adjustment tools just because it's so comprehensive. And that's just looking at the basic Corrections tab. We still have creative. We have curves where we cannot just adjust the lighting curves, but also color curves allowing us to change colors in an image. We have color wheels, HSL secondary, and even a vignette that we can apply through this Lumetri panel. So I'm just going to click and drag the vignette to the left a bit, because dragging it to the right actually gives us a brighter vignette. And I'm gonna put this at about minus 2.5. I'm going to leave the mid points at about 50. I think that's where it was actually before. Was it wasn't 50. That's fine. You can change the feather of the vignette to make it less or more pronounced. This is actually exactly the look that I wanted for this footage. So we're going to leave this video here. I do encourage you to actually go into the creative panel and give a look to these different looks that you can apply. These are basically Instagram filters that you can apply to your footage. I could go for a Clean Kodak B for example, and that gives me an even more contrast, the image where the colors pop a little bit more still. And I also have the intensity slider here with which I can increase or decrease how this effect affects my footage. So this is also something that can be useful in certain cases. I'm actually going to leave it at the basic correction that we did because I think the footage already improved a lot. But I encourage you to dive into these panels when you have some footage that you just want to give a little bit more tender, loving care, let's say for better results and just twist the knobs and see what it does. And you'll rarely have to actually get out of basic correction of vignette. Sometimes the creative tab is useful if you're going for a specific look that you know from going through this list. But just these two categories alone, Basic Correction and vignette are so incredibly powerful that I cannot recommend using this effect enough. 80. 9.4-Gaussian Blur: Another absolutely essential effect is the Gaussian Blur, which you might be familiar with if you've worked with Premier Pro and or Photoshop in the past. But this time we will be working with the after-effects version of this effect. So I'm just going to import the footage for this lesson and that's gonna be 9.4 Gaussian Blur. And that is again the reversed bit of drone footage at the waterfall at the beach and deliver in Colombia where it went on my first holiday with my wife, actually. And I'm just going to click and drag this to New composition and create a composition based on this footage. Again, we're going to create an adjustment layer to apply this effect to, because I'm also going to show you a different benefit or an added benefit of working with adjustment layers as opposed to just applying the effects to the layers themselves. And instead of going into the Layers menu, I'm actually going to press Control Alt Y or Command Option Y on the Mac. And that's just going to create an adjustment layer. And I'm just going to name this one blur by pressing Enter and typing blur. Now, the Gaussian blur effect is found in the Effects and Presets panel or in the Effects menu at the top. But if you type in Blur, you will find a lot of different colors that you can apply. So I'm just going to look for Gauss J, G, a, U, S. And that's going to be in the Blur and Sharpen category. And I'm just going to click and drag this onto the adjustment layer to apply the effect. Now the blurriness by default here in the effect controls is set to 0. But you will see once I start increasing this value, the layer itself becomes more blurry. This is obviously something you can key-frame. So I can go from blurriness to it being in focus for this footage. So at the beginning of the timeline, I'm just going to add a keyframe. I'm going to put the blurriness at something like 20. Then I'm gonna go to 1 second in the timeline. And then I'm just going to decrease the blurriness to 0. And I'm now going to press U to get all the keyframes here. So u is the Uber key, has its known and that just enables all the properties in the layer controls actually have keyframes and I'm going to add the appropriate easing. So an Ease In for the second keyframe and an ease out from the first keyframe. And that's going to look something like this. So it fades from blurriness into focus. And I can actually increase the timespan of that effect to visualize it a bit better, it starts out blurry and within four seconds it now becomes in-focus. And I'm just going to mute this footage here, this waterfall in the background. So that's how to apply this effect. But I wanted to show you a specific way of applying this effect. And for that, I'm just going to go to the start of the timeline and click the stopwatch for blurriness to remove the keyframes while keeping the footage actually blurry. Now, I'm going to make sure that this adjustment layer, the blur adjustment layer, is selected. And then I'm going to go to the Ellipse tool, one of the shape tools. What I'm gonna do now is find the center of my composition and start clicking and dragging, holding the mouse down. And I'm going to grab the control key to draw this ellipse from its center. And I'm just going to draw this wide ellipse that is wider than it's high. So I don't want to hold the shift for a circle. I just wanted to draw this wider ellipse. Now, what you see is that we have a mask and this blur effect is only visible within this mask because it's applied to this adjustment layer. That means that we can actually change the mode of the mask to subtract. And that's going to make the center of the footage in-focus and the edges out of focus. But this line is extremely hard. So you can actually see the outline when the mask isn't selected. And that's not something I want. I want it to be a bit softer where the transition is concerned. So I'm just going to expand the mask options and look at the mask feather. And I'm just going to increase this value until I get to something like 250, Something like that. So that gives a much softer edge to the blur effect. Now when I play the footage, it gives this kind of ethereal look to it. Because this water going up is actually being blurred towards the edges. And I just quite like how this effect looks. And this is just to demonstrate that when you work with adjustment layers, you can actually determine which parts of your footage are being affected by the effect by applying masks in this way. 81. 9.5-Light sweep: Another effect that's a little bit cornea in today's world, but is still used very often, is the light sweep. And that can actually predict a light across our layers to indicate that it has a shining light on it. And to demonstrate this, I'm just going to create a new composition here in After Effects. And that's going to be 1920 by 1080 with a 32nd 30 frames per second frame rate, and the duration is gonna be ten seconds. And just for demonstration purposes, the background color is going to be black. So I'm just going to create that composition. I'm going to grab the type tool here at the top and click in my composition. My type size is currently set to a 170 pixels and the color is set to read. Because of what those settings do for the visibility of the effect, you don't want white text with a white light on it. So I'm just going to go in here and type in light sweep. And we're going to press Control Enter to confirm that text input. Grab the selection tool and place it approximately in the middle of the composition. Then in the Effects and Presets, we are going to search for light sweep and that's going to give a CC light sweep. And I'm just going to click and drag and drop this on the layer. And that's going to place a highlight on these characters here. I'm just going to go to full resolution so you can see it a bit better. Here in the effect controls, we have the settings for this effect with all of which you can key-frame by the way. So I can click and drag the X position to actually drag it across the layer. I can change the angle of the light. So when I set it to 0, the light will be shining straight down. I can change the shape of the effect and I'm just going to make this smooth. I can change the width, which is going to affect more or less of the characters. The sweep intensity is how strong the light is actually falling on this subject. The edge intensity makes the edges a bit more defined and gives them more of an embossing effect. And then we have edge thickness, which also increases how far the effect reaches into our shapes. And also we can change the color of the light. So what I can do is click on this color and then click on the color picker and pick this red. And I'm just going to make a lighter version of this red. So I'm just going to click and drag the color here a bit to the left and click. Okay, and that's gonna be my highlights. So to animate this, we just have to add some keyframes. So first I'm going to place it all the way on the left, outside of the actual text. And at the beginning of the timeline, I'm just going to keyframe the center. Then I'm going to go to 15 frames, so that's 2.5th. And then click and drag the center across the shape here. And I'm going to place it outside on the right side. So it's just going to sweep across this shapes. So now we have this highlight sweeping across our texts. So I don't use this effect very often, but it's something you will very often see when you watch a lot of YouTube, for example. So this is how that effect is achieved. 