Create a Media Presentation in Adobe After Effects

1. Welcome to the Course!: Hey everybody. Jeff Knight here. Welcome to the School of AE and this exciting media presentation course. We'll be going through ten detailed, yet manageable lessons. I've found that it's easier to learn if you take one concept at a time. And this course is designed with that in mind. Among other topics, you'll learn how to use alpha mats. Work with three D layers, create text animations, add music to your project, and export your final video using Adobe Media encoder. We'll be doing some pre comping to make this project procedural, which simply means you can swap out the footage and text in the primary comp and your project will update so you can easily and quickly use different footage or images for all of your clients. Organization is everything and I'm meticulous with my organization, so you are in good hands. I'll be putting shortcuts for both Mac and PC up on the screen along the way. The more you use these shortcuts, the easier it will become to use them. Shortcuts speed up your workflow tremendously. So I highly recommend that you try to learn them as we go through this course. Thanks for buying this media presentation course and joining this school of AE, with your fellow motion graphic designers. I'm super excited to take you on this journey and I look forward to bringing you many more courses in the very near future. Okay, there's a lot to get through, so let's dive right in. 2. Project Settings, Assets, and Main Composition: Okay, welcome to lesson one. Now before we get into the actual animation of our media presentation, I just want to go over our project layout. I'll give you some tips on how to put things together and you can follow along with the project file that's included with this lesson. Whenever I create a project, I think that a project folder structure is very important. As you can see, I have some folders over here for comps, audio footage, and images. And you'll notice in my comps folder I put an underscore before the word that's going to move that folder to the top of your list. And I do that because this is where my final renders folder is, along with any pre comps in our precomps folder, we're likely to have some subfolders. Our final project will be in this renders folder. Next we have audio. If we open that up, I have brought in a soundtrack, and this is what will be applying to our video at the end of our lesson. If I had something like voiceover or sound effects, I would have those subfolders in here as well. If we go down to footage, these are our footage comps that will make up our media comps. Finally, we have images. This is our intro image for our media presentation. You can use whatever footage you'd like. The media that I'm using is included in your project for this lesson. One of the things that's really cool is if you double click any of this media. If I double click, say this footage here, it will open up in a footage window here. You can scrub through and find certain moments that you like. You can set in and out points by clicking these buttons right here. Also, if we double click on our image, it will pop up like that. And notice that you don't have a time ruler at the bottom because this is simply an image. Now one of the things I do tend to do as I go through these tutorials is use a lot of shortcuts. I'm on a Mac, so I'll be using things like command option and shift. If you're on a PC, those would be control Alt and Shift. Whenever I do use a shortcut, I will be popping that up on the screen so that way you can start to learn those and incorporate those into your workflow. I do highly recommend that you learn these shortcuts. It makes life a lot easier and you'll be editing a lot faster. So the first thing I want to do is create our final render composition. If we select this folder right here that says Render and then we create a composition, it will go into that folder. Now, there are several ways to create a composition. You can click on this icon here that says New Composition. This is only available for the first composition that you create in a project. You can also click this icon down here, see if you have Rover it, it says create a new composition. Or you can use the shortcut command. Again, with PCs, that will be control in. I'm just going to click this icon right here so you can see what I'm talking about. We click on that. Let's change our composition's names to media presentation. This composition is going to be 1920 by 1080, which is a very common format. We're going to be using a frame, right, of 30 frames per second. And the duration is going to be 20 seconds. Once you have all of that set, you can just click okay. Now whenever I create subsequent compositions, it's going to default of these settings. Whatever comp settings you use for your first composition, every comp after that will default to those settings. So we'll just click okay. As we can see, this composition went into our renders folder, which is exactly what we want. I'm going to leave all of these folders open so that way we can easily access all of our media and also all of our pre comps. That does it for this lesson. I will see you back in the next one where we will be creating our media comps. 3. Media Comps: Welcome to lesson two. In this lesson, we'll be creating our media comps. Select our pre comps folder here, and then click this icon right here to create a new folder. We can start to name these, I'm going to call this media comps. Then also I want to add one for flippers. We'll be putting all of these compositions into these folders. If we select our media Comps right here. Let's create a new composition, command or control. And I'm just going to call this media one. As you can see, the settings that we used for our final render composition show up here. The only change I want to make is I'm going to change my duration from 20 seconds to five to click okay. The first media that we'll be using in this project is this image. So we can just drag that right in. And as you can see, it fits perfectly within our composition. So we're going to change this to full quality so you can see it better. Okay, now if we select media one and duplicate that, that'll be command or control D. Duplicates anything, whether it's a composition, a layer effect command or control D is a shortcut that you should definitely learn. It will make your life a lot easier since we named our first composition media one. When we duplicated that, you can see that the next one went up sequentially. So this is media two. Now let's double click into media two. And you can see we still have this image because whenever you duplicate it, it made it into a copy. We need to get rid of that. Now, the first footage I want to use is this surfing footage we scrub through here. We can see this is what it's going to look like. I'm just going to drag this in. This footage is actually a lot larger than this composition, I can tell because we can't see the edge of our footage. Now if I pull back, so I'm going to scroll back on my mouse, we can see this is the actual edge of this video footage here. So there are a few shortcuts to make this happen. First, if you hold down shift and press the slash mark, it's the one that's on the same button as your question mark. So shift plus slash, it will fit your comp back into your window here. But now if I want this footage to fit perfectly within this comp, shift command option H is going to match your footage on your width and shift command option will match the height. And if we right click on this layer and go to transform, we can actually see these shortcuts here. Fit comp width is shift command option H, fit to comp, height is shift command option G. And I use these shortcuts quite a bit depending on if my footage actually fits into my comp or not. The way we're going to design this is at the three second mark. We'll be transitioning from one media comp to another. So we need to have a really cool cut point at 3 seconds. So I'm just going to grab this layer, holding out my left mouse button and kind of scrub backwards maybe. Something like this is a good cut point. Now, you could do this up here as well. So see if we go over to our footage window and I scrub back and forth. The problem with that is that it doesn't update until you release your mouse button. I can't really tell at this point where it is because you can see my playhead is jumping around based on where this playhead is up in my footage window. The way I'd like to do this is just go to my three second mark and then set my cut point right there. Okay, And moving forward, if we select media two under our media comps command or control D to duplicate that and it creates media three. Double click into that and we have the footage from media two so we can get rid of that. Now the next footage I want to use is of this guy jumping off of this cliff. He's doing like a bungee jump, so I'm going to pull that in. Our playhead is already at the three second mark because we duplicated the previous composition. And that's where our playhead