Motion Paths and Transform Tools - Adobe After Effects for Funsies

1. Bee Buddy Intro: G’day, how's it going? Do you want to get animating in After Effects, but you're completely overwhelmed by the possibilities. And find the beast that is After Effects just a little bit daunting. Mate, do I know those feels. But it’s alright. I got you. I'm Alyssa. I'm an animator, illustrator, designer. I co-direct a small production company, and I've been teaching into TAFE and Higher Ed (University) for about four years. I've been fascinated by animation and motion graphics since I was a wee tacker. I've been animating professionally for around about eight years. My absolute favourite thing to do is to personify made up stuff. And that's exactly what we're gonna do together. We are going to animate a little bee character. So we're going to bring in a little single layer character, and we're going to animate that bee, bouncing around a cute little daisy patch. We're going to use this little bee to explore the transform tools, to really dig deep into the fundamentals of animation. So this bee, while it is little character that we're going to add personality and intention to, This class is all about simple animation, making the most out of using a little. From this class, Once you've completed it, you should be able to jump into After Effects. And firstly, not panic. That's the main goal of this, this is supposed to be fun. It's animation. If it's not fun, what's the point? So you should be able to jump in and play around with some layers and get things moving. So you can work with your own files, you can start making collage animation, you can start building more complicated characters if you want to. You can start looking at the bigger picture of animation in After Effects This little class will give you a solid grounding of where you can go beyond. To start in this class, you don't need any prior experience with After Effects at all. This is very much from the beginning. Some experience with Adobe is never going to hurt, it will help you create your own assets if you so choose. But there are no prerequisites or prior knowledge needed. You need to know how to use a computer and ideally a bit of copy paste. But that's all you gotta do! If you feel like that's you and you're excited to animate a little bug, let's get going. 2. What we need: For this project, we're going to be animating a little bug character bouncing around the scene. Now I've already created this scene for you. I've got a background of some daisies and a little bee that you can animate to your heart's content. Now, if you would like to create your own assets, absolutely, feel free, be my guest. But you just want to check that some specs are going to work. So for the background we'll do 1920 by 1080. A jpeg is perfect for this. The character themselves, I would do a PNG, so you can have a transparent background because we don't want a big rectangular box behind them. And roughly 500 by 500 pixels. There's a bit of give-and-take there, but around about that you've got options to scale it up and scale it down without losing any quality. That will do just fine. So feel free to make your own assets if you like. If, however you want to jump straight into the animation part, feel free to download the resources that I've created for you in the resources tab below. Now this project is all about getting comfortable with the basics of After Effects and using the transform tools to their full potential. So it's very scalable. Make sure you're pushing your skills to wherever you feel comfortable. My strategy for learning is always push it so far that you break it and then reign it back in. Don't be afraid to break stuff. The purpose of this is to be fun. So if you are getting to the point that it's stressful, reign it back in friends, reign it back in. There's no pressure on this. It's low stakes we’re just animating a little buddy bouncing around. Your final project is going to be a little rendered GIF or video that you can upload into the class gallery at the very end. 3. Tour of the Kitchen: All righty Rusical gang. Let's have a little squizzy at old After Effects, shall we? First, I'm gonna give you a quick overview of what we're looking at. If any of these windows aren't visible on your screen by default, just be aware that you can always go and find them. The default for everybody is slightly different depending on which version of After Effects are using. But you can always go to Window, and all of your options are there. For Workspace, if you just want to start with default, then you'll be nice and safe. So first step, we've got our Project Window that's over on the left here. Now your Project Window is basically, I like to think of it as your pantry. So the pantry is where we keep all the ingredients, all the elements that we're going to bring together to create our final, incredibly delicious cake. Next up, I'm going to show you the Timeline Window. That's this guy down the bottom here. And that is where we will place all of our ingredients, where we'll figure out our ratios and we'll get the pieces all laid out together, how we need them for our cake. I like to think of the Timeline Window as the mixing bowl. So it's not until the ingredients are put into the mixing bowl, that things can actually start to happen and we can see things starting to work. Next up is our Composition Window. This is the big guy, and this is where it all really happens. Whatever you can see in the Composition Window or the Comp Window, that is your final render. That is the beautiful cake. That's the good stuff. Now to help get our ingredients for my mixing bowl, looking good in our Comp Window or in our cake, we need to use a few utensils. Now that's up the very top, that's our Toolbar. Now that's what we're gonna be using like our kitchen utensils. So you got your classic Selection Tools, you've got some Shape Tools, you've got Text Tools, all sorts of different things that I'll show you how to use. That is working with all of the ingredients that we've bought into our Timeline. Next up is the fancy bit. It's where you get a little bit extra jazzy. That's our Effects Panel. Now, technically it's the Effects and Presets, but we're going to keep a simple. It's the Effects. It's all the jazz. I like to think of this as a mirror glaze, right? So it's awesome when you can add this on top of your incredible, beautiful cake. But if you've got a mediocre cake, aint no mirror glaze is going to fix it. So that's all the extra sparkle and we may look at some of that, but really it's all about getting a solid sponge. Can't go wrong with a solid sponge cake. And that's it! That's all the windows and sections that you need to be aware of at this stage in After Effects. Now that you know where everything is, Let's start filling our pantry. 4. Popping to the Shops: First thing we're gonna do is we're going to bring some ingredients into our After Effects file, “pop to the shops”, if you will. So we can go File and Import, Import File, crazy stuff. Or, from our Project Window, from our pantry, we can double-click. Both, do exactly the same thing. Then that will take me to my folder structure. I can just navigate to my files, the files that we'll be using. I've got these two that I've created myself. You are absolutely more than welcome to use your own. Just navigate to those. So I've got the bee and daisies. I'm going to select both and then hit Import. I don't need to change any of these settings. I should be importing footage. That, that's all. There's nothing else going on here. We hit Import. Then we can see two files in our pantry. If I click on one, I can see the details about it, which is really nice. Make sure that you've got the right files. Now they're not in the cake yet, they're just in our pantry. You've gotta do a few more things before we can bring them into our mixing bowl. 5. 05 Prepping Your Cake Tin: Now that we've got some stuff in our pantry, we want to prepare our cake tin. To make a cake tin. Or a New Composition, we can click this big old button that says New Composition, crazy stuff. If you haven't got this button, you can go to Composition, New Composition. They all do the same thing. But the first time you open After Effects, you should have this big old button. Now what we're gonna do is set a few key settings. Good to keep track of this as these are the settings you’ll probably use all of the time. Mine don't change very often other than either going landscape or vertical. But we'll go through them one by one. First thing at the top is the Composition Name. We’ve got to give it a good name. Hmm, what's a good name? I don't mean like actually fancy. I mean something that you're going to remember. That's what's important. So Animated Bee Buddy, that's going to work for me, I'll know what that is. It's different to my bee boi because that's my asset. This is the Animated Bee Buddy. So next up we've got our Presets. We're not going to use these at the moment because we want to be putting our settings in ourselves first so we know what everything does. But if you have a little click on there just to see how many options you've got. There's so many! So if you're ever working with a client or for broadcast or any particular project that has specific requirements, using these presets will help set you up really nicely. But if you're working on stuff for online, what I personally prefer to do is type in the dimensions myself and make sure that I've set these top settings correctly