82. 9.6-Write on: The next effect we will be looking at is the write on effect, which makes it look like a layer is being drawn or written as the timeline progresses. So here in After Effects, I'm just going to create a new composition. And that's gonna be the same settings as the last one. So 1920 by 1080, frame rate 30 and a duration of ten seconds with a black background. And I'm just going to click Okay in here. And I'm going to create a text layer. And I'm just going to click in the composition here and I'm going to type a 123. I'm just going to take a thin font, something like quicksand light. You can also go from Myriad Pro, Light or something like that, as long as it's a thin font, which is just easier for demonstration purposes. And I'm going to increase the size to, let's say 300. And with the text selected, I'm actually going to use the alt key and the right arrow key to increase the distance of the characters so I can place them a bit further apart. I'm also going to change the color to white just for demonstration purposes and click Okay, and then Control Enter to confirm the text input. I want this centered in my composition. So I'm going to grab the align panel and I'm just going to click on these to align options to place it in the exact center. Now, I want to actually write this text as the timeline progresses. And for that, I'm going to go into Effects and Presets. And then I'm going to search for right WR IITE. And that's gonna give me the right on effect in the Generate category. So I'm just going to click and drag this onto the text. And that's gonna give us these controls in the effect controls. And the first thing we're gonna do is change the color of my brush to be better visible against this background and over the text that we will be writing. I'm just going to click on the color picker and I'm going to pick a bright red. And then increase the brush size to be wider than the actual character line of the text. So it has to be wider than the text itself. I can then click and drag this brush position around. And that's what we will be keyframing. And I'm just going to place it right outside the first character of this text. And this is what we will be animating. So I'm just going to click here on the stopwatch for brush position to add a keyframe. And you can see when I press the U key on my keyboard that I immediately get the keyframes property, which is currently the brush position. Then I'm going to use Control and right arrow to skip three frames. And then I'm just going to click and drag this brush position over here. Then I'm going to skip five frames, 12345, holding control and the right arrow key, and I'm going to drag it down. Now, the further you drag these out, the better the individual, individual brushstrokes will be visible. This is determined by the brush spacing. So I'm just going to click and drag the brush spacing all the way down to 0.001. Just to get a tighter fit for the brush strokes. I'm going to drag it to the bottom here of the one and then skip ahead three frames 123. And then I'm gonna go to the number two. So I'm just going to click and drag it up. Skip three frames, go here, 123, go here. And I'm just going to be tracing all of this text here. 123. Note that if you are working with a font that is a bit more tricky to work with, that you can also key-frame the brush size actually so that you can trace around other objects. And 123, moving on to the 3123, skip had three frames. Click and drag it over 123. And going down here, 123. There we go. Dragging it down, 123 over here. And the final one is gonna be two frames. Okay, there we go. And now when I play the timeline, you will see that it actually traces this text. But I don't want it to just trace the text. I want to reveal this text as the brush position is going over the layer. And for that we have to look at the paint style. So I'm just gonna go in here where it says paint style and then choose reveal original image. And at the beginning of the timeline, the texts will now be invisible. When I played the timeline using spacebar, you will see that the text is being drawn. So this is basically like a trim path effect that you have a lot of control over. And if you animate it across a layer, you can make it seem like the layer is actually being drawn as the timeline progresses. Now a fun little effect is that we can actually Parents stuff to this brush position. And to demonstrate this, I have here a stock image, which unfortunately I cannot make available to you because it's from Adobe Stock. And what I'm gonna do here is create a selection in Photoshop of this hand with this pen. So I'm just going to grab the object selection tool and click and drag a marquee across the hand, arm and the pen. And that's gonna give me a pretty decent selection of this subject. This function works amazingly well in Photoshop and I use it all the time. Then I'm going to copy this to a new layer using Control J. Then I'm going to hide the background layer and I'm going to save this layer as a PNG file with a transparent background. So I'm going to press Control Alt S, go to my desktop. And I'm going to name this Panza pen or hand with pen. And in Save As I'm going to choose a PNG, so I get the transparent background and click Okay. And I'm going to import this image into After Effects by going to the project panel and double-clicking on an empty spot, going to my desktop and then looking for the document over here, hand with pen. And I'm going to import this into my composition by just clicking and dragging it down and placing it above the text. Now, the size of this layer is a bit of an issue, so I'm just going to scale it down to something like 30%. Let's say 35. What I wanna do now is place the anchor point on the tip of the pen. So I'm going to grab the anchor point tool and click and drag the anchor point over from the center of the layer to this pinpoint. Now what I want is to parent the position of the pen to the position of the brush position. The brush position is visible here already. So I can just click on the pen care and press P for position. And then I can use the link property to go to the brush position. So I'm gonna click and drag the link, pick whip to brush position. And that's going to parent it to the brush position. And now, when I play the timeline, you will see that this pen actually follows the effect. 83. 