was. I want him to go about off screen and that way he's going to start his jump right there. Okay, select media three. Command or control to duplicate that to get media four. Double click into media four. We'll get rid of that layer. Then we have this race car footage right here. If I double click, it goes into our footage window. We scrub through and get like an idea of all the possible shots we can use. I'm going to pull that in and go to the three second mark. I think something about like that may be cool. It starts off like that and crosses over. She let's scrub through here so we can get something a little bit cooler. You can pick any moment that you would like, just something that fits with your aesthetic. I think I may do something like this. That's a cool movement there. We start off with them behind the wall, The three second mark. He's now facing us. Maybe a little bit more like that. That looks good to me. Select media four. Under our pre comps, media comps folders. Duplicate that command or control. D, we have media five. Double click into media five, we'll get rid of that footage. And then our last footage is this sky diving footage. Now whenever you select these layers, you get all of the aspects of your footage up here in this window, you can see this is 1920 by 1080. Remember our surfing footage was bigger. You can see it's 38 40 by 21 64 K. Then this footage we're using here for skydiving is actually 12 80 by 720. Whenever we bring it in, it won't fill up our entire composition. As you can see now, this is one of those times you may want to use shift command option G and it will fit the footage to your comp height. Shift command option H will fit your footage to your comp width. Since these dimensions are 12 80 by 720, whenever you increase it up to the full composition size, it's going to fit perfectly. Because 12 80 by 720 has the same dimensions as 1920 by 1080 out our three second mark. And I want to choose a spot that looks cool. Actually, I'm going to double click this and it will show up over here in our layer window. If you double click Footage from the project panel, it will open up this footage window. If you double click it from your composition layer, it will open up a layer window. They allow you to scrub through here. You can set in and outpoints, I want to scrub through here and maybe we have a moment right here. He grabs a guy's hand. That could be a cool moment if my playhead right here. And then I select this outpoint, it will trim this layer to that outpoint. Now the reason why I didn't show up here is because you have to come into your composition. Make sure you click your composition tab and hit your right bracket. Your right bracket will move your layer over to where your playhead is. Our outpoint from our layer window, which is right here, now matches our composition outpoint right here. Around 3 seconds. I want him to do that flip and it's just easier to access that moment when you have your layer trimmed, something like, that's really cool. You can see he starts to go back. We don't want him to go off camera just yet though. Something like this I think will work just fine. You can always update this later also if you'd like for now. We're going to leave this right here, but we may come back to this later. Okay, so we've reached the end of this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll be creating our first flipper, comp. 4. Flipper Comp 1: Welcome to lesson three. In the previous lesson, we created our media comps. And in this lesson, we'll be creating our first flipper comp. I'm going to just select this flipper comps folder right here, and command or control end to create a new composition, we're going to call this flip one. We want these settings to be the same as our media comp settings. So we're going to leave this at 5 seconds and click Okay. We'll be creating our flippers using shape layers. There are a few ways to create shape layers. You can either right click in this area to the left of your timeline and choose New shape layer. You can also go up to new shape layer. The final way is from your tool bar. If you hover over this shape right here, you can see that it's your rectangle tool. If you select this little arrow to the right of it, you can see you have a rectangle tool, rounded rectangle tool, and so on. The way I like to create them though is by hand because I want a specific size. One of the ways that I do it all the time, and this is just a personal preference, is I like to right click on my mouse, this in the area to the left of my timeline. Choose new shape layer. Okay, now if we open up this shape layer, we can see we have this add button. Let's click that and choose Rectangle. Then click it again. And let's add fill. The color of our fill doesn't matter because we'll be using this as a mat, open up a rectangle path, and we need to adjust our path size. Now one thing to keep in mind is that this rectangle path size is measured in pixels, not percentages. If I troll open my transform properties right here, we see our scale is in percentages and it's at 100% But we'll be making our size changes from within this rectangle path. So let's unconstrain our size settings and we need to change these values. I want to make nine rectangles that make up our flippers. We're going to have quite a few layers in this composition. I think it looks better. This rectangle needs to be a third of the size, wide and high. The way we can do that easily is just type in 1920/3 Now I'm using the slash button on my keyboard. You can also use this slash on your number pad if you have 11920/3 And then for our y value, we're going to go 1080/3 and we can see that our size is 640 by 360. Now I'm going to reconstrain those just in case we need to adjust it later on. And we keep this exact same dimension. Now we need to make three rows of three rectangles to the left, center, and over to the right. And we need to do this for the top, middle, and bottom. If you press Y, it brings up your pan behind Tool. You can also select it right here. Now we need this to go up to the top left. It's a little difficult to do that by hand to get it exact. You can hold down command while you're doing it and it will snap right there. Or if you enable snapping, it will snap right there. Also have snapping enabled and it just goes boom, right there. I'm going to take snapping off because I'd like to just use my command button as I'm dragging my pan behind tool. Okay, now let's select this shape layer in, press P to bring up our position. And we want this to go in the top left corner. This is going to be a value of 00 because we're going to put our anchor point at the 00 marks on zero X pixels and zero Y pixels. If you go zero like that and it goes right to the top left. Okay, Now let's rename this shape layer to one. Okay, Now let's duplicate that layer, Command or Control D. And you can see we have two here. Press Y to bring up your pan behind tool, hold on the command or control button. And just pull this anchor point to the top middle. Now if I press on this layer to bring up my position, we need this to be in the dead center at the top. Our Y position will stay the same. But the midpoint for a 1920 by 1080 on the X axis is 960. Because 1920/2 is 960. Select that layer command or control D to duplicate. Press Y to bring up your pan behind tool on command. And let's move this over to the top right. Press P to bring up our position here. And let's just change our x value now to 1920 because again this is a 1920 by 1080 comp. I'm going to just move these shape layers so they're in order. We have 12.3 I'm going to close those up. Now we just need to make two more rows. The quickest way to do this is to select all three layers, command or control data duplicate. And as you can see now we have 45.6 Let's pull these underneath. And then go ahead and arrange those so they're still in sequential order. Select 45.6 press to bring up our position. Now notice where our anchor point is. They're still in the top left, top middle, and top right corners. If you hold on command and double tap your pan behind tool icon right here and they all go to the center of those layers. Now that these are centered, we can move all three of these layers at once, as long as all three are selected. And you want your Y value to be 540, because 540 is the midpoint of a 1920 by 1080 comp on the Y axis. Okay, now I'm going to close these up with 45.6 selected again, Commander control D to duplicate that, we get 789, we're going to pull those underneath and 789, make sure we have those selected. Let's select these. Bring up P four position. Now we just need to make these the bottom rows. I'm just going to pull down my Y position until we get to 900. Now we have three rows of three rectangles. One of the things you may want to do just to differentiate these is if you select these layers and then grab your selector tool or press V, you can change some of these colors just so that way it's not this ocean of red and it's easier to differentiate where they are. This is optional. You don't necessarily have to do this. I