and this will update. So for example, if I change these figures, you can see that the preset will automatically change. I'm going to set this to 1920 by 1080 pixels, which is high-definition. So you can see in your presets that it's updated to HD, that means high-definition. Then I'm going to make sure that the frame rate, is set to 25 frames per second. Because ‘Straya, in the US, they use 29.97 or something, other rates as well. There's also 24, there's 30 frames per seconds, 60 frames... There's lots of different things that you may use. By default. In Australia, we like to keep it nice and clean and we will stick with 25. And that's what we'll do for the rest of these videos too. You may find 24 or 25 will do for us. And Square Pixels, super important. If you are doing stuff for web, square pixels is exactly what you're after. If you're doing stuff for broadcast, sometimes you might need something different. But basically what that means is what you see in your Comp Window is what you're going to render out. A square, goes in as a square and comes out as a square. If that is set to something different, sometimes the way that things go to broadcast and they get stretched and distorted. So then you need to counter that. We don't need to do any of that. We're just keeping a clean. Squares be squares. The other stuff in the bottom, they are the most simple to change and the things you’ll probably change all the time. Now, that is, the resolution. You do not need to set that, That is just your preview. That’s.. We have full control over that when we’re in there. Leave it on full that's fine. Start timecode, when does it start guys? Sometimes After Effects does make sense. So it's starting at the beginning. That's what 00:00:00 means. And duration. obviously, how long does it last? Now, important to note what these little sections And what they mean, because it can be misleading. So this one is actually hours, minutes, seconds, and this guy, is frames. So it's really important to remember that the last two figures are your frames. They're not seconds, they are frames. And the frames is this base. So that means if I change this number here to be 24, great! Ten seconds and 24 frames long. However, if I change it to 25, that will make the duration 11 seconds because it has a base of 25 frames. So whenever this number hits 25, it rounds up to a second, because it's 25 frames per second. For this comp, we'll do ten seconds. That should be plenty. The last thing to be aware of is your background color. The background color means nothing for the render. It is purely for your preview. I’ll change it so we can see it. So that's particularly if you've got things that are transparent and you wanna be able to see what you're working with. But for our case it means absolutely nothing. But I'll show you what you can do anyway. So you can click on it to change the colour. do an orange, that’s fine and that will make the background colour of our composition orange. But as soon as we render, it will still render black because there's nothing there that is just for our preview. There's the preview of that composition. There is no orange solid background. Just keep that in mind. Then if I hit, OK, we can see that we've got a new comp. So we can see the orange that we set as the background. We can see that our timeline now has figures in it and we can scrub through, there's nothing there, but we've got controls now. And we can also see in our pantry, there is a new object and that is our Animated Bee Buddy comp. It's got a new icon for compositions. And we've got our two assets here. So everything is in the pantry in the same way. So what I like to do now that I've got my comp, is manage my pantry a little bit, I love a good tupperware moment and make some folders with this little button down the bottom here. I'm just going to make two of them. I'm going to click and then hit Enter to name them. I'm going to have one called _Assets. and one called _Comps. I'm going to drag and drop my little bee buddies into assets and my animated bee boi into. It just keeps everything nice and tidy. It means that if somebody else needs to use my file or I come back in six months and I want to have another go, I can find everything. These parts. These are my real ingredients and this is all the cakeage that I've made. 6. Organising your Ingredients: Now that we've got some stuff in our pantry, we've got our cake tin ready to go. We can start bringing stuff into a mixing bowl and having a little, having a little play. Firstly, I'm going to bring in is my daisies because that's gonna be my background. So I'm gonna click and drag that into my timeline. So you can just click and drag it into either the timeline or your Comp Window. You’ll notice if you pop it in the Comp Window, you have control over where it goes, so that can be handy. For a background though, I want it to be smack bang in the middle. So I'm just going to drag it into my timeline, that is automatically what it will do. So I've got my daisies in the bottom there, I'm going to bring the Bee Boi in as well. I'll bring him into my scene. Then. There's my buddy. So you can bring in one layer at a time or you can bring them in altogether, does the same job. But what's important to know is that After Effects works in a layering system. So think of it like pieces of paper. So if I've got my bee character and I've got my background, if the bee is on top, then I can obviously see it. But if the bee's at the bottom of the layer stack, I can't see it behind the background. So whatever is bigger, will hide it. So really do think of it like stacked pieces of paper. I'm going to make these a little bit clearer as well. My default has these layers set to be gray. Yours will probably be something else. So I'm going to change these with the little grey box that's on the left here. You can click on that and you can change it to whatever you like. I have messed around with mine so that they're nice and organized. You will have the default After Effects colours, most probably. But you can find some nice, clear bright colors, whatever works for you. And I'm gonna make my background green cos, grass or something. And then the bee, I'm going to make that yellow so I can tell the difference. And then I'm also going to lock the daisies. There's a little icon that has a little padlock on it. If I could take that on the matching layer, I can no longer click it. And it means I can't grab it accidentally because I'm gonna be animating the bee, not the background. So I want to keep that locked so I don't bump it. Some other handy things while we're here is this little dot. We can take that per layer. What that does is it solos whatever layer you’ve selected. If you've got hundreds of layers, that can be really helpful just to figure out where something is all focused on something for a moment. That little solo. And similarly, you can turn the eyeball off on any layer. In this case, because we've only got two layers, they are fundamentally doing the same thing. But if you've got heaps of layers, you might say how that can be useful. 7. Position Property: So we're ready to actually start looking at this properly now. we're gonna look at the properties available on a particular layer. Now in this case on our bee boi, I can move my little guy around the same, just grab him and move him in the comp window. That's awesome. But nothing's animating. It's just moving. If I scrub through my timeline, nothing changes. He's just either there or it's here. But he's not animating, right? So to animate it, we need to be looking at the properties. So to get to our properties, I'm going to use a term called twirl. And we're going to twirl down this teeny tiny little arrow. Whenever I say, twirl, you're looking for this tiny little arrow. There's another one. So we’ve twirled down to our transform properties. That's where we are right now. In After Effects, the base type of animation you will be doing is your transform animation. So that's working with these five key transform tools. We've got anchor point, position, scale, rotation, opacity. They are the magic five. That's what we'll call the magic five. Sure. I'm going to show you one by one what we’re.. what they do, what they mean. But basically anything that you see with a stopwatch, that is this little icon here, means you can activate a property. We're not gonna do that just yet, but that's, they’re the tools that can be animated. First up, we're going to look at the position property. That's the most important one. So first of all, if I grab my bee and move them around, you can say the position value changes. You can say those numbers are just going haywire. So that is one way to adjust a position value. We can also click and drag on one of the values. So each one represents a different axis. So we've got x and y. So x is horizontal, y is vertical. So clicking and dragging. You can also click. And that will open up a text box. And you can put in a value. So for example, if I want it to be perfectly in the corner 0,0, so that's the very beginning. If I want it to be in the opposing corner. This means that you need to remember the dimensions of your screen. You have the corner 1920 x 1080. I never do things by that system because I'm not that good at remembering numbers. I would generally for position, drag it around in the comp window to whatever looks good. But that's the position property. 