9.7-Slider control: The next effect we will be looking at is a slider control, which is used very often in animated infographics. So what I'm gonna do here in After Effects is just create a new composition with the same settings as previously. So 1920 by 1080 with a frame rate of 30 and a black background lasting ten seconds. And then click Okay to create that new composition. Now, I'm going to grab the type tool, and I'm just going to click here in my composition and I'm going to enter a 0. The actual numerical value doesn't matter. What we will be doing is animating the numbers. Let's say you could enter text here. It doesn't really matter. We're going to just animate a number running from 0 up to something like 79%, let's say. Speaking of percent i, we will add the percentage marker as a separate text layer. I'm just going to press control enter to enter my text input, and then go into Effects and Presets and then search for slider. And that's gonna give me slider control in the expression controls. So I'm just going to click and drag this over to the layer to apply it. And that opens the Effect Controls. Now, clicking and dragging this value is not going to do anything because the value has to be linked to a layer property. So I'm just going to make sure this is at 0. And then I'm going to expand the layer controls because we have to add an expression. So I'm just going to expand the texts category so the source text is visible and the effects in which we have slider control, which also has to be expanded. Now, what we're going to do is link the source text to this slider value. So I'm just going to grab the link, pick, whip, and click and drag it over to slider. And the slider value determines the text value within this text layer. So you can go into minus, you can go into plus, and you can animate this value to get different numbers. So what I'm gonna do then is actually animate it. And I'm actually going to make sure that the source texts expression here, which we created when we linked the property to the slider is also visible because we will have to do a little bit of work in here. I'm going to animate the slider value from 0 seconds to 1 second. So I'm just going to go to one period and then go to something like 79. And that's going to put the value at 79. But note that when we play the timeline, we get some unexpected results. We also get a lot of decimal places, and that's something we don't want in our end result. So we have to actually round these numbers to full numbers. So not decimals by going into the expression and adding a little bit of code. Here at the beginning, I'm going to type math and then press Tab to autocomplete period and then type round, and then tap to auto-complete. And then I have to put this closing bracket at the end of the expression. So I'm going to get rid of this closing bracket and then put that closing bracket at the end. And that will give me the desired results. So everything within this math round bracket is now being rounded to 79. I'm gonna give this a little bit of easing. So I'm gonna go into the keyframe assistant for the second keyframe and choose an ease in. And then choose an ease out for the beginning. So that's gonna give me this where it accelerates and slows down to 79. The number is so high that you don't really see the slowdown, but it suits our purposes just fine. Now, let's say we are going to actually animate an infographic element. What I'm gonna do then is actually go in here. Actually, first I'm going to center this text frame within the composition. So I'm going to select the text and the layers go to align and just make sure that it's in the center. Then I'm going to draw a circle around this text layer. So I have to make sure nothing is selected. Otherwise, I will add it as a mask and then double-click the Ellipse tool. And then I'm gonna go into the contents of ellipse one and go to ellipse path, unlink the width and the height. And I'm just gonna make this, let's say 500 by 500 pixels. Then I'm gonna get rid of the fill by Alt, clicking the fill color until we end up with no fill. And then make the stroke white. And the stroke thickness looks about right to me, so I'm not going to mess with that. Then we're going to add a trim path animation. So I'm going to go into Add here at the top with the Shape Layer selected and go to Trim Paths. Now we've worked with trim path before when we were working with shape layers in the chapter about shapes. So what I can do now is actually animate this value with the start and the end at 100. I'm going to keyframe the start and go to 1 second. And then I'm going to decrease the start value to 21 because that gives me 79 on the other end. Then I'm going to apply some easing to this, so Ease In for the end and he's out for the start. And now when I play the timeline, you will see not only the percentage count up, but you will also see this bar filling up because of the trim path effect. So that is a couple of things. I really liked this effect. It's very useful if you want to illustrate numbers, making them a little more dynamic and use that. You do that using the slider control and for the progress bar, let's say which we have here in a circle, we use a trim path effect because it works with the same numerical values. 84. 9.8-Particle systems: The next effect we're looking at is the particle systems affect which we can use to create particles for something like rain or explosions or snow or whatever you desire depending on the settings. Here in After Effects, I'm just going to create a new composition, same settings as before. So 1920 by 1080, frame rate 30, a 10-second duration and a black background color. And then I'm just going to click Okay to create that composition. Now, to use the particle systems effect, we need a layer to apply that effect too. And for stuff like this, you usually use a solid layer, which is just a solid fill layer that is most often used for effects. So I'm just going to press Control Y. Or alternatively you can go up to Layer new and then solid. And I'm just going to name this particle. The name doesn't actually matter. But the the better organize your layers, the better the easier it is to work within any given project. We can specify size for this solid. I'm just going to make it the comp size here, and you can choose a color. The color doesn't matter because the solid itself is just going to disappear once we apply the effect. So I'm just going to click Okay. And here we have a solid. And then I'm gonna go into Effects and Presets and search for particle part tick. And that's gonna give me these three systems. And for now I'm just gonna go with CC Particle systems too. So I'm going to click and drag this over to the solid layer. And that's going to apply the effect. And now when I start playing the timeline, you will see an explosion of these yellow particles. And these particles are affected obviously by the settings in the effects. Effect Controls tab. The first setting here is the birth rate and that determines the number of particles that are born every second. We also have a longevity. And the longevity determines when the particles die, so when they go away, so when I put it at 0.5, the particles will die after 2.5th. Now, these are also values that we can keyframe. So let's say at 1 second in the timeline, I want just one single explosion of particles to take place. Then I'm just going to keyframe the birth rate here. And I'm going to start the birth rate at 0. Then I'm gonna go ahead one frame. So using control and the right arrow key, and we're just going to put the birth rate at ten. And then in the next frame, I am going to put the birth rate to 0 again. And now when I press U, you will also see these keyframes here. Once I zoom in on my timeline a little bit using Alt scroll. And now in one frame we get this little explosion. I can also spread these keyframes out a little bit more so I can select all three, hold Alt and then click and drag to space them a little bit. And that's gonna give me a slightly longer explosion. So I'm just going to go to the second keyframe here and then get rid of the keyframes by clicking the stopwatch. And now we're going to look at the producer settings. I'm just going to move forward in time a little bit. So we have some particles on screen. Here. We have the position of the producer or the emitter. So you can change where the particles are being born within the composition. We can also change the radius value, which spreads them out over a larger area. If you want to make it look like things are raining down in a composition, that's something you can do. And you can also do that over the y-axis to fill the entire composition when I play it now, you will see that we get this effect. Just going to Control Z that to go back. Then we have a Physics tab in which we can change the animation type. I can go from explosive to Turley, for example. And that's going to give the objects a rotation. Let's go to full-on twirl for a second and then we get this vortex kind of thing. Which can be interesting. We can change the velocity of the particles, meaning that they will be thrown