like to do this sometimes just because I like to be able to see exactly what I'm working with. As you can see right here, we see we have 45.6 These are actually incorrect. This layer here should be four, and this one should be six. We have 45.6 like that, we make sure 12.3 is correct. We have 123456, right? So this fourth layer here, let's go and change that color. And then I'm just want to make these a little bit different so that way they stand out from each other and they're not so uniform. The colors I'm selecting are completely random. At this point, we want to make sure our anchor point is centered in all of our layers. We can see that 12.3 they're not, they're at the very top. I'm just going to select all of these layers. Hold on command and double tap our pan behind tool and they all go to the center. Okay, so now we need access to both our motion blur and our three D settings. Those columns are not open here, but if you click this toggle switches modes, they will pop up like that. You can also click right here. Go down your columns, and you can see you can include anything that you want to see. I actually like to see modes. Click that and you can see it as in your modes, command or control A to make sure all of your layers are selected. And this is your motion blur right here. This is how you enable it per layer. So you can just click on this first one and they will all be activated because all the layers are selected. And this is how you enable three D is just this button right here. Now they're all three D and they all have motion blur enabled. I'm going to rotate this on the x axis and we're going to do just one layer and we can copy and paste that to the other layers. With this first layer selected, press R to bring up your rotation. If three D is enabled, you have orientation X, Y, and Z rotation. If this wasn't three D, we'll take that off. You can see all we have is just a rotation option. But whenever you select three D, it gives you a lot more options. I'm going to put a key frame for x rotation right here at the beginning of our animation. And then holding on shift page down 12345 times. Whenever you shift page down, your playhead will jump ten frames. If you don't have shift enabled, you just press page down or page up. It will move by one frame. Shift page down, jumps forward ten frames. Shift page up, jumps backwards ten frames. And then likewise, page down moves forward one frame, page up moves backwards one frame at the 1 second 20 frame mark, I want to change my x rotation. We want it to rotate 2.5 times. We're going to put two right here and then 180 here, because 180 is half of 360, which is the degrees of a circle. For this to move 2.5 times, we need to set this to two times 180. If you scrub through here, you can watch it. And it goes as one time, and that's two. And then here's our half. Close up that layer and then press that reveals our key frames. And it only shows that one property, so it's a lot easier to work here. Okay, so now if you select x rotation, notice both for our key frames are selected, press F nine. That will make your keyframes easy ease. Now we just need to affect the speed of these keyframes using our graph editor. Select this icon right here. It will open up our graph editor. Using the graph editor is a specialization all its own. It's really too much to address in this tutorial, but if you follow along with me, you'll be just fine. Let's take this left handle and notice as we start to move to the right, we have our influence increasing, 62, 63, 70% like that. If you notice our speed is at zero. We want our speed to stay at zero, want our influence to be about 70, it doesn't have to be exact. And then take this right handle over here, move it to the left. Our influence is increasing. Stop at about 70, something about like that. Make sure your speed remains at zero. Now if we go back to the very beginning of our animation here, press the space bar. It'll play through. I like that speed about like that. Now you can tweak this anyway you'd like. For example, if you want to pull this all the way to the left until your speed is 100% you just to get a different look, it speeds a lot faster. But I'm going to bring mine down. Actually, I may keep it about 85. Okay, watch that play back. And that's our rotating panel. Okay, now let's click this graph editor icon again to go back to our timeline. We can select x rotation command or control C to copy. And then we can select all of these layers, two through nine command or control V to paste. Now if you press with all these layers selected, you'll see that all the key frames in fact came on. I'm just going to move this up so you can see this a little bit better. That way we can take a look at all of our layers. What I want to do is offset these in a random way, probably by two to three frames each. But this is completely up to you. We're going to move these around. You don't really want them to go in order because it just looks a little bit cooler. I think maybe we want this to be about here. We'll have our first one come in. We'll see maybe on this panel right here. Just move these around in any way that you would like. Again, there's no set rule to this is all based on your aesthetic. We're going to be changing these on every one of our flipper comps. Anyway. If we watch that play back, we can see how our animation is going to work. You can even offset some of these by more or less frames. I'm going to put my playhead right here past the animation and press in. And that's going to loop our work area. This is the end of our work area. Think of N as end. If you want to do the beginning, maybe I'm moving down about ten frames and press and you'll see this handle moves over. B is the beginning of your work area, N is the end. I'm going to move this back. The reason want to do that is because now I can watch it play back. Once it gets to the end of my work area, it will loop. So that way I have to watch the whole thing or let it play out. I do this quite a bit whenever I'm trying to preview sections that I'm animating. It looks like the panels, 8.9 are a little bit too close if you watch these bottom two here. So I don't really like that. Maybe I'll make this one come in last. Watch that play back. I encourage you to play around this just to get your own feel for what you think works. Now if you notice every time I move a key frame, it starts to render really slowly. And that's because our motion blur is enabled. If you click this icon right here, it will disable your motion blur, however, your layers still have motion blur on them. But by disabling that, Atrifx won't be processing that, it just plays back a lot quicker. I like the way that that looks. Just one more quick tip. If you're finding that your playback is still really slow, you can change your resolution. See I have mindset to full. You can change it down on a two third quarter, or if you set it to auto, then Atripx will pick a resolution for you that's going to work pretty efficiently. You see whenever I pressed auto, it jumped down to half. Adrifx believes that half resolution is about what I need in order to see it play through. I'm still not crazy about this number eight, You want to move that just one more time? Okay, and I like the way that that looks. So that concludes this lesson. This is our first flipper. And the next lesson, we'll be bringing in our media and track, matting our layers as well as parenting them. And that's going to give us the reveal that we're looking for. I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 5. Attaching Media Comps to Flipper Comps: Welcome to lesson four. In the previous lesson, we created our flippers. And in this lesson, we'll be attaching two different pieces of media to these flippers. We need to transition between two different media comps. We're going to start on a certain piece of media, then when it flips around, it's going to go to our next piece of media. Now once we create this first flipper, we can duplicate this and easily replace our footage moving forward. But the thing you need to remember is that we have nine flippers. However many flippers we have, we need to have the same number of copies of media. And this will make sense as we start to go through it. One of the things I always do to keep things super organized is I like to color code. If you select all these layers and then just press this blue box right here. You can select any color you, that you'd like. Whenever I want to have a layer that I don't need to touch anymore or that's set in stone like a background or now that these flippers are completed, I like to set those to none and that becomes this gray. You see, it blends into the background a little bit. Okay, let's start to bring in some of our media and we're going to see how this is all going to fit together. So here's our first media right here. We bring this in, and we can sell this by clicking this column right here. It's got this dot. So just click that. Basically, it makes everything else invisible. And we can see that this is our first media comp, and remember it's