8. Scale Property: The next property we're going to look at is the scale property. That very similarly to the position property, you can adjust in a few different ways. So we can click and drag on a value to change it. And you'll notice both values work together. So again, we've got x and y. So horizontal and vertical. As I clicking and dragging or click and type of value. You'll notice the scale property, unlike position, has this little link icon. Now what that means is that by default these chains are linked. And that means that this value is the same as this value. They work together, not necessarily the same, but they work together, right? If I want them to be different, I can unlink. And then I can scrub those values independently or click and type them independently. So that's super handy if you're doing squash and stretch, which is an animation principle we'll talk about later. But it's good to have that control. The other way we can adjust our scale is with the bounding box itself. So you see these little corners, a little boxes on the corners. And we can just click and drag to adjust the scale. It will just go whichever which way it's so pleases, unless you hold Shift and then it will maintain the proportions. You can see that that's working because in our scale value, we can see that those numbers are married on either side. If I stop holding Shift, it'll just go nuts. Now, you'll also notice, actually, if I go backwards, It's also just affecting my scale with the first value being negative. So to turn something backwards, we'll flip it. That is by making it a negative scale on whichever dimension you need to flip. So we wanted it to be upside down. I'm just doing this by clicking and dragging. I can also do it by unlinking and making one value negative. Does the same thing. I'm just going to reset it. Just a manageable scale for now. I'll just have 60 for this guy for the moment. But that is the scale property. 9. Wotate and Anchor Point: Next we're going to talk about two properties in tandem. We're going to talk about the rotation tool and the anchor point because I kind of work hand in hand. But first we'll look at the rotation tool. Now that is this guy here. And we'll notice we have two values. The first value is, uh, it represents full loops of the 360 degree rotation. Bit confusing, bear with me. So we've got full rotations as the first value. The second value is up to 360 degrees. So if I click and drag on this, I can see that first of all, my bee is moving in the Comp Window. And as I keep moving around, it'll get up to 360 and it will take over to one full rotation and now it’s plus 15 degrees. Okay, and if I keep going, then goes to two and it'll keep going. So this value is full rotations. How many of those, right? And if I go backwards, I can also do the same. So it'll go to negative rotations, right? So the first value is full rotations. The second is between negative 360 and up to 360. So if you're only doing little rotations, like a little bit of an uppy downy kind of moment. You won't need to mess with this at all. But this is really helpful if you're doing something that does full circuits, like a propeller on an airplane, for example. But it's really important to be aware of the two differences. Because if you start animating and you've accidentally use this one, as you scrub through, the bee will just be absolutely haywire like a propeller. So just be aware of those two different tools and as far as how to use them, same as before, we can click and drag. Or we can click and type. If you know exactly what degree you want it to be on a 45-degree angle. Great, you can click and type that. We can also use the Rotate tool, which is this guy. Up the top, where I can click and drag. Now the keyboard shortcut for the rotate tool is W. I like to think of it as W for Wotate So the w for wotate tool. If you want to go back to my normal selection, is just this guy up here or V for Selection. I haven't got a funny pun for that one. Now that will also take us into the next property, which as I said, works in tandem with the rotation tool. So that's the anchor point tool. Anchor, Anchor Point tool is this guy here. Now that represents the crosshair of where our character Wotates from. So if I use my wotate tool, I can see it pivots from the middle there. But if I go up to this tool up here, or use Y on the keyboard. And that means I can click and drag on this crosshair and move it wherever I want. So if I move it to the bottom, then jump back to my rotate tool. Can say it pivots from the bum. If I jump back to Y and I move it to the face, and then jump back to W for wotate. Pivots from the face. So you can see how that could be quite handy when you get to rigging in particular. In this case, I'm going to put the anchor point kind of around the center of gravity, which for a cartoon bee, we're kinda making it up. But it looks roughly like it would be a little bit around the belly area, kind of there-ish. If I rotate that, that feels kind of balanced. If you imagine balancing the little bee on your fingie. Kind of where he'd pivot from maybe. And that's where I'll keep it for now. But that is the rotate and the anchor point tool. So yeah, anchor point, I prefer to use the tool in the toolbar rather than the values. And I'll show you why they're a bit mediocre. But you click and scrub to change them, or type a value same as anything else. But you can see that your image moves around your anchor point, which is quite cumbersome to work with sometimes. I prefer to move the anchor point rather than move the image. So that's why I prefer using the tool, but you can absolutely use these figures as well. 10. Opacity Property: The last property to look at is the opacity. That's least boy, down the bottom. And that is so straightforward. You can see by default it's set to 100%. If I scrub that, down to 0 he's invisible. Back up *whistles* Wee-oo wee-oo, that's, that's it. That's all there is to it. So clicking, scrub, click and type. If you know exactly the ghostiness you want, if you want a little ghosty bee, you absolutely can, be my guest. But that's it. So obviously, that's going to be handy if we need to keyframe something fading in and out. Um, it's also really handy if you want to keyframe, something on and off, you can have those keyframes really close together. But that's it. It's a hundy or less. It's all about percentage. 11. Shortcuts: Something really handy to know in After Effects is keyboard shortcuts. It just speeds up the process and gets everything flowing. All these transform tools have a keyboard shortcut associated so you can see them in your timeline quickly. So at the very beginning I was talking about twirling down Properties. Sometimes you've got heaps of properties, you've added effects, you've got all sorts of extra jazz. So you want to just quickly open the one property. So to do that, for all the properties, they are the first letter of the word. (Mostly) We've got Anchor Point is A. Position, is P, Scale is S, Rotation is R and Opacity is T. For Transparency. I don't know why they didn't do that, but here we are. A, P, S, R, T. And if you need to have two open so position, you've already got position open and need scale as well, just to add Shift, as you click. So shift + click will remove or add just that one property while leaving everything that's already open, still open. Otherwise you can always still twirl. Very handy. But those little shortcuts will save you a lot of time and effort when you're trying to find a particular property down the track. 12. Key Framing: So we know the tools, now it's time to actually move our little buddy and animate it. So for this guy, I'm going to start with position, keep it nice and simple. I want the little buddy to start out of frame. So I'm going to grab him and move him out of frame. So I'm going to start with my little bee buddy outside of the frame. This is where the timeline gets really important. It's really important to keep track of your mixing bowl that you're actually putting things in at the right ratios at the right time. Okay? So the moment, my little timeline marker is way over the right-hand side of the screen, I don't want that needs to be at the beginning because I want the bee to come in from the beginning. So I'm going to move the little marker to the beginning. Everything that you do on these properties relates back to where you are in time. I'm going to activate a property. That's when I click that little stopwatch we were talking about before. You can see when you click a stopwatch, it goes blue, I get a little hand on it, like a time hand, and I get a little diamond here, and here. Lot of stuff happens you guys! I've got, the property is activated, which means that it's recording. So any changes that I make from here on, it's going to keep track of that property. So now I see when I move my timeline marker across, this little blue dot is no longer there. It's a little grey dot and my arrow is available. What that is showing me is whether I'm on a keyframe or not. Because that's what this little icon is. This is a keyframe. So while I'm directly above it with my timeline marker, this will be blue. When I'm not, it's empty and grey. and it has a little arrow that shows me there is something there. There is a previous keyframe that I can click on, so I can get back to it. So just handy to know those little tools. But now important to animate it, I can move along in time, my little bee starts on the left of frame, and I move along, say 1 second. We can adjust it later, don't stress about nailing at