out from the center a lot farther. We can change the velocity or the gravity of the scene. So with the gravity set to one, the particles will inevitably fall down. Now, when I change the gravity to 0, they're just going to disperse in all directions. You can change the resistance, resistance, you can change the direction of the particles. And then you have the particle settings themselves. So now we have this line and we can change that to, for example, a shaded sphere. And that's gonna give us this effect. We can change the size of the particles at birth, and we can change the size of the particles at death. So when they cease existing, which is determined by the longevity, we can change the size variation so we can give a bit more variety in their size. And the color map is set to birth to death, meaning. And then we have these colors here. So they're going to start out yellow and as they die, they become red. So you can also change these values to something different. I can make them a light-blue at birth and a darker blue at death. Let's say. That's gonna give me, I'm just going to put down the birth rate a little bit to five because that ten was a bit exaggerated. And I'm going to decrease the velocity 2.5. Let's say. That's going to give me this effect. So you can play with these settings for all kinds of different results. Note that these particles are not 3D, so this is just a flat effect. Basically, you are playing a movie of this, these particles being born in a flat frame of reference. So even if I turn this layer into a 3D layer and I grab the rotation and rotate it along the y-axis, you'll see that the effect is flat, so this is not 3D. So it doesn't interact with 3D objects that you put in your scene. If you want to do something like that, you're going to have to look at a plugin such as trap code particular, which does interact with the camera and with lights natively. 85. 10.1-Animation composer: In this final chapter, we will be looking at a few different things that didn't really fit in with the other chapters. And we're going to start out with a little bit of a plug-in showcase of a couple of plug-ins that I use every day. The most important of which is animation composer. Animation composer is created by Mr. Horse and you can find it at Mr. Horse.com. So just go to their website and you can click here where it says products, products for After Effects or products for Premiere Pro. And you will end up at the learn more and download screen here. And animation composer is a freemium plug-in, so it's free to install. And it comes with a whole bunch of animation presets and animated graphics and stuff like that that you can use without paying a single dime. But you can also pay for these expanded packs that gives you, gives you a lot more video transitions and text animations and effects that you can apply two layers, which is incredibly easy to use and completely changed how I use After Effects, which I will show you in this video. So you can download it for Windows. You will get an installer. Within the installer, you will have to create an account for Mr. Horse, which you do have to activate, and they use that to validate the license of any products packs that you may have purchased, which are actually pretty affordable. So if I go here where it says products and the products for After Effects, we have these motion presets, which you can buy for $70. We have these texts presets what you can, which you can buy for $60. They also have these filmmaker transitions which are exceedingly easy to apply. We have these animated shape elements, 2D special effects, animated background, textures, animated illustrations, and even essential sound effects, which we will also talk about a bit in this chapter in a few separate videos because this plugin is so important for my daily work with After Effects that I just want to make sure that you understand its value proposition. In the exercise files, I have an Illustrator file prepared. Once you install animation composer. You can just follow along by importing this Illustrator document from the exercise files. And that's going to be 10.1 animation composer. I'm going to import this as a composition with Footage Dimensions, layer size to put the anchor points on the center of the layers themselves. This illustration, once I open it in, the composition viewer, is just this little icon of a game controller, which consists of several different layers. We have a background layer, we have this shadow layer. We have the body of the controller itself. And the separate buttons are all separate layers so that we can animate them separately. So I'm going to bring up animation composer by going up into Window and then choosing animation composer three, there is currently an update, but what, I'm going to skip that for now. And here I have a lot of different categories that I can use because I have bought basically everything they've ever released just for demonstration purposes. And because I like using this plugin, but you will have the starter presets available. And that comes in different categories. We have 2D layer transitions, 3D layer transitions, texts layer transitions, 2D layer effects and effects for texts layer. And the cool thing about these categories is that you get an instant preview of what the effect is actually going to do. And that's relatively unique in After Effects, because all the effects and presets of After Effects itself will not be visible until you actually apply them to your layers. So here we get a preview of how that's going to look. So I'm just going to decrease the zoom level a little so that I have a better overview. And I'm going to make sure that the background layer here is selected. And then I'm gonna go to the bottom most preset and then click Animate in. You can animate objects into the composition, out of the composition, or you can animate both at the same time. For now, I'm just going to go within. And that immediately applies the animation. And you also have some settings here that you can still influence for the number of bounces and the actual scale being animated. And now when I play the timeline, you will see that the background layer is now animated with this really nice dynamic and fluid bounce animation. So I'm just going to put this layer on solo for a moment by clicking the Solo button here in the layer controls so we can better see the effect itself. So we get this really cool, clean Bounce. Now, something happened to this layer. There was this marker added which says tRNA, and that stands for transition in. The position of this marker determines when the animation has completed. So the further this is into the layer, the slower the animation will play, the closer it is to the beginning of the layer, the faster the animation will play. So when I put it more forward, the animation will play quicker. And I'm just going to undo those two steps by using Control Z. And then I'm going to un-solo this background layer. So I get the other layers and then we're going to move on to the background shadow layer. So I just clicked on Background shadow and I am just going to choose a fade cubic inch to make it fade into view. And then press Enter to apply the animation. Then we are going to the body controller. And let's say I am going to choose an overshoot rotate here, and I want it to animate in from the top. So I'm going to click top here. And then click in to apply the animation that we already have, something like this that didn't play smoothly. Now it did. That already looks pretty cool. Then we have these four buttons. And to these four buttons I'm going to apply the same overshoot Scale as the background. So I'm just going to select these four layers by clicking on the top one and shift clicking on the bottom one, and then choose the overshoot Scale from anchor point and click in. Then moving on to the D-pad. Let's say I'm going to choose this one. The ys rotate and I'm going to make this come in from the left actually, and then click Okay. Now when I play the animation, you will see that we have this nice dynamic fluid animation for all of these layers. Now, I could easily do this manually, but that is a process that will take at least 15 minutes. And using animation composer, I can just choose a preset, apply it and immediately have this kind of animation. Making. Animation composer exceedingly useful for the basic animation stuff. So scaling, positioning, rotating, opacity animations, It's all in there and you have a lot of control over how these effects appear with the Effect Controls. And while the list of presets in the freemium version, the free version of the plugin is fairly limited. The pacs contains so many animations that for me, it's always an instant purchase and I cannot recommend it enough because it just makes the standard busy work in After Effects, all these animations, just a breeze to go through and so much easier to work with. Now, these animations play out at the exact same time currently. And that's because the start of the animation is linked to the start of the layer. So if I want to delay these animations, I would have to stagger them. So I would move each layer forward a few frames and time. Now, that is something that can be very time-consuming. In the next video, which is still about animation composer, I'm going to show you how to use animation composer to stagger your layers. So you have a lot of control over when animations actually play out. 86. 