just that image. Okay, And actually we can turn that back on because we're going to be turning these off anyway. These are going to be alpha mats, so they would disappear at some point anyway as we start to attach these. Now we need to make nine copies of this media. And all of them need to be track matted to a shape layer. And they also need to be parented to that same layer. And this is going to make more sense in a second. So let's go ahead first and we'll make eight more copies of this. That way we have nine copies. Command or control, D12 345678. So now you can see we have nine copies of this right here. Okay, so now we need all of our media comps to have both motion blur turned on and made into three D. Before I do that, I'm going to select this first shape layer and press you to bring up my key frames. Now if we select all of these media comps, we can enable motion blur and make those all three D. Make sure you don't have all the layers selected because watch this. I'm going to command or control Z to undo that. And now watch if I command or control A to select all and say I had them all selected and now I hit three D, notice my keyframes disappear, and it disappears on all of these layers. I press R, you can see there's no more key frames. The reason why is because it's resetting these layers to three D. I'm going to undo that. Click on layer one, hit you, make sure we have our key frames back. Make sure you only have these layers selected. Or you could lose all of that work you've already done and you may not even know it until much later. The way we're going to connect these is we're going to take each one of these and connect them to one of our shape layers. First, I want to select two through nine, select you to bring up our key frames. We see right here that our animation ends right here with no layer selected. If you hit your Asterrisk button on your number keypad, it will create a composition marker. Now if you don't have a number pad, what you can do is go up to layer markers, Add marker. And you want to make sure you have no layer selected because you want this to go in your composition. Now if you double click that marker, you can add notes here. I'm going to just say out Animation and select. Okay, and now we have this note here. Now I can take all of these layers, press and that will close up all the layers. We know our animation starts at the very beginning of this. I don't need a marker there and I'm just going to pull my work area handle all the way out for now. The first set of media needs to be placed at the beginning of our animation. The second needs to be placed after our animation. And I'll show you why. First, let's just take one of these. That way I don't do a lot of work and have to undo it. I'm going to select this right here, because this is going to match up with this layer right here. And I want to be right in the middle so that way it's easier to see what I'm doing. Make sure you have your track mat column and your parent and link column open again. If you don't have those, you can right click here, go to columns and just make sure parent and link and modes are enabled. This is going to correspond to our fifth layer under track. Matt, select this dropdown choose five, and then also for parenting choose five. We're just going to watch this animation on this one right here. As we can see, it starts to turn. Actually, I'm going to solo that so we can see this better. If we watch it play back, we can see that it starts off right side up and then it ends upside down, which is exactly what we want, right? But now watch this. If I take that off and say what if I had linked it right here. This is right in the middle of the animation. So if I hit you, we can see we're in the middle of the animation. So wherever you link these up, this layer is going to start animating from there. So if I press five at this point, go back to the very beginning, we can see that this layer is somewhere in the middle of the animation. So it's very important whenever you link these up that you make sure you're aware of where your animation is. And I'm going to command and control Z that a couple of times to make sure that this goes away. So C, this right here is not linked anymore. Actually I'm going to go ahead and take this off and set that to know Matt, just to make this easier. So this first set of media needs to be linked up before our animation. We can close up that layer. So I'm going to go to the very beginning and then we can just go down in order media one. Want to track Matt that to one parent? That one is for all of these, we'll say 2233, 4455, 6677, 8899. We've told Athrofx that we only want these layers to show up in very specific places. That's what alpha matting does. If we solo this right here, it's only going to show up in this box right here. If we add in maybe this one, we can see where that shows up. All of these layers are only going to show up in the specific boxes we've assigned them to. The thing that's really cool about this is I'm going to turn off my motion blow because it'sbably going to be a little bit heavy. But now watch it play back. And we can see how this is going to animate out, which is really cool. We don't have our other media attached yet, so we can't see the transition. Get an idea of how this is going to work. Right. Okay. So I'm going to select all of my media one comps and I'd like to choose a color that stands out. So I want to make all of those yellow. Okay, so now let's bring in our media two. That's what we're going to be transitioning to. And bring it underneath media one, so let's enable motion blur and make this three D, and I'm going to make this color orange. Now we need to go back through the same exact process that we did with our media one, but with a few different changes. We need to track matt this and parent this up to one. But we want to make sure these are parented and track matted after our animation. Otherwise we'll have that same issue that we had before. So I'm just going to pull this up and let's make some copies. We have one command or control D to duplicate to make 23456789. Now again, we want to make sure our playhead is past our animation. And then we're going to go through the same process as before. We link this up to 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, and then 9.9 Now if we go back to the beginning of our layer, we can see if we play through that, we don't see our second layer. And the reason why is because they're both on the same exact place. Position wise, if we select all of these layers and hit the thing that we need to change is our positions. I want to pull this up just a little bit. Let's just move each one of these back by, we'll say three pixels. If you hit 33, and you'll start to see this other image creep through because it's pushed back in z space just enough so that it can be revealed. Okay, so now I'm going to command or control A to select all my layers. I'm going to close those up if you bring this down so we can see it better. And then I'm going to turn off my motion blur, so that way it plays back a little bit quicker. I'm going to hit zero on my number pad to watch it play. Or you can press your space bar. You can see how this is going to animate. Now I'm going to loop this about right here. I might play head at the three second ten frame mark. And hit that will loop it. You can watch the play back a couple of times just to see if you like the way that that transitions in. That brings us to the end of this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll be adding some text with a text box. Now, there are a number of ways to do this, but I'm going to show you a really quick way to just add in a quick text box so that way you can do this with any other project. I'll see you back in the next lesson. 6. Text Animators and Text Boxes: Welcome to lesson five. In this lesson, we'll be adding text to our media comps. But first, let's make some room in our comp using the shy option. Let's take a look at layers one through ten, which are our shape layer matt layers. We don't need all of these layers open while we're editing. And having all of these layers visible makes editing clumsier. We'll be calling these layers back up when we need to make adjustments, but for the most part, we can hide all of these layers. Let's select layers one through nine and then select this icon right here. This is our shy option. At the layer level, nothing happens at first, But if we go to our layer controls and enable shying by pressing this master shy icon, we can see that those layers are now hidden. This icon enables shying for all of our layers. And the layer level shy icons toggle shying on and off for each individual layer. This frees up space in your timeline and makes things a lot less confusing and cumbersome. So we'll be shying these layers and calling them back up as we need them by selecting our master shy option. In this lesson, we'll be adding some text to all of our media comp layers with the exception of media one. This is our introductory card. We're going to start the text animation at 1 second 20 frames. Reason why is if we go back into flipper one, we can see that our animation ends right about here. We can start animating about right here. It's going to animate as these are coming to a stop. Let's go over to media two at 1 second, 20 frames, list command or control. To bring up our text tool, I'm just going to type surf up press V to get your selector tool. Without moving your playhead, press the left bracket and that will move your layer over. Undo that command or control Z wherever your playhead is. If you hit your left bracket, it will bring your endpoint to that point. If you hit your right bracket, it brings your outpoint to that point. 