the first go. We can just grab our little bee buddy, move him into fine. And we will see, hopefully, there is a motion path that is popped out behind. That means our bee is animating. It's animating over time. That line, that first represents where he is on the first frame, and then it goes to where he is now We can see when we scrub through that our little bee moves. Now to actually play it, I'll hit the spacebar. Now, if you do not have a motion path, that means rather than just moving your bee, you've clicked the stopwatch again. So it's really important, you only need to activate the property once. Once it's activated, that's it. You don't need to click the stopwatch again. In fact, clicking the stopwatch will delete all of your keyframes. So really important that you activate, then leave it alone. But super handy if you want to start again, which I do regularly, so don't be afraid of that. So I'm just gonna do it again. So I'm going to put my bee over to the side. I'm going to click the stopwatch to activate it, move along in time and bring him into the frame. I'm kinda lining him up with this little flower here. So, *boonk*, pop him there. If I play that, I feel like that's too fast. So what I can do, once I've keyframed, these keyframes can move. They can move along in time. If I want it to be slower, I'll move the keyframes further apart. If I want it to be faster, I'll move them closer together. I reckon around about here feels right. The path is super weird. It looks like an escalator, but we're going to fix that. But it's one step at a time. Now, you might notice these little dotties, these little motion path dot is important to be aware of them. We'll play around with them quite a bit later. But for now, they are a handy tool to know when your thing is getting faster or slower. Because at the moment we can see they're kinda close together. But if the time it gets faster, they get really far apart. What those dots represent is where our bee is at each frame. Because this timeline, at the moment I can see that, that it's got S's, which means Seconds. If I zoom in. So I'm holding Alt and use my mouse wheel. Or I can use these little mountains to zoom in. If I zoom in, I can say they become Fs, which is Frames. If I zoom all the way in, I can see that each frame, when I scrub through, my little bee is moving to a different dot on my timeline. That is what those dots represent, where is the bee, from frame to frame? We've only keyframed the first and the last. But we've got all these little indicators along the way that show us what After Effects is figuring out for us. So it's interpolating. (Write that down for later.) It's interpolating from one keyframe to the next. We can change how those dots are represented and how we get from A to B. But for now, keeping it as this is fine because we just want to figure out overall a general pace of our little guy. An important thing to be aware of once you've activated a keyframe is that it is always recording basically. So if I am at this point in my timeline and I've moved my bee, that's not going to move all of the keyframes. I'm just going to move that one position and create a new keyframe. Which might be what I want, but me personally right now, that's not what I want. So I can either undo or I can select that keyframe. So just click and drag around it, or click it and delete. And then it's gone. So really handy. Nothing is permanent in After Effects, you can always make changes. So I never feel like you have to nail something the first time. But do be aware of where you are in the timeline. So if you start nudging this guy around, just know that that's going to interpolate. If you would like your character to stay perfectly still. You can also use this tool here, to make a new keyframe that is not creating any new properties, is not moving in between here and there. But you've got a, another keyframe that's exactly the same as this one. So nothing, nothing is happening there. Which then means I could move him again. "Shwing" and also remember at anytime you can grab and move the keyframes all at once or individually, adjust those times. So it's also those dots that I was talking about before, it's handy to keep track of those because I can say this bit is going to move away faster than this bit. Because the dots are wildly different distances apart. So I can grab these keyframes and move them closer to the same *blub blub blub blub blub* But for now, I'm just going to animate the bee coming in. I'm not going to worry about the going out to yet. I'm just gonna do one bitty at a time. 13. Motion Paths: Once you've got something moving, it's time to make it look... not robotic. So part of that is the animation principle called Arcs. So things that are organic or naturally moving don't tend to move in straight lines or perfectly straight lines. So for example, with this bee, it'll be more natural if there was a bit of a curve to the motion. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to adjust this motion path so that it's no longer a straight line, I'm going to make it curve. The easiest way to do this is to jump up to the Pen Tool. This guy here. If you want the keyboard shortcut, it's G for Pen Tool, and I don't have a good way to remember it, so I never use the shortcut. But if we click and drag on the path we'll get some handles. You may already have some handles depending on how your motion path is set up. You might have some little dots. You can just grab those, and move them. If you decide, You know what? I don't want that to be curly, that's fine. Just click, still with the pen tool selected, just click on that point, and that will move those handles. That's all you need to do. So click and drag to create handles on points that already exist or just normal click to remove them. The way that these handles work is your classic pen tool from most of the Adobe suite. It kinda works, if you think of it, this kind of magnetic. So this handle is kinda dragging this curved line. And the further you pull it, the less kind of responsive it gets to it because it starts reacting to another handle. Just a quick Hawt Tip here, If you're finding the pen tool a little bit tricky, I highly recommend having a look at this website, bezier.method.ac It's a free online game that is for getting better at the pen tool. It uses all of the Adobe keyboard shortcuts so you can use it exactly as you would in any Adobe program. And then you're tracing shapes. And the more accurate your shape tracing, the higher your points. So really simple, really fun and effective way to kind of get the hang of the Pen tool. But yeah now you get a more natural flow. I'm going to keep tweaking this, so it looks a little bit more natural again. I'm just going to make it come from a bit higher up. Just thinking about where I want the bee to be coming from, trying to make it, I dunno, as convincing a story as possible while still being a giant cartoon bee. Now if you wanted to, you could have another point up here or even down here. Once you've got curves on your path that will kind of continue, they won't automatically be linear paths that we had before. So just bear that in mind. And again, same thing, pen tool, click to remove if you want. or click and drag to add them. Now the reason we may not want to have keyframes at every point is just so we have a bit more control over the easing, which is going to become clear down the line. In software that uses tweening, which is After Effects or Adobe Animate, you want to use the least amount of keyframes possible. Generally speaking, this is just a guide, not a rule. And that is because you want to be ease it smoothly. Easing is what I was talking about with adjusting these dots along the line, so we can tell After Effects to interpolate differently. If we've got heaps of keyframes, it just means that it's a lot harder to get After Effects to figure it out if you've kind of made it a bit more complicated. So two is good, and three is absolutely hunky-dory. In fact, I may even make it do a little bit of a swoopy moment, that could be fun. And I wouldn't be able to do that with just two. So just feel free to have a little play around and see what works. But yet, whatever you do, just try to avoid, there's no need to make the path curved, with this many keyframes. You should be able to figure that out just with the pen tool. Let After Effects do the heavy lifting for you. Just because yeah, it'll become really difficult down the track to smooth out that timing. 