10.2-Animation composer-transition shifter: Continuing on from the previous lesson, I'm going to show you how we can move these layers on the timeline so we can make our animation a little bit more dynamic, because I don't want all of these layers to animate at the same time. I want to delay the animation by about five frames. With animation composer installed, I can go up into the Window menu and then choose the animation composer three transition shifter. And that's gonna give me this little pop-up window. And now I'm going to select all the layers that I want to stagger. And then I'm gonna look down here where it says stagger. So I want to stagger the layers themselves, and I want to do that by five frames. So I want to move each layer five frames in time in reference to the previous layer. And I want to do this in ascending order because I want to go from the background up to the D-pad layer. Then I just click do. And that is it. That is all I have to do to stagger these layers. So now when I play the timeline, these animations start five frames apart because of this stagger function. And this is so incredibly useful. I cannot emphasize enough how often you have to do stuff like this in After Effects. I'm just going to undo that and show you the manual way of doing this without animation composer. So what I would have to do is go to the Background shadow layer and go to five frames in the timeline. I would zoom in a bit and I would shift, drag the layer forwards. Then I would go to ten frames, and I would go to the next layer and click and drag it forward the next layer. So I would go to 15 frames and drag it forward. And I just messed up already. So this is a very manual process that you will have to do for each individual layer and animation composer makes this so dummy proof and so easy that I cannot recommend it enough. Again, like I said in the previous lesson already. So just select your layers. Grabbed the transition shifter from the window menu, click do, and that is all you have to do. 87. 10.3-Animation Composer-Precomps: Animation composer also, also comes loaded with a lot of pre compositions that you can use for transitions between clips that you can use to animate, to add animated illustrations or 2D special effects or other things to your compositions, which also make life in after effects a lot easier. For demonstration purposes, I have put two video clips in the exercise files which I'm just going to import now to osha walking, 12 osha walking too. So I'm just going to select these clips and import them. These clips are, let's see, 30 FPS, ten seconds long. So I'm going to create a composition that lasts for 20 seconds. So I'm just going to create a new comp. And I'm going to make sure the duration is set to 20 seconds, so 20 period, and then press Okay. Now I'm going to import both of these to the timeline by just clicking and dragging here and placing them. And then I'm going to stagger them by just selecting one and clicking and dragging it to the right. And I'm gonna make sure that they actually overlap by zooming in and then placing them exactly on each other. So when one ends, the other begins. Now, I want to show you how these pre compositions work from animation composer. So I'm gonna go up into the Window menu and choose Animation composer three. And then you can take a look at the starter pre-comps that we have available here. We have different categories. We have these overlays that you can add. We have these shape elements that you can add, which are also just exceedingly easy to use. We have these animated social media icons, we have textboxes, and we have transitions that we can use. So let's say I want to add a transition between these two layers. I'm going to put the timeline exactly where they split and I can snap it to that point, to that frame by holding Shift actually. And let's say I want to just add this zoom and rotate out transition. I'm just going to click on the comp. And for demonstration purposes, I'm actually going to add sound to this transition and then click Add to put it in my composition. Now, it's going to ask me to save the project, which I'm going to do real quick. So I'm going to click Okay. And then press Control S. And I'm just going to save this to my desktop as untitled project for now. There's already an untitled project as they're often is. So I'm just going to click Yes. And now it's saved. And I can use this transition that pop-up came in because it's referencing a sound file. So you need to save it manually for that sound file to be referenced. So now I can click Add, and it's going to add a pre-composition to my layers. Now, once we get to this point in the timeline, you will see that we have this transition which has to render first before we actually see it. I'm actually going to place it on top of the layer stack for now. This is centered at this cut, the cut between these two clips. So I'm just going to let this pre-render. So I'm just waiting for the transition to complete. Now I can preview it in normal speed. And now we have this super smooth transition that required 0 effort to add to the timeline. So instead of animating the layers rotation and the blur and the distortion, we just choose this free precomp, we add it to the timeline and we have this really cool transition. And you actually have a lot of control over this transition by going into the settings here, the edit settings for the transition. You can change the shape strength. You can change the auto orientation, the amount of blur, the amount of color distortion, and the color distortion settings themselves. So this is just extremely easy to use. I use this all the time to transition between. What I often do is create animations based on the photos that I make. So I create a reel for Instagram and I transitioned between the images with these transitions because it's just dummy proof, quick and easy. And it looks fantastic compared to what you can do yourself in the same amount of time. So you can also hear the sound playing in the background. If you want to get rid of the sound, you can just mute the composition by clicking this switch here in the layer controls. So this is one of the transitions. Let's look at another item from the pre compositions, from the free ones. I'm just going to go into Browse and then I'm gonna go into textboxes. And again, we instantly get a preview here. And let's say I want this one, line, one down. Then I can just click Add here in the timeline. And it's going to place the end point where the timeline was placed. And then I can change the color of the text. I can contain, change the color of the container. I can change the fill of the container. And what you can also do is just click in here to change the text so I can type in After Effects. Press Enter to confirm that, or that's actually going to add a line. So just click out of the text box and close the settings. And now I have this really cool, Sweet and easy texts animation without having to actually add a text frame. So this is just so ridiculously fast compared to manually animating all of this stuff. I use it all the time. I use it basically for every project that I create. And these are just the free presets. So if you go to Mr. Horst.com and look at the pacs, then