1 second 20 frames left bracket, and we're going to start our animation. Now I'm using a font called Montserrat. I'm using extra bold, and I have it all caps. If you don't have this font, it is included in the project file, so you can follow along exactly with what I'm doing. I'm going to set this to an even 140. And now I want to animate this, but I also wanted to have a text box, So maybe I'll have it somewhere like around here. We can always adjust this as we go along. Now, there are a number of ways that you can animate text and also add a text box. So I'm just going to show you a super quick way. You can add in a text box. You can actually say this as an animation preset and bring it into any project. So we over to our effects and presets and we need to add in a few effects. The first effect I'm going to add in is a simple choker. If you just spell out simple choker, it's right here. So make sure you have this layer selected and double click simple choker. We can see it pops up in our Effix controls panel. Let's get rid of simple choker and now type mini max. This is the only option we have right here. Again, double click, We have mini max. Then the last effect is going to be a tent effect and it's going to be this first tent right here. Let's just double click that. Let's go to our simple choker. Change the view for final output to Matt. And as you see we already have something going on right here. Now these other two effects are going to give you some options that you can exercise over this text box. The mini max is going to serve as your padding around your text. First, we need to take our channel option here and change it to alpha. Now we can use our radius as our padding. See if we type in 20. You can see we have more padding around there. And then your tent is going to be how you change the colors of your text box and your text. This black is going to be a text box. White is your text. I want to make some changes here. I want to make this maybe orange. Then I want to make my text black. Now we can animate this either with our transform layer properties. If you open this up, we see under transform we have anchor point, position, scale, rotation, opacity. Those are the transform properties of every single layer. But I'm going to use my text animators because you have more options. For example, we'll open our transformer back up. If we animate the position, the only option we have is to animate this as a single unit. You can't animate it by word or characters. That's what text animators allow you to do. Just real quick. I'm going to add in a text animator. So if you click this button right here, this is animdding a position. And I'm just going to move this off over to the right, so that way it's completely off screen. And then I'm going to open up my range selector, advanced tab. Let me just pull this up so you can see all the options here. Okay, I'm going to change my shape from square to ramp up, E low. We'll make that maybe 85% Ese high. We'll make that maybe 20 text animators are super involved. If you're not familiar with this, don't worry about it too much. Just follow along with me and we will get through this together. Okay? And I'm going to close this up. And now we have this offset. This is how we're going to be animating our text. Let's put a key frame at the beginning. And let's change this to negative 100, shift page down 12 times to go 420 frames, and change offset to 100. Okay, Now if we watch that play back, this is how it's going to animate in. Notice it's animating in by characters, which is not an option you have whenever you use to transform position property. If we open up our advanced tab here, we can see based on it is based on characters. We can also do words if you want to come in one word at a time, that's cool. Actually, I think words is the way to go for this. But you can do lines now. If we had more than one line, it would come in one line at a time obviously. But since it's all on one line, this is going to come in as a single unit. I'm going to change mine back to words, and I think that looks cool, just like that. And notice how the text box lags because it's moving with our text. This is a really cool way to make a text box. Close that up. I'm going to toggle my switches and I'm going to enable motion blur. I always like to have motion blur on text animations. You can see the effect of enabling motion blur. If you toggle this off and on, I always like to have text animations with motion blur on. Okay, now I want to add text to each one of these media comps. Make sure this layer is selected command or control C to copy that. Now we're in media two. Let's go over to media three and paste command or control V. The reason why it paste it in right here at 01:20 is because we copied it and it was at 01:20 That's one of the things that affix does, which is cool. Whenever you copy and paste the layer, it's going to paste the layer at the same endpoint from where it was copied. Obviously, we need to change this text. Take a leap. Okay, I just want to change these colors so that waste more consistent with this footage. Maybe we'll make this a blue since he's a little high up in the sky. Then we can make our text color white. Or maybe we can go with a yellow, just something that stands out like that. I'm going to do a quick color correction on this. This is a little bit flat. If you select that layer, go to effect color correction curves. Going to add in really quick curves just to give it some contrast. Maybe a little bit more color to it, effect color correction, Cuban saturation. And maybe just bump up the saturation a little bit. Now this isn't a course, obviously, on color correction, but it is good to know how to do little tweaks like this super quick. I don't want the media comps to look the same. We're going to be moving our text around in different places and also adjusting our flippers. That way is not the same exact style. Every time maybe we'll put this something like maybe over here. So like he's jumping from it. I'm just going to set this to auto so it plays back better. But I don't want to come in from the right, said I want to come in from the left. If you select your text layer, then command or control, it will go right up to your finer toolbar type POS for position. This animator position, this is what's dictating how this is going to animate in is coming in from the right 1041 pixels from where it stops. All we have to do is just change this to a negative value. It may be negative 500, and then just keep tweaking it in a negative direction until it's off screen. Now it comes in from the other direction, but notice that the text doesn't really come in the way we want it to. We can make a few adjustments super quick. Let's just close a layer, open it back up. And under range selector, I'm going to go down to advanced change, ramp up to ramp down, Select these key frames. Now you can right click keyframe assistant time reverse key frames, just like that. Now our last word comes in first and it looks the way that we want it to. Again, this isn't a text animator course. There's a lot more to text animators in this, but it is good to know a few different ways you can use text animators. Okay, so I'm going to copy that layer. Go into media four, paste. It comes in at 1 second, 20 frames. We want to move this up here. Let me see. We'll call this fast track. Select my tent, the blue here. Let's make that maybe like a red. Okay, and now I want this to come in from the top. Select fast track command or control, and then type POS. Now we just need to change the values of our position. This is our x value, and this is our y. If you're animating on the x value, it's going to animate horizontally. And y is vertically. We want to go vertically. Let's make our x value zero. And then we want our y value to come in from off camera. So go back to the very beginning of this layer and let's just pull this up until it's off screen. Watch that play back. That's our animation. Now I want my first word to come in. First, we're going to make the same change we did last time. We can clear out our finder tool bar, open this back up, go into animator, go into Advanced and change. Ramp down to ramp up, select those key frames, right click keyframe assistant, time reverse. Now this is how we have our text coming in. Now this may be one of those times it's cool to use characters instead of words. Watch that, play back. That