14. Beezing: Now that I've got a bit of motion happening, It's all very steadily paced, there's no variation in the action. And I wanna, I wanna add a bit of drama. So what I want to show you next is some really simple easing. And that's where we adjust these dots on the motion path. So I'm going to cut to something else just to show you how that works. So here we've got four bees, technically doing all the same thing, but totally differently. So the first and last keyframes are in exactly the same place. So they line up exactly the same. However, if I go to the middle, they're all at completely different times. These guys are actually not too far off. But you can see as we scrub through, They go at different paces in between. So if I grab all of them, we can see the differences on their motion path. But hopefully you can see what I'm getting at. The very top one is this guy. All the dots are perfectly evenly distributed. That is linear easing, that is straightforward, bish bash bosh, no change done. This guy, you can see the spaces in the middle are further apart than the ones on either end. That has got some basic easing on both keyframes. Now I can see the difference in my timeline. Top ones, a little diamond shapes and the ones underneath on this layer, are little hourglass shapes. That's what your keyframes look like when they've been eased in and out. These ones, the diamond, are your linear keyframes. You can see the difference in your timeline as well, so you get a bit of an indicator as well as seeing on your motion path that there is variation in the spaces. What's happening with the other two is we've got easing at the beginning and nothing at the end. So you can see it all gets quite even in the end. And then the bottom one is the opposite. So they're all quite close together. Now remember, close together means that it's slower. So that might be confusing thinking this is slower here, why is that in front? Why is that basically coming first? Because to make up the time, if that bit needs to be much slower than it needs to be much faster over here to allow it to have space to be slower because it's still gonna be done by the same amount of time. Now there is no playing with any graph editor at this stage. And you can still get quite a bit of variation. So as much as we can, I'm going to keep it simple so you don't have to belly flop into the graph editor. Easy Ease will get you a really long way. I'll show you a little bit, but don't be afraid of just sticking with a linear keyframe and an Easy Ease, that'll get you miles. Now. How do we actually do it? Great, great question, everyone. Thanks for asking. So if I just hide these guys, for a tickitty boom, and I look just at my bee boi. So what I can do if I know that I want a keyframe to be eased, I want it to be slower around that frame, I can just select the keyframe, either drag and select or, just click it. Then right-click > Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease. That's the option that we're after. And you'll notice that the shortcut there is F9 and there we go, I can see him move in the middle of the motion path there. And a little dotties have gotten closer together at this end and further apart of this end. If I play that now, he should slowly take-off, and then kinda hits with an impact. So it's not particularly dramatic. But if you picture yourself driving a car, you don't start at speed, you gain speed. You start slow and build up. And generally, if everything's gone well, you'll slow down to come to a stop. So then in that case, you would have easing on both ends, if this was a car or if this was a bee with plans and somewhere to go, you would start off relatively slow, gain speed, fastest point would be in the middle, and then come down to a stop. Right? However, if you're a little bit enthusiastic, might become a little bit harder. So just to remove the easing, I'm just selecting the keyframe and command clicking or control clicking. And that will remove the easing F9 to add easing, control-click to remove easing, *shwing*, *boonk*. So to remove it again, just control-click and we're back to linear. So I'm going to jump back to our other bee buddy for a bit and we'll see what we can do on this one. So I want to keep it as simple as possible, just using Easy Ease. There are Ease Ins, Ease Outs. I think we can get away with most of the things we want to do with Easy Ease. I personally don't use ease in and ease out. I exclusively use Easy Ease and then play with the graph editor to make my adjustments. Everyone has their own system, so figure out what works for you. But we're just going to look at keeping it simple with Easy Ease and linear keyframes. That's all we're really going to explore together. So if I want my little buddy to kinda gain speed from the beginning and get, gently land down on the flower, Then I'll put easing at the beginning, and then at the landing point. But I don't want this to change, I want that to be kind of constant. It's cute. A nice little settle there. If I wanted the bee to kinda *boonk* onto the flower, then I need to try something different. So I might take the easing of there. And I'll probably want this to be a bit closer here. So I can see these dots get further apart, which means that happens faster if I just play that now what's that gonna do? I've only got easing at the beginning. Aw there we go. So I can see it gets a little bit clunky there, it suddenly speeds up. So what I might want to do this is when we get a little bit curly, I'm going to make this the height of my ramp up, I guess, I'm trying to think of the right terminology. This would be the height of my arc. Then I'm gonna get him to slow down here. This is going to ruin it for a second, but bear with me. So the thing about Easy Ease, is that your motion path will come to a stop. The action stops at that point. It default slows you down all the way to 0. A little tippitty toe, into the graph editor to show you what's happening. I'll start back at the Beezing Comp. So. The Graph Editor, what is it? Where is it? Why do we have to know what it does? It's this guy here. She's beautiful, but she's scary. Okay, I'm going to click on my graph editor and we're going to see what we see. At the moment. I see nothing because I haven't got any layers selected or any animation properties. Alrighty. So the graph editor works in speed. So the y-axis is speed at pixels per second. So right now I can see 0 pixels up to 100 pixels. That's what those numbers represent. And then the horizontal axis is time, as the timeline has always been so far. So if I select one of my bees, in this case the first one, which is my linear keyframe, I can see what's happening here. The bee is constantly moving at approximately just above 600 pixels per second. If I hover over that, I can see it's 640. Those numbers mean nothing, it is going at a constant speed. Great. Now if I go to the second one, I can see this nice little arc situation happening, which means down here, as opposed to this first one, where the first keyframe is up the top, the first one starts down here. So it's starting at 0 pixels per second, and then gaining speed all the way up to here, dropping back down to 0 pixels per second. So comparatively, perfectly steady pace, varied pace. And you'll also notice that this one, we said, what was that? 640 pixels per second was a steady pace the whole time. This one, the highest speed, is going to be higher than the linear keyframes. It's 960ish, That's to make the space for this to go slow. So if you're gonna go slow here, you need to go comparatively faster in the middle to be able to get to the end in time. I'm just going to interject on my own video with a little note that, if this is not the graph that you see, Don't worry, friends, do not worry. What you may be seeing instead is something a little bit like this. This might be what you're seeing instead. This is the value editor. I like working with the speed editor. Every animator has their own preference. The speed graph makes more sense to me than the value graph. So if you would like to change it, to follow along, you need to go to this guy, then you'll go to Edit Speed Graph. Editor Value Graph is what this guy looks like, and I'm pretty sure that's the default when you first open After Effects. If that's where you are, not a worry! Just switch it on over to the speed graph and you'll see exactly what I see. So we've got our linear keyframes. We can see what they are. The Easy Eased keyframes on both ends, and then we've also got what it looks like when you go easing at the beginning, versus easing at the end. I mean, surprise, surprise, they're the same. Now, the anatomy of the speed graph, what we've got here, are points on the graph. So you can grab these little handles. And adjust them and you'll notice our little bee buddy, the dots at the end there get really close together and these ones really far away. So this is the end. So this represents this point, this represents this point. Because I'm making this so shallow. The shallower the path, the slower the action. Which means if this is really slow to allow time for it, this has to be really fast. So if I play that through, we'll see him wizz off and then slow down. That's how you can kinda make variations to the graph. A really simple way without playing too deep. And I highly encourage you just to play, like play to the point that you break it and then unbreak it, that's how you learn. Don't be afraid of breaking it. It's an animated bee, it's going to be fine. Now, the other thing that we can do is we can move them vertically for their starting speed, or they kinda where the speed is at that point. This is what we wanna do on our little bee friend here. So this guy is reaching the point at the top of the arc and stopping. I don't want him to stop. I him to slow down, but don't want him to stop. So this is when with my property selected, I'll jump into my graph editor, grab this point, see it comes to a full stop? I don't want that, I don't want that guys! So I'm gonna grab it and drag it on up. I don't know where. Just somewhere. Just just higher than it was. I don't have a plan, let's just see what happens. So I'm dragging out the handles as well, so that it dramatically slows down. Boom. That's nice. It looks heavy. That's the drama I'm here for. So that's what we're doing with the graph editor. Like, you don't need to play anymore than that at this early stage. In fact, honestly this is probably too far. But look we're here guys. Moving your key points off the baseline, off that 0 keyframes per second, that's how you can get things to stop stopping. If it's all a bit much. I think it looks perfectly fine with a bit of F9 on it. A little bit of *zjoomp* and settle. That's nice. That's beautiful. Nothing unconvincing about that. However, I personally, I am gonna go back in and adjust my easing, so I've got a nice slow in the middle and a good bit of *OOMPH* at the end, because I personally, love a bit of drama. But it is entirely up to you to decide on the easing that's working for your bug. This is the important thing about easing, is what's the intention? Was the motivation behind your character's action? Now that character could be a textbox, that character could be a bee, in this case, obviously. But what drives them to move there? We're recreating the illusion of life with animation. Easing that really helps us do that. So are we moving with emphasis? Are we moving excitedly? Are we sluggish because we are a bee that's eaten too much honey? Are we peppy? Are we sad? Are we sombre? All the ways that we can adjust the timing and easing in After Effects is how we can show that personality and that intention. 