you can see what kind of added value They have for you specifically. And I would recommend the to-be layer. Motion presets, the transitions and the text animations, and the 2D special effects because I use those all the time, just a simple background elements. And I'm not sponsored by animation composer, I'm not sponsored by Mr. Horse. I'm just recommending this to you because it completely changed how I use the program, so I cannot recommend this plugin enough. One final thing that I'm going to show you is the anchor point mover. So I have this text frame here selected. And now I'm just gonna go to Window and then animation composer three, anchor point mover. And that gives me this little pop-up here, which I have on-screen most of the time when I'm not teaching. And with this, I can just quickly and easily move the anchor point of a layer, a pre-comp in this case, to whichever position I choose so I can center it. I can put it at the top. I can put it at the bottom. And note that this is actually not the the comp size of this pre-comp is actually the full resolution of the main composition. So it's larger than this textbox. It actually fills out the whole composition. So if I wanted to move the anchor point of the texts frame, I would have to actually go into this precomposition. Now, this is also extremely easy. Of course, when you want to center an anchor point on a layer, you can always double-click the anchor point tool holding down Control or Command on the Mac. But if you wanted to move it to a different location, you can very quickly and easily do this using the anchor point mover. Please take a look at animation composer. It will make your life and after-effects so much easier. 88. 10.4-Newton 3: Another plugin that I would like to showcase in this video is that Newton a0b0 or Newton three, which you can purchase on a0b0 scripts.com. So this is not a free plugin, but it is extremely useful for motion graphics, which I will demonstrate in this video. A0b0 scripts, by the way, is a site where you can download many different kinds of plugins and presets for After Effects. If you're looking for something specific, like animating dynamic text and such, then you can have a look at this site. So I'm just going to search for Newton here and press enter. And that's going to bring up Newton three, so I can click this. And Newton is a physics engine within After Effects. And I'm going to dive into After Effects in a minute and show you how it works and what it does. They have some very interesting demo content here that you can take a look at which showcases what the plugin can do. It's quite expensive, so it's $250. So that's definitely not cheap. But it really depends on how much your time is worth. Because if you are working with a lot of physics-based animations where things collide with each other or rotate or fall down. It can really save a lot of time. So I'm just going to go back into After Effects and create a new composition. And note that you can follow along with what I'm doing now because you probably don't have this plugin. So I'm just going to click here on Okay, to create this new composition. And I'm going to quickly build a scene based on shape layers. So I'm going to click and draw, click and drag to draw a floor. And I'm just gonna get rid of the stroke that was on there. And then I'm going to draw a rectangle here at the top. And then I'm going to draw a star. And then I'm going to draw a circle by just clicking and dragging and holding Shift. And these are all on their separate layers mind juice. So these are all separate layers in the Layers panel. So I de-selected everything before I drew the new shape. And now with this composition set up with this scene setup, I'm going to go into Newton. So I'm going to go into composition and then choose Newton three. Where are these plugins end up can be, can vary a little bit because you also have plug-ins that go into File and then Scripts when it comes to doing vessel, for example. They can also wind up in their own panels when you go to Window. But this actually opens up a program within After Effects. So I'm going to go into composition and then go into Newton three. Now we get this scene setup and the scene setup, I can just play by clicking this Play button here. And once I hit, hit play, everything falls down. And note that everything falls down with a speed of 9.8 seconds squared. So this actually behaves as gravity would behave on earth. Now, what I can do is click on the floor here and I can go to the top left where it says type. And I can change the type from dynamic to static. And that is going to make this not fall down. So now when I click Play, you will see these objects fall in a realistic way. You will also see that they bounce because they have certain properties over which I have a lot of control. Now what I'm gonna do is move these objects around a little bit. And I'm going to make this star a dormant type object. That means it's not going to move until it interacts with another object. So what's actually going to happen is this circle is going to fall down. It's going to hit the star and then move the star as it goes down. Now when I click Play, we get this. As a result. This is completely automatic. All I have to do is just click and drag the shapes around, give them their different properties and click Play and everything just behaves exactly as it should. I have a gravity control here so I can change the direction of gravity if I choose. But I'm just going to put this back where it was before holding Shift. The strength of gravity is also determined by this the distance of this circle. So the radius of this circle. So I'm just going to leave that where it was. And the next thing I'm going to do is make this circle, this ball a little more bouncy. So I'm gonna go into the bounciness and change this to 0.9 instead of 0.3 and then click Play. And now it's a whole lot more bouncy. And it actually bounces off of other objects. And that is one of the most important things that this plug-in does. It allows object interaction it within After Effects, you can't really say, okay, when this object hits this object, I want this object to behave in exactly the way as it would in real life. So Newton actually automates all of that and it animates everything for you. All you have to do is click play. Another thing we can do is give things inherent velocity. So what I can do is click on this rectangle and then go into where it says velocity tool. And then I can click and drag something like this. And then I'm also going to make weight. Actually, what I want to do is this. And then you have to switch back to another tool first. And I'm gonna make these circled dormant as well. And now when I hit play, it's going to hit the circle and it's going to hit the star and everything bounces off of each other. This plugin has, I could develop a whole separate course on this plugin because it has magnetism, it has pistons that you can add to make objects move in a static way. Just a bunch of different options that you can use, create cool animations. But this is as far as this demo goes. So I'm just going to render out this animation by clicking out render here. And it's going to end on frame 300. So it's just going to play the animation. It's going to close out of Newton. And now in the project panel I have a comp to. Opening comp to, you will see the animation play out. And all I had to do was set up the scene and click Play. And now what I want to show you is when I select these layers and press U, you will see that the position and rotation of these objects, objects was just automatically keyframes for me. So these keyframes were added completely automatically. I can still change them if I want. So I can click and drag the position of these layers around if I chose. And I can also share this project with people that don't have newton. So this is a very useful plug-in if you work with a lot of physics based motion graphics. 89. 