looks cool. I like that. Okay, I want this to be centered in our comp. If you hold on command or control and then double tap your pan behind tool centers, your anchor point right up. Select a layer press to bring up your position and just change your X value to 960 so that way it's centered right here in your comp. This is how the text is going to look on this layer. We have one more to make Squid select that layer. Commander control C to copy. Go to media five, Commander control V to paste. Okay, and we need to change this text. Let's say something like free falling. Okay, let's make some changes. We're going to make our text box like a darker blue. We can make our text white. Actually, I may go even darker blue than that. Okay, maybe we'll make this text end up somewhere over here. And I want this to come in from the left. Select that layer type POS in our finder bar, make our y value zero and make our x value, we'll say negative 750. And see if that gets us off screen. It doesn't keep moving this back until it does. Watch that play back. We had the same issue we had in the other composition. Let's go ahead and make some changes to our text animator real quick. All we have to do is open up our animator range selector advanced. Change our shape from ramp up to ramp down. Select those key frames, right click keyframe assistant, time, reverse key frames. Now our last character will come in first, but for this I think only changes back to words. I like the way that words looks a lot better, just like that. That's our text animation for this media comp. Okay, let's go back over to our flipper comp. You can get an idea of how this is going to play out. We watch this play back. We're set on our first here, and then it rotates in, and as it comes to settle, here comes our text. That's pretty cool. Now remember we're going to be cutting at about 3 seconds here. That is super important for our next step in the next lesson. This concludes this lesson. In the next one, we're going to be making copies of this flipper, bringing in other media and making an adjustment. So all of these things line up. I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Flippers Comps 2-4: Welcome back and we are now on lesson six. In the previous lesson, we added in text on all of our media comps. And now we need to duplicate our flipper comp and then string everything together. One of the things I want to point out first is notice in our first animation here, this is just a title card. But when we go into our next animation here, we have text. Now, this will be a potential issue whenever we line up all of these flippers. As we go into flipper two, we're going to make a very important alteration that will carry us through the rest of this lesson. Select flipper one command or control D to create flipper two. And now we need to go into flipper two. The thing we need to do first is change this media out. This taber is for flipper one, we have media one and media two. As of right now, flipper two as media one and media two. We need to change this to media two and media three. And there's a very, very quick way of doing that. If you write, click on this yellow, choose Select Label Color. We'll click all of your yellows. You can select media two here, a hold down option or Alt. And drag media two on top of media one and it immediately updates. That's a great shortcut, is something I use all the time. Go back to the beginning of our layer, we can see that now our sur footage is in there. We go down to the end of our animation. We can select all of these media two layers here, Select media three option or Alt drag. Now we have this animation where we start off on media two and it transitions right into media 31. Of the issues is that since we have that text animation coming in, we need to make sure that we make an adjustment. The most important thing to keep in mind is that we're going to be doing our cuts at 3 seconds. Put your play head here at the three second mark and make sure that none of your layers are selected. And I'm going to click my asterisk on my number pad again. If you don't have a number pad, you can go to layer markers, add marker. And then if we double click that here, we can say cut point. That way we know this is where our cut point is. What we need to do now is grab all of our media two layers and holding down option or alt left bracket and that's going to trim everything. As you can see right here, you still have some of your layer right here that you can see this grade out. That's because we trimmed it. I'm going to undo that. If I just hit my left bracket alone, it moved all the layers here. See, there's nothing here. Our layer begins here. I'm going to undo that again, make sure you're holding down option or Alt and left bracket because you want to trim out the first 3 seconds, Okay, Now if we go back to the very beginning of our animation and hit the left bracket. Not all left bracket, just the left bracket. We bring all the layers over. So the end point now starts at the beginning of our animation. So let's go back into flipper one. At the three second mark, we can see that we have surfs up and we see how this looks. We see our footage at that point, go back into flipper two, the very beginning, it's the same thing surfs up is there and we're at the same point in our footage. And that's because we grabbed all of our layers and we pulled them over to the three second mark and then we moved them down. This will make a lot more sense whenever we start to line all of these media comps up. But just keep in mind that's something that's really important to get right right now. Because moving forward we're going to be making copies of this and it's better to have everything perfectly lined up the way we want it. Now we'll just make more copies of this flipper and replace the media. Select clipper two, command or control D to duplicate double click clipper three. Let's select all the yellow layers which are media two. Select media three, holding out option or Alt. Drag media three onto media two. Let's grab our orange layers, which is media three. Select media four, holding down option or Alt. Drag that on top. Now this works perfectly since we set this up the right way in the previous comp. Now all we have to do is just replace those media comps. Select flipper three, command or control to duplicate. We have flipper four, Double click to go in there. We'll grab all these yellow layers which are media three and we want to make these media four. Same thing for the media fours at the bottom. Select those, then select media Five option, or Alt. Drag media five. Now we have all of our media comps in. However I want to create this in a way so it can be a gift and I'm going to show you how we can do that. Let's take our flipper four, duplicate that to make flipper five. We go into there, we'll change out media four for media five. And now we want this to loop back around. In the beginning, if we select media five and replace it with media one, it's going to begin and end on this comp, Okay? So we have five flippers. That's exactly what we need. Okay, and that concludes this lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to randomize our flipper rectangles so that way each comp is different from one another. I'll see you back in the next lesson. 8. Randomizing the Flipper Animation: Welcome back to our media presentation course. We are now in lesson seven. In this lesson, we're going to randomize the way that each one of these flippers animates In on each one of the flipper comps, we hit all of our flipper shape layers by selecting this shy icon here. So let's select that again. And notice that all of these layers here are shed like that. So whenever you a layer, and then you engage it at this level, it hides it away. So we want to reveal that. Okay, so we want to randomize the way this animates in. So if we select all of these layers and press, these are our current key frames. Now since we made copies of all these, they're all going to be exactly the same. Slick those layers press, you can see that the animation is the same. Actually, I want to make these columns exactly the same. That way you can see it seamlessly from one comp to the next. See our animation looks exactly the same. Let's change this up. We can leave flipper one alone. Let's go to flipper two. And now just move these around in a different configuration. That way these animations are going to be different every time on every media comp. It just gives us some more variety and it adds a little bit of extra special care. So that way these don't animate in exactly the same way. One other option is you can go from top to bottom. So that way you had the first one animate in, followed by 23456789. If you want something to come in in that way, I like it better. Where it's a little bit more random. I think it just looks cooler. But that's just me. See now if we watch it play back, it just looks a little bit different. If we go back to flipper one, that's our animation. Flipper two, just as a different configuration. There are no real set rules to this or set