15. Rotating with Mass: Continuing on with our plan to give our bee intention and kinda mass is what we're looking at next. So my guy has got quite a bit of oomph at the end there. I can keep nudging this until I'm happy, like don't worry about anything being shmicko at any particular point. It's about doing it in layers and stages and keeping tweaking it. But what I'm gonna do next, generally my process is positioned first, then rotation. So that's what I'm gonna do now. I'm going to rotate my little buddy so that he, well, lines up with the flower. That's important. But he kinda show some weight along the way. He's already been to a flower, he's picked up a lot of stuff and he's going to show that mass with him. So I'm going to activate my rotation keyframe. There is no science to this. I'm going to straight up eyeball this. So I'm going to, in this case, when it's not in my frame, I need to use the bounding box as my reference. So I'm going to start with thinking about if I'm carrying a heavy load, it's my top half that's weighed down. In the case of a bee, that's your face. Your top half is your face. So I'm going to start with him tilting down a little bit. Then when he finally gets to the top. And just a little bit past there, that's when he's going to straighten up a little bit and maybe even a little bit overdo it because he's coming into land, he's eyeing this off. And then here I'm going to make sure that he's facing right. That's about it. I'm going to nudge him down because I didn't line him up probably in the first place. And if I play that back... I think that's cool, but I think I'm going to exaggerate. Yeah that's nice. So again, just a bit of easing. That's alright. Like it doesn't, it's not done. We've got more to do here gang, but it's coming a long way. So the rotation, look, if I just take this off again just real quickly, and just see what that looks like. Super stiff. Without rotation, we don't believe it's really moving in the air and really got any, any purpose for being here, like in a really rude kind of way, might even give him another one. Why don't we give him another keyframe? Whadda reckon? It's going to start a bit straighter actually. You don't notice much, it's just this little tip. That's quite nice. That's good. So again, it's just about playing with it, seeing what works. Obviously, I have done this a few times, so I feel pretty confident about the bee that I'm after and you might not be, and that's absolutely fine. Don't be afraid to experiment. Something that I find really helpful, when animating characters are trying to personify something, is acting it out. And in this case with a bee, it's a single layer, I can use my hand as a puppet to try and help figure it out. So how would, my bee move? Would it go straight? Would it dart around? Would it do like, big curvies? These just animating my hand in the air helps animate the bee in After Effects. 16. Squash and Stretch: Next up I'm gonna look at my absolute favorite principle of all time, Squash and Stretch It's everything about the animation principles is based in reality and then exaggerated to add animationy, kind of drama and squash and stretch is one of the funneriest ones to play with I reckon. It's the principle where things that move fast, get really stretchy and things that impact all of a sudden, Squash. So if you think of a tennis ball in the air, it's quite stretchy and when it hits the ground or hits a racket, it flattens. That's what we're doing. And depending on how elasticy you're imagining this bee is, that's how much squash and stretch we will add. The thing about doing squash and stretch in After Effects is it's a little bit mathsy. If you're not a maths fan... On behalf of After Effects, I apologize. However, it has been very kind and it has, After Effects has got some systems in place so that it can do equations for you. You don't actually have to be good at maths. It's okay, It's going to hold your hand through it. What I need to do first is figure out where I'm going to put it. Where does it need to squash and stretch? I think it's pretty steady pace throughout here. Maybe, honestly this is quite a fast bit. I can have a bit of stretch here. So coming into that impact. And then I'll do a squash right on here. And then I'm going to settle back. So the thing about a bouncy squash and stretch is that you don't go from neutral to fully stretchy too squishy back to neutral. It's a bit more of a back-and-forth. If you think of the bouncing ball and how it will gradually stop bouncing, that's the kind of thing that we're doing. Now, my process for adding squash and stretch is to add the keyframes first so that we've got nice clean numbers to work with. To add squash and stretch, what we're gonna do is we're going to use the scale property. I'm going to activate that property, where I want my first keyframe to be. And I want that to be right before my impact. And again, this is just on my bee, you might be doing something different and you'll have an impact, you'll have a squash and stretch at a different point. That's totes fine. So I'm going to activate it. That's created a keyframe here. Then I move along, and the impact is going to be another keyframe. That's what I'm going to press on this little diamond, this add or remove keyframe. So that's going to create a new one that's exactly the same as the previous. Then I'm going to move along a little bit, add another. Move along, add another. Now when I say a little, I'm looking at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 frames. I'm going to start animating now that I've got some basic key frames, they're all set exactly the same. Nothing's happening. It's 60, 60, 60, 60, 60. But they are there, so that ,because squash and stretch works with your x and y values, having clean numbers to begin with is much easier than having to figure out the math from where you are, as you progress. So, if I do my squash first, that's gonna be the easiest to process, I think. So I will unlock my scale property. And what I want is this first value is gonna be bigger. I'm going to make it like 62, not much bigger, just a little bit bigger. A little bit bigger. Maybe I'll make it 64 so it's a bit more obvious while we're looking at it. Now. The thing with squash and stretch, particularly in motion graphics, you want to try and maintain mass as much as possible. To do that, when you're doing scale is quite simple. Whatever you add to this side, take away from this side. So I've added 4 there. I'm going to take away 4, which means that is 56. And that will be the same overall volume. So if I just play that, you can already kinda see what's happening. *Boonk* That's fine. It's gonna be, we're gonna make it more bouncy than that, but we can kind of see what it's doing. Now. I'm going to add a stretch as well. I think I'm a keyframe or two short. So I need to add another at the beginning because I want this bit to be a bit stretchy. So this will be the opposite of what we just did here. This is squashing. And I want this to be stretchy. So by that principle, I can assume this will be 56 and this will be 64. Because it's literally the opposite figures of this one. The thing about really good animation, you don't notice it. You notice bad animation. If it's good, it just looks right. It's really hard to see if got it. So it's really about going through the minutiae of it. But all I reckon that looks pretty good. Now to get it back to 60, I'm not going to go straight back. So we've got the first value is bigger, second value is lower. I'm going to go straight back to 60. I'm going to, kinda, overshoot. Which means rather than this going back down just to 60, I'm gonna go a little bit past where it should, and my difference originally was 4, so I'm gonna make a difference 2, so it'd be 58. This one, again differences 2, but I'm adding this time, 62. So I've got 60. The difference of 4. Difference of 4 on the other side. Difference of 2 on the other side. Back to 60. A little bounce. I'm going to bump these up because that felt too far apart for my liking. I'll go up, bung some good old easing on it. That's the ticket. That's the stuff. *boonk* watch the whole piece coming together. Done. Oh, she's magic. *bloop* 17. Putting it all together: So now I'm gonna get this little