10.5-After effects projects in Premiere: In this lesson, I want to show you how you can use animations that you've made in After Effects in a different program, like Premiere Pro, which is mostly used for video editing. So what I'm gonna do here is create a new composition. And that's gonna be 1920 by 1080 at ten seconds long with a 30 FPS frame rate. And then I'm just going to click Okay. And I'm just going to use animation composer to create a quick text animation. So I'm going to go into Window and then animation composer. And for demonstration purposes, I'm gonna go with the free started pre-comps and then go to textboxes and use the same text box that I used in the video about animation composer. And then I'm going to click Add. And because the video that I'm going to show you in Premiere Pro and I can't make that project available to you because it's several gigabytes of video. I'm just going to type in czar, grab Croatia, because that's where the video was actually shot. And then I already have this animation. Then I'm going to save this project by pressing Control Shift S to save as. And I'm just going to put this on my desktop for now. And I'm just going to call this text animation. So this is a very simple animation obviously. But this goes for any project that you create within After Effects. So now going into Premiere Pro, I can import the animation by going into file. And then import. Then I can find this after-effects file on my hard drive, which is here text animation. And I'm just going to double-click this. And that's going to give me the choice of which composition I actually want to import. And that's gonna be the main composition comp one. So I'm just going to click Okay, and that's going to put this composition in the project panel. And you might have to look for this a little bit. Here. It is with in the motion graphics folder. So I'm just going to click and drag this into the video. Play the timeline. Now you will see that the text animation takes place above all the video that's there. This is actually linked dynamically to After Effects. So once I edit this text or how it looks in After Effects, those changes will be automatically reflected within Premier Pro. So going back to After Effects, I am going to open the animation, compose our panel again, and just go into edit. Click the layer. And then I'm going to change the text box color. So I'm just gonna make this blue. That's gonna make it blue. And going back to Premiere Pro a second later, it will update and it will also appear blue. So any changes that you perform in after-effects will be reflected in Premier Pro, which is exceedingly useful because you don't have to actually re-import anything or re-link anything. You just perform the changes in After Effects and they will be automatically reflected in Premiere Pro. 90. 10.6-Package: It's time to start working towards actually exporting a video out of After Effects. So creating a video from our compositions. And to demonstrate this, I have the file 10.6 package. And before we actually export a project, I like to create a package of a project. And a package basically means that after Effects creates a folder on your hard drive in which all the external files that are used in that project are collected so that when you open the file later, none of the links will be missing. You won't have to correct any of them. And everything will be nice and collected in one place, let's say, to create a package out of a file, I'm just going to go into the File menu here at the top, and then go about halfway down two dependencies and then choose collect files. Now when you collect files, so you get into this pop up where you can choose what is actually going to be collected. And I usually go for everything. But you can do this for specific comps if you want, or you can just collect the project itself without any of the external links. Now I'm just going to choose All. And I'm going to click collect. Then you will be asked to choose a location for this package. And I'm just going to put that on my desktop for now. And I'm going to click Save, and that's going to create the package and open the folder. Here I have a report of the package, which is a text file which shows what's actually within the package. And if there were any mistakes, I have the after-effects project itself and I have a footage folder in which the 10.6 package file is collected, which just this Photoshop document which we worked with in chapter six. So now I can put this in a zip folder, put it on my Dropbox or Google Drive for later reference. So this is a very handy way of archiving your projects so that when you open them, you're not missing any of the actual footage. 91. 10.7-The Render Queue: One of the ways that we can render video out of after effects is with the internal render queue. So after Effects can actually create videos for you from within the program. It's just that the renderer is pretty limited in the file types that you can choose. The files, video files that come out of it are usually absolutely enormous, which I will demonstrate in this lesson. So here in the composition 10.7 Render Queue, I'm just going to go up into the File menu and then go to export. And here the second option is Add to Render Queue. And we will be looking back at the Adobe Media Encoder Queue in the next video. So I'm just going to click Add to Render Queue. And that's going to open up the render queue here at the bottom. There's a few settings that you can click here to change the settings of your video. The Render Settings. I can click here to get this pop-up menu. And I can choose the quality in which the video will be rendered. Usually you want to leave this at best, it, unless you actually wanted to show a quick draft of your project, then you can actually generate a draft preview. But usually you want to go for best and do this at the full resolution, but you can also go for half if you want. And it's going to display the dimensions of that half size here behind the actual size. But I'm just going to render it at full size for now. And those are basically all the settings that you want to look at in this pop-up. So I'm going to actually, one other thing that you might want to take a look at is the solo switches. So when you're working in a project, you sometimes put things on solos. So you solo a layer to hide all the other layers. Now, sometimes it's possible that you forget to read, enable, or disable those switches. So what you can actually do here in the solo switches is turn all of them off. It doesn't happen very often and you'll usually see it immediately once the render is complete. But rendering tick can take a long time. So stuff like this as a precaution can be a good idea to take a look at. So I'm just going to click OK out of this. And then we're going to look at the output module where we actually choose the format for our video. Now, the format is selected here at the top, and currently mine is set to quicktime, which is also the default on Apple systems, which I'm not working on by the way, I'm obviously using a Windows system. There's actually only a couple of video formats in here. So we can choose avi or AVI, or QuickTime, or all these different image sequences. So I can generate a JPEG sequence based on this composition, a PNG sequence, an open E XR sequence, which is kind of a raw format, or even a Photoshop sequence. If you want image sequence as just a series of images out of your project, and this is something you can do. But AVI and QuickTime are generally not good file formats to choose because those files are absolutely enormous compared to other file formats that we can choose in the Adobe Media Encoder. So this is not something I would recommend, but it is something you can do if you are so inclined. The format here is the most important setting. You don't really have to look at anything else, generally speaking. So I'm just going to click Okay. And then the final setting is the output to setting where we choose a location for our render. And I'm just going to render this out to the desktop as an AVI file and click Save. And now I can click Render here. And that's going to actually start the render and create a video based on this animation. And we have a fancy little progress bar here where we see a percentage and how many frames are already rendered. And after a little while, you will also see the remaining time for the actual render. This is a relatively simple project, even though it contains some 3D stuff. So it doesn't take more than about 45 seconds in total. Now it's done. We get this little ping of which I actually really like that sound, even though it can be a bit loud. So I'm just gonna go to the desktop. And here I should have my video 10.7 Render Queue. This is a 10 second video, almost 3.5 gigabytes in size. So this is not exactly something you can upload to Instagram where I believe the limit is about 64 megabytes. So Avi and QuickTime are both very large file formats. And you don't want to use them for stuff like this because it's just too large to handle. Now, you can use post-processing software such as hand brake or Adobe Media Encoder to re-encode it to a different file format. But that's an extra step that you can skip by just going straight to Adobe Media Encoder. You can render video out of after effects, but the files are absolutely enormous unless you choose for an image sequence such as a JPEG or PNG sequence. So I would recommend against using the actual render from After Effects itself. 