Starting a New Composition
Philip Ebiner
Lesson Info
3. Starting a New Composition
Lessons
Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates
06:22 2Understand the After Effects Workspace
05:39 3Starting a New Composition
08:15 4CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage
01:55 5Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline
05:08 6Using the Basic After Effects Tools
10:20Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors
03:04 8Working in the Timeline
10:59 9Layer Properties
08:57 10Quiz: After Effects Basics
11Animating in After Effects
07:35 12Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations
05:17 13Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral
04:21 14Using the Graph Editor
05:32 15Challenge - Bouncing Ball
01:01 16Solution - Bouncing Ball
13:00 17Quiz: Animating with Keyframes
18Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects
07:07 19Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths
06:24 20Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients
03:44 21Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag
05:54 22Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers
23Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear
08:37 24Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers
05:34 25Easily Reverse Complicated Animations
02:14 26Playing with Time
05:54 27Blend Modes
06:05 28Stabilize Shaky Footage
04:04 29CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts
00:46 30CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time
03:36 31CC 2019 Content Aware Fill
03:55 32CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates
08:37 33Quiz: Important After Effects Skills
34Intro to Motion Graphics Projects
00:53 35Clean Lower Third
09:22 36Logo Reveal Animation Bumper
13:25 37Colorful Transition
16:59 38Text with Mask Path Animation
10:05 39Text Bubble Animation
13:39 40Weather App 1
16:41 41Weather App 2
08:21 42Weather App 3
06:59 43Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects
44Flat Animation Challenge
02:47 45Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene
01:23 46Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect
15:02 47Removing Green Screen Background
06:46 48Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground
07:55 49Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool
06:26 50Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect
06:07 51Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge
52Intro to 3D
10:04 53Swinging 3D Text Animation
12:11 54Build Out Your 3D Composition
05