bee to continue moving on. It's pretty much using everything we've already done. There's just a couple of funny things that may happen. I don't want to make sure you're prepared for before you run off to do your own buggies. So for example, I want him to sit still for a bit before he jumps away. So that means the position, I need another keyframe here, I'm going to hit that. And that is going to make this keyframe the same as this keyframe. However, those with a keen eye may see that I've got a handle sticking out. What's that about? And if I scrub back, oh my gosh, what's happening? It shouldn't be moving here. That's because I have a curved path before it. After Effects is like, "I know what you want me to do." "You want me to continue those curves yeah?" " Yu want me to continue the curve for ya?" No friend. I don't. What you need to do is grab your pen tool, grab the handle, drag it back, just get rid of it. Now when I scrub through, it should sit still. He's squashing and stretching, that's fine. But the position is no longer moving. That kind of thing, that'll happen all the time. After Effects is trying to be helpful. But generally speaking, it's not that helpful. One thing you can do to reduce the amount, that's silly thing happens, is if you go up to Edit > Preferences > General, you will find a little button. This guy, it's the most complicated phrase I've ever heard. Default spatial interpolation to linear. Tick it my friends. Tick it. What that means, default. We know the word default that is normally, usually, generally, always, start with. Spatial interpolation, that is your motion path in space. Not in time, not how the speed goes, but how it looks in space, how it moves in space. That's what spatial interpolation is. To, we know the word to good work everyone. Linear, straight lines. Do you want your lines to be curvy by default or straight by default. That's what that means. We want them to be straight by default, straight unless told otherwise. Because of those points where we want it to sit still. By default, we want it to... Default we want it to be straight, so that we can have it sitting still. Make sure that is ticked. You will still get those funny buggers sometimes, but generally, you should be okay. So he's sitting still and then I'm going to do the position over to this leaf, over to this flower back here. Now in this case, I'm going to scale as we go because that's in the distance, so I want it to get smaller. Now. I'm not going to manually do both sides. No no no. No no no no. I'm going to lock them again and do them together. *bloop* that feels rightish. I'm just going to take the easing off while I'm testing these out. I'm gonna say that's about right. Maybe a bit bigger. Yeah. That's alright. Cool. So now, the scale and position are working together. So it's important to keep these keyframes together, so I don't stagger them, because he'll scale down and keep moving, It'll look like a weird little slide. They've got to stay together so that they seem uniform. Now I'm going to do my curved path. Now, I'll adjust the placing a little bit, but I'm going to make it a little leap up, pop him up a bit, and curve the path ever so slightly. Cute. Now I want him to start off slow, ease bit at the top, and then again, come in with an impact because he's are chonky boi. Right. Now this guy is causing a little blip and that is because he's on the baseline again. So I'm going to zoom in a little bitty, grab it and move it up. That's better. Cool. Now, I'm going to add a bit of weight. So I've done my position, I've done some easing. Now, I'm going to do some rotation. That's cool. So I've adjusted my position so the rotation fits. Cool. A bit chonky, so I'm going to ease my rotations. Clearly, I go in with a plan. Doesn't matter if I've done it 20 times, I'm just fiddling, to see what we can get. I'm kinda happy with that. So I've got the same as I've done before is I've done position, bit of easing, then some rotation to support that action. The next thing is some squash and stretch. So it's coming in quiet impactfully, so I'll definitely need some of that. Now this is the other great reason to do your blank keyframes first, because This guy is scaling from 60% down to 45%. But I need to tweak it partway through that scale. So by having this scale set first and eased and matching everything else, then I can pop a neutral keyframe there, another one is already there. Then my overshoots. And my final, back to 45%. So that I'm going to be adding and subtracting from what I've already figured out. I don't need to do any crazy maths because I've already done the tricky part, really. So, my impact frame unlock again and I'm going to add to this side, so I'm going to do plus 3 maybe because he's a bit smaller than it was before, so I don't want it to be quite as squishy. And that's right, you can put it in an equation. You don't need to know maths, just need to know your plus symbols. Then I'm going to minus 3 from this side. Amazing. Move along, and this one is going to be the opposite. But half. So if that one was plus 3, then this will be minus 1.5. Then, plus 1.5. And then a bit of our old friend, easing. *bloonk* If I play that forward, it's really important to double-check it against your other ones, because sometimes you've made too wildly different bee leaps. Been there, done that multiple times. So good to check it still feels like the same character. I'm happy with that. Now if I want him to spin around, what I can do is keyframe, his scale. So whenever I'm doing a new action, will always turn off that easing because I don't want anything to carry across that I don't intend. Set one keyframe. And then I'm going to make this first value because that's my horizontal a negative. Then if that's moving quite a bit, which in our little buddy's case, it is. I'm also going to pop a keyframe, for the position. You're just going to snap to the new spot. I'm also going to do that with rotation. We'll have six keyframes or very close to each other that's fine. It's doing it's job. And we're ready to go again! That's our little bee buddy. Then we start doing the whole process over again. We'll set a keyframe again. Then move along in the timeline. And he's going to *whistles* And there we go! There's our little bee guy, bouncing about the daisies. Isn't he a little cutie pants?! 18. Your Turn: That's the basics of it gang. So using those transform tools along with the motion path techniques with the pen tool and getting it all working together. That's how you can create all sorts of different animation. Have another go at it. Bring a new bug into the scene and give it a different drive, a different intention. Maybe it's really tired, maybe it's real hungry. How does that kind of bug move using the tools that you've already learned? So keep in mind the process so that you can keep building on the animation as you go. So first step, anchor points, make sure everything pivots from the right place before you start animating. Step two, position getting from A to B, we how does is it, where does it go? Step three is how does it get there? So motion paths, do we do curved lines are they straight lines? Are there are few pit stops along the way? Step four is your timing. Make sure the pacing and spacing between those keyframes feels about right. Make sure you're pressing spacebar to play it back, not scrubbing through because that will give you a different impression of the timing. Step five is your easing. So a little bit at Easy Ease, maybe playing with the graph editor, if you feel ready, see what kind of *oomph* you can add to the action, then rotation, building on the motion, how does that indicate the rotation? Position movement will drive a rotation. If something is moving really fast, it will rotate a lot afterwards to make up for that action. And then step seven is your squash and stretch. My ol' favourite. When it's moving fast, it stretches, when it impacts it squashes. So make sure you add those little elements to varying degrees of complexity, entirely up to you and your animation style. 