92. 10.8-Media Encoder queue: Now it's time to look at the actual Adobe Media Encoder, which produces the most useful files because we have a much larger list of file formats that we can choose from. Here in composition 10.8 Media Encoder. I'm just going to go into the File menu and then go to Exports and then choose Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. And that's going to fire up Adobe Media Encoder, which can take a minute depending on your system specs. And we've actually been in this dialogue before when we were working on our project in chapter eight. And the footage, the composition is actually going to load into this panel once the connection to the project is made. And again, that can take a few seconds. And now we will be looking at the actual settings that we can influence here, because last time we just chose H.264, the default which is the best one to choose. In most cases, when you click on H.264, which is an MP4 video codec, which is extremely efficient. So it produces very high-quality files, but the file size is actually quite small. Here we can choose what kind of file format that we want. So I can create a dot gif. From here. I can also create an AVI file. I can just choose MP4, which is also going to be quite large. I can choose QuickTime, a PNG sequence, H.264 Blu-ray, and the file format that's actually going to be replacing H.264 in a few years. H.265, which is even smaller and even more qualitatively correct than H.264, but it's not as universally adopted as H264. H264 is actually still the standard, the preset you can leave at the source. So this is, this matches the settings of the composition. So that's not something that you have to go into here where it says video, we can actually choose a different width and height for our video if we so choose, but that's going to crop in the screen. So it's going to distort the footage, which is not something that you want. You can change the frame rate of the render by default, it's set to the composition frame rate, which is set to 60. There is a little checkbox here that you can enable for use maximum render depth or render quality, you can enable that, but there will not be a visual difference. You would have to really pixel peep to see any meaningful difference. And that's not something that most people do when they consume video contents. So that's not something you actually have to do. Those are basically all the settings that we have to look at. We see a preview of our video here. We see an estimated file size here at the bottom. So that's going to be 12 megabytes. So I'm just going to click OK to close this dialogue. And then we can actually choose the location for our exports. I'm just going to click this and put it on the desktop. And I'm going to render this out as 10.8 Media Encoder and then click Save. Then I'm going to click the Render button here, this Play button, and that's going to create the actual render. So that's going to actually create the video file. So we're just going to wait for that to complete. We don't actually hear that little chime that we heard in Media Encoder, but that's okay. We can, we can live without it. So I'm just gonna go to my desktop and then I have this video file here, which is only nine megabytes as compared to the previous video file, which was 3.5 gigabytes. So if you put those videos side-by-side, you will not be able to tell the difference. I guarantee it that you will not be able to visually distinguish the videos from each other. Even though this one is so much smaller, the quality is exactly the same. It's just a different way, a different method of encoding the videos. So it's just in a different box, which is much smaller than the other box, which would be Avi than Media Encoder is what we use to create our actual video. And you end up there by going into the File menu and then choosing export and add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. 93. 10.9-Setting background color: Before we wrap up the course, I just wanted to point out something that is inherent to Media Encoder when you start rendering out video with a transparent background or transparent elements on your video. To demonstrate this, here in the composition 10.9 Media Encoder, I'm just going to hide the background layer. And you will note that the composition is actually set to a white background. So if I press Control K for the composition settings, you will see that the background color is set to white. Now, watch what happens when I go into Media Encoder and actually render out this animation. I'm just going to go into File and then Export and add it to Media Encoder Queue. Bringing me back to Media Encoder. And then I can choose the Export Location here. And that's just gonna be the desktop again. Well, actually, if I can actually get to the to choose the file. Yeah. Okay. I'm just going to choose this one and press Enter. Close out of this. I'm actually opening the previous ones, so I have to actually choose the file location here. So I'm just going to export this to the desktop again, and I'm just going to name this Media Encoder dash to note that this item has a transparent background. So I'm just going with a white background color chosen. Then I'm just going to start the queue by clicking the button here. And what you will see is that Media Encoder fills transparency with black. So it actually ignores the background color of the composition and it just fills it in with black, which is not something that you generally want. It can be that you want it to be black, but I want to show you how to get something other than black. What you wanna do if you want something other than black is just make sure that no layer is selected and then double-click one of the shape tools. The Rectangle tool preferably. And that's going to give me a shape layer which I can move to the bottom of the layer stack and then give a different name by pressing enter and enter just BG for background. And I'm going to make sure that this layer is locked so I don't actually change it later. So now it has a blue background. If I want to change this to, let's say white, I'm just gonna go up here where it says Fill and lock the layer again, and then head back to the Media Encoder Queue. So I'm going to go into File Export Media Encoder Queue. And I'm just going to go to the desktop again and render this out as Media Encoder three. And then click Start the queue. And now it's actually going to render with a white background because I added this background myself. So if you have transparency in your composition and you don't want this filled with black. This is how you would solve that particular problem. Problem, just putting your own background, give it a color, and then lock it so you don't accidentally influence it later. 94. 10.10-Outro: And with that, we have come to the end of this nine our course. I hope over the course of the last 90 plus videos, I've managed to show you what you wanted to learn about After Effects and that I've met your expectations or even exceeded them. If you have any feedback about the course, or if you want to share your own work or look at some of mine, you can either follow me and contact me on Instagram at Martin from vagal or you can e-mail me directly at info at easy dash 123 and l. Feel free to contact me at anytime regarding any questions about the course or feedback that you may be looking for. As I'm always interested in engaging with my students. So thank you very much for your attention. I really appreciate it. And if you got this far, please let me know what you thought about the course.