values, this is all just randomized. I'm going to select flipper three. I'm going to unhide that. I'm going to make my columns consistent like that. Select our shape layers, you to bring up our key frames, and now I'm going to make this different configuration. Instead of selecting these the way I'm selecting them, there's actually a quicker way. If you just select x rotation, it selects all your key frames at once. I'm going to do it like that, just because it's a little bit faster, maybe, something like that. Just a different way of animating. In flipper four, we're going to unhide those layers. Select our shape layers, press you to reveal our key frames, select x rotation. And again, we're going to move these around. They're a little bit more randomized. Now one of the things to keep in mind is that you want all of these to animate out before this out animation line right here. Let me go back and make sure flipper three, see this one animates a little bit past it. I'm going to bring that back in flipper two. Yeah, we got one that goes beyond it. We're back to flipper four. I just want to make sure that I keep all of these within that range. That way they all animate in at about the same point, okay? So watch that playback. Just something a little bit different and these are the touches that will really make your animation stand out. It's just more professional, so that way things look more stylized. Like those layers press you, maybe we'll make this one come in first. This time watch that playback. Now every one of these media comps animate in in a different way. My modes here, right click columns. I'm going to add my modes here. So now if we kind of go through here, we can see that each one of these animations is unique and different. You can tweak these in any way that you would like, but the main thing is to make them randomized. Just like all of our text animation comes in differently. Now these flippers flip in differently every time. That brings us to the end of this lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to bring in all of these flipper comps into our main comp to start creating our final animation. Once all these are lined up, these will seamlessly go from one to the next. And you'll have a very cool media presentation. I'll see you back in the next lesson. 9. Bringing it All Together!: Welcome back. We are in lesson eight. In lesson seven, we randomized the animation of all of our flippers that way. They all come in in a unique way. Now we need to combine our flipper layers into our final media presentation to make our final animation within our render folder. We have media presentation we created that way back in the first lesson. Let's bring in all of these flippers right here. Flipper one through five. Just drag those in. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit. And you can see from our markers that our cut point is at 3 seconds. Remember we want our transitions to happen every 3 seconds. Take flipper two and hit your left bracket at the three second mark. I'm going to command and control Z to undo that. If you hold down alt left bracket, it leaves the first 3 seconds in here and it trims your layer to where your playhead is. We don't want to do that. We want to actually move our endpoint to where our playhead is, left bracket. Then we go down to 6 seconds, grab flipper three left bracket. We're going to pull out here a little bit. We go down to 9 seconds, grab flipper four, left bracket. And finally at 12 seconds we're going to have flipper five left bracket. Now what I'll do at this point is with flipper five still selected. If you press it will jump to your outpoint, I goes to endpoint, O goes to outpoint, press to go to your outpoint. Then we're going to press to loop this. Okay, So now we have everything within our work area. And then right click on your work area bar right here. And choose trim comp to work area. So that way everything is in here that we need. If we go to this second flipper and again press I to go to the very beginning, we need to cut the layer above it. That way there's no overlap because we want this animation for flipper two to start right here. But as long as flipper one overlaps it, then we can't see it with flipper one selected at the three second mark shift command or control D and that splits the layer. Now you have these in two layers, you can just press delete to get rid of that, to go from one straight into two like that, we're doing this for all of these layers. Select flipper three, press to go to the beginning. Then select flipper two, shift command or control D to split it, delete. The more you use these shortcuts, the more you used to them, you'll get flipper four, press select flipper three, shift command or control D, delete. Finally, flipper five, press the select flipper. Four, shift command or control D, delete. Okay, now everything is set up exactly the way we want to be set up, okay? But now see we have this black behind all of these comps. And if you toggle your transparency with this icon right here, you can see that that's transparent. I don't want that, we need to have a background behind this. I'm going to leave the transparency on and command or control y to create a solid. Okay, now you can put any color you want in there. I'm just going to go with a basic white. Then I want to add something to it that way it's not just completely white. Now let's move this down to the very bottom, underneath all of this. That looks better, but it's not exactly what you want. With that layer selected, let's go over to our effects and presets and type in vignette and you'll see this CC vignette, double click that and it gives a little bit of texture as you can see if we so low it's just something better than just solid white. Now you can put whatever you want behind here. I think this works just fine for our purposes. Now I want to give each one of these media comps a little bit of dimension. It's a little bit flat like that. A quick way to do that is to add a drop shadow. Let's select flipper one. We're going to right click Go to effect perspective. Let's add in a drop shadow. Now our drop shadow settings are up here. Let's just change our distance to 30 and our softness to 75. See, you just gives us a little bit of a shadow back there. Talk with this off and on, I just think that looks a lot better. Now select drop shadow command or control C to copy that. Now you have to do with select the flipper layers two through five. Command or control. Now all of these have the same exact drop shadow on them throughout, which is exactly what we want. Okay, and that brings us to the end of this lesson. The next lesson, we need to make a little bit of an adjustment to this first flipper. Because as you can see, our adrenaline junkies is only on there for less than a second before it starts to transition out. This one in particular is a special media comp that we need to make an adjustment to, and we will do that as soon as you come back. 10. Finishing Touches: Welcome back. We are now in less than nine. We are in the home stretch. We are almost there. In the previous lesson, we brought in all of our flipper comps and combine them into our final main composition to create our animation. As I mentioned in the previous lesson, we need to do something with this first media comp here. Because our drilling junkies is only on there, just for a second. So I want to offset this. Give it a good 2 seconds before it animates off. Let's go into flipper one. Let's go down to about the two second mark. Now let's grab all of these key frames. And we're going to move it so that the first key frame is right at 2 seconds. It's really important to move the key frames. You don't want to move the layers because all of these pre comps down here are matted to all of these shape layers. If we were to move these over, maybe something like that. Now you can see you have nothing here. I move that over by selecting Alt left bracket. If we command or control Z to undo that, we can see that we have everything back. You want this first key frame to be right here at the two second mark. Since we've moved that over, we also have to move over our media two comps. So select all of our media two comps at the two second mark. Hit left bracket, because we do not want to trim those. We want the start point to be at 2 seconds. And the reason why is because now we have our media one staying up there for 2 seconds. And as it goes to transition, we want to make sure that our media two animation doesn't start until media one starts to animate out. We can see that our comp is 5 seconds, so this should still be fine with the way we have our animation set. I'm going to go back out to our main composition. Since we added 2 seconds to our flipper one comp, we need to move everything down by 2 seconds, starting with flipper two animation. If we hit, we're at the three second mark. We need to jump down 2 seconds to 5 seconds. Then grab flippers two through five and move all of these down. Now select flipper one, alt, right bracket to trim it. We zoom in here, just want to make sure