19. Rendering: Alrighty. You've animated the thing that's awesome! But at the moment it's still stuck in After Effects. So we need to render it on out so we can show our besties and brag about our sweet sweet new skills. So there's two ways you can render from After Effects. It's directly from After Effects or using a third party program called Media Encoder, which comes with After Effects. If you've installed After Effects, you will have it. So don't worry about that, but I will show you both so you can see the differences. And pick your own personal preference. GUYS! Whoah! Before we go and render.. We better, we better, save it! Hopefully, you legends have been saving as you've been going, I have not. So I'm going to jump up to File and Save As and save this file so that I don't lose all of my hard hard work. And save it - great work! That feels safer. Nice, now it is safe to render it on out. I'll show you through After Effects first because that's obvious. Now, with the composition you want to render open, with it selected. You know, it's selected because it's got a little blue box around it. You can be in your comp window or your timeline. Just don't be in your project window really because it doesn't know which comp you've got. I've got two in here. It doesn't know what I'm talking about if I'm just in that window. So just click on your timeline window is easiest. Go to Composition > Add to Render Queue or Control M. And that will bring up our render queue. A couple of key settings we want to make sure we've got turned on. Certainly, best settings. That's good, that, we want the best settings. Some of these things are quite self-explanatory. We can click on that and see all these different options. But really, it should be set correctly by default, the frame rate will be set to what we've told it to be. Best quality is exactly right. Full, great. You get these options so that you can do quick, like, work in progress renders, little WIPs. So you can reduce the quality if you've got something complicated. But we are doing the final one so we want Best Settings. Then output module. We'll go to click on that. So clicking on the blue text anytime you want to change something. Now this is where you decide all of your most important settings. So, from After Effects directly, you will have a list of options of format. Now, this is one of the reasons that you will choose either Media Encoder or After Effects because there's different options available. In this case, what we would be doing would be a Quicktime. Most probably if we're rendering out a video or an image sequence, we could do an image sequence from After Effects quite well as well. I would avoid doing an AVI, it's not particularly compatible with things, and some of these are sound files, so I'm not sure why you'd be rockin' sound in After Effects. So what we'll be doing is a QuickTime. Quicktime is obviously a super fance, high-scale, high-quality, crisp as heck video format. We don't always need this though, but it is good to have it as an option. So in our format options, we can go to video codec. And recently, I needed to render some Apple ProRes. So whatever you've done recently is what it's going to have ticked. If I go animation, nice, clean, simple. That's exactly what we need. I don't need Apple ProRes, it's going to be super huge. So I don't need a massive file for that. Now, with QuickTime, we also have the option of rendering things with the transparency. So if you are doing a logo animation for example, and you want it to be clear, have a clear background, you can do RGB and Alpha. So your colour and your transparent. This guy has got a big old picture of flowers in the background. So RGB, we'll do us just fine. We've got audio output options as well. So we don't have any audio, so I'm just going to turn it off. You don't have to do that. I just like to so that it's encoded in my file, it knows not to worry about sound. Then I'll hit OK. Now I'm gonna go into my output. So I click on that text and then I'll navigate to where I want to save it. Animated Bee Buddy, the name will be set based on the name of your composition. So that's called Animated Bee Buddy, So your file will automatically have that name. So you should be doing here is saving, is setting where it should be saving to, and you can update the name as well. Then when I'm happy with those settings, I will hit Render. And we'll see it preview And then you get that beautifully satisfying noise when it works. Now let's go have a squiz at it shall we?. There he is. Animated Bee Buddy. Lookin' a bit choppy, but that's my playback more than anything else. But there she is, beautiful. So that is how you can render out from After Effects. So the other way to render a video, which is my preference, is to go to composition, add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue, rather than just straight to the Render Queue. Add to Media Encoder Queue. Now I'm just going to open up Adobe Media Encoder, which is another program, which is very handy because it also means that you can keep working in After Effects and render the same time. Which does mean sometimes things take longer, but swings and roundabouts. So, here it is. I've got my little blue text there that tells me this is my comp it's going to render out. So if I click on that H.264, that will open up these settings. So similar to before, you've got one area where all of your main settings are. That's in here. So we've got format options as before, but you'll notice this list is a whole lot longer than the one available in After Effects. So you've got quite a few different things to work with. I'm going to work with a H.264 render first. I'm going to show you two things, but H.264 render is a MP4. So I can see when I set, pick a setting, pick a format, the extension changes. This is my MP4. If I go to QuickTime, it'll say MOV. So I wanna do a H.264 render. That'll be an MP4. I don't know why the universe decided to make that complicated terminology, but just remember, H.264 is an MP4 render. Really handy for online, nice and small size without losing anything major in you visuals. Your preset, we want it to match the source because we nailed it when we set up our settings. Match source just means what you said in the comp. That's what it's gonna do. So that means it's going to be 25 frames per second 1920 x 1080px. All those things that we told it to me. If we need something else, we can do that here. Just know that it's going to re-wrap if you get what I mean by that. And so really if it's not matching the source, you want to go back into your original file and adjust it. So what I tend to do is even though I've hit Match Source, I want to just scroll down and make sure everything is hunky-dory that I did indeed, nail it inside my comp. Width, 1920 x1080, sweet, 25 frames per second, perfecto! and square pixels stunning. If I did need to change these, I can do that, though it is best practice to jump back into your comp and change the settings there. Because otherwise you're asking Media Encoder to figure it out and it does its best, but it's best isn't always that great. That's about all we need. H.264. Click on this text here to set where you want it to go to. By default, it will try and be clever and pop it in an AME folder. I'm just going to leave it with the same name. Again, it's named after the comp. And then we'll go OK And all of these have been updated. So these three links will take you to the same place. So you only need to go into that one as it does the same thing. Then when you are happy and ready to render, you hit the little play button, which is the Start Queue button. And I can see him doing his thing. Unfortunately, you don't get a nice fun sound, but that's, that's fine. We'll cope. Here he is. *Doonk*. Look at that cutie patooty. Lovely. So now that you've got your MP4, I'll show you one of the main reasons that I will render from Media Encoder, from everything, for everything that's online. Look at dat file size. Wildly different. That is flipping huge. So this, MOVs, they are so high-quality, but they are at least a gigabyte most of the time, even for this 10-second little thing. Whereas a little MP4, that's 8.16 megabytes, That's beautiful, That's so manageable. Instagram does not need a MOV. That's fine. You can get away with MP4s No worries whatsoever. So everything that I would render for my own stuff is just an MP4. If you're doing stuff for TV and broadcast, you need to be fancier than that for suresies, but for just fun stuff, which this is all about, MP4s are yo friends. So Media Encoder is great for that, nice and small sizes. Now the other thing that you may want to render is a GIF. Now, Media Encoder is also great for doing that. When you've rendered one thing, the other handy dandy thing is you can just duplicate that render. So Control D to duplicate. And then I can change the settings. So it's rendering and referencing the exact same comp. Nothing is different about that plan, but you can change what the settings are. So I'll go to format. And this time I'm gonna go to Animated GIF. Not GIF, I want Animated GIF. Again, Match Source is good. That's great. Animated Bee Buddy, that names fine. What I am going to do though, GIFs set at 1920x1080 are flipping huge. We don't need them to be that big. GIFs tend to be nice and small and compact. So I am going to adjust the size. Now I could do it with presets. I don't want to, I want to have full control over the size. I'm going to untick this little box down under video where it says Basic Video settings, if I scroll down and we'll get to width and height. If I adjust that just to make it a bit more of a manageable size. I dunno, something like that, think about popping it on an email, or popping it online, it doesn't need to be huge. So 620 pixels seems fine to me. Again, if it's too small, we can re-render. No wozzies. But that'll do for this. And I'll hit, OK. And again, I will hit play. And let's see. There he is. And because we've made it smaller, that's a that's a reasonable size. We can work with that. We're going to have a little look-see-do. That ain't too bad. Now that is pretty much everything you need to know about the basics of animating in After Effects. Position, scale, rotation, animate a cool bee, render it out. upload it into the project gallery. I'd love to see what you've created! Well done you guys! 20. Wrap Up: That's it! You've done it. You're basically an animator now, congratulations! Hopefully this little class has given you a bit of an insight into the fundamentals of After Effects, taken away some of the mystique and the fear of getting stuck into the big beast, that is After Effects. There's loads more tools and projects that we can explore in After Effects, but hopefully with the help of Position, Scale, Rotation, you knew besties. You can see a way forward and creating all sorts of new projects. So keep creating guys.