there's no overlap and there's not because this was exactly 5 seconds long. Okay, And the only thing left to do is to add in our music. Let's go to our audio folder here. And this is in your project file that comes with this course. You can put any audio track you want or you can leave it with no music at all. Now if you press L, it will bring up your audio levels. Just going to bring this down to maybe like negative five. This is something I commonly do. I like to bring my music down when it's just a music layer only to about five to 7 decibels. If I have voice over, it's going to come down a lot more. But when it's just music alone, just so it's not peaking out or blasting too loud, I like to bring my audio levels down about negative five. Now let's watch this play back. Okay, so let's press LL to reveal our wave form. One of the things you may want to do to get it exactly perfect is you may want to have a cut point on your mic command or control K to open that back up. I'm going to go ahead and add in another second because I think I've heard a beat where this could loop back around. If we zoom in here, this is the beginning of the next beat. You can tell by the wave right here. Now if I press in there, and instead of having it exactly at 17 seconds, we have it at 17:21 22, somewhere like around there. It should loop back around and give us seamless music that loops back around just fine because this is the next beat and it lines up with this. At the cut point, I'm just going to right click trim comp to work area that way it's going to cut right there at the exact right spot and loop back around. And actually we may be able to go one frame earlier and see how that sounds. That's better. Right click, trip, work area. See now there's no beat here. You can tell by the wave. You just want to make sure that you extend your background all the way to the end of the composition. Now, your music may not loop exactly perfectly. I got lucky with this piece of music and it loops around perfectly. So you can use this music if you'd like or put your own music. In the next lesson, we're going to render this out as both the gift and an MP four. While I do want my audio to loop, just keep in mind with animated gifts you don't get audio. So even though it's really cool to have this loop like that, you'd have to do something a little bit different than a gift. However, on our MP four, I do want that to have that exact loop point, because there are some platforms that will loop your video for you. So that brings us to the end of this lesson. We have one more lesson. I'm going to show you how to export this. And you can post this anywhere you'd like on social media or in your portfolio. I would love to see what you guys create. I will see you in less than ten. 11. Let's Render the Final Project: Welcome back to our media presentation course. We are in our final lesson where I'm going to show you how to export this. And you can start to upload this anywhere you want, whether it's social media onto your website or somewhere else. Okay, so we're going to render this in media encoder. And you can send this video over to media encoder right from after effects. One of the really important things whenever you're rendering out to media encoder is that if you have motion blur, make sure you have it enabled here. Right now we can't see your motion blur enable it here. Now we can, if you are rendering this out to media encoder and this isn't enabled, then your video will not have motion blur. If something, this come back to bite me in the past. Just a very important tip. Whenever you're rendering out of after effects into media encoder, make sure you enable motion blur. If any of your compositions use motion blur, select the composition that you want to send over to media encoder. Select it up here in your project panel. Go to Composition, Add to Adobe Media Encoder. And it's going to open up Adobe Media Encoder. And as you see it went ahead and dropped it in there force automatically. If you select this drop down, you have a bunch of different options that you can choose. Even within those options, you have other options. What I'm going to do is go down to animated gift. And by default it's got animated gift with transparency, match source. So you always want to match the source, that way you don't have any black areas is around it. For example, if this were like a nine by 16 video and I didn't have the right settings, then we would have some black areas around our video. So once you click that link right there, it opens up this window. And if you use Premiere Pro, this should look very, very familiar. So you can go into your presets, and you can match some presets. You can go down here and unselect things. For example, if you wanted this to be a smaller size than what is rendered, you can actually change this maybe to half. So instead of 1920, you can make it 960. And as you see, it's linked, so that way it will make your height 540 when it was 1080. If for any reason you do want these values unconstrained, you can just click this right here. Watch. When I put it back to 1920, the height will remain at 05:40 and this area would be black. So I'm going to go ahead and just change this back to 1080. I'm going to link that back up. And if you start to mess around with some of these and you realize, okay, I made some mistakes, if you just select match source, it will match whatever the source is in after effects. So I'm going to select cancel for that because everything is set through the way I want it. Now let's select this output file. And this will open up your Finder window, or if you're on a PC, your Explorer window, to where you have your after effects project saved. I have this folder created for this project, and I have all these other folders for all of my assets and things like that. My project file is saved in my AE folder. By default, it wants to send it to this same folder where your AE file is saved. I always have a Renders folder. I'm just going to select Renders, click Save. Then once you hit this play button right here, that's going to start your cue. You get a preview down here. And you can see by the progress bar how it's working through your video. Now if you have motion blur like I do, it's going to go a little bit slower. But to me it's worth it. Okay, and in my finder window, here's my media presentation gift. As long as I have the file selected, it will preview. In my finder, I press the Space bar, it will open it up. Now if you're in Windows, you can double click the file and open it that way. I believe that PC's have an automatic player for gifts. Now one of the things with gifts is there's no audio. So this is something that's kind of couple on social media or maybe as a presentation to give an example of some things that you can do. So if you want to have audio in it, let's actually export this as an MP four. I'm going to shrink down my media encoder, but it is still selected. We're going to go up to composition, Add to media encoder. It's going to bring in the preset of the last thing we just did. So let's change this now to H 264. It defaults to match source high bit rate, which is exactly what we want. If you click on this link, you can see again, it's trying to send it over to the same folder where the project file is saved. You'll see this AME folder right here. This created, this happens every time you bring a project into encoder. You can actually save it here. Like I said, I'd like to have a renders folder, so let's make an MP four to see what this looks like with audio. Now let's just select our Start Cue button and let this render out. Okay. And I'm going to open up my Finder again, and we can see we have our gift and our MP four. And I can play it right here inside of my finder. Or if I want to see it full screen, I can get my Space Bar. And there we go. We have a gift and an MP Four. This can be uploaded anywhere like onto social media or onto a website. I would love to see what you guys create and that does it for this course. I really hope you guys enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed creating it. Please leave your comments and share this with anyone that you think may like to see this or may want to learn some of these concepts. I'll be back very, very soon with more videos. Until then, thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. 12. Thank you!: Thank you so much for allowing me to take you on this after effects journey. I hope you've enjoyed this course as much as I enjoyed creating it. I'd love to hear what you thought about the course, what you learned, and see what you create as a result of this course. Feel free to contact me at any time at the e mail address on your screen. Check out my other courses following the link below this video. And check out my Youtube channel seven minute AE tutorials where I teach at effects, tips, tricks, and shortcuts on a weekly basis. If you're looking to really up your game, join my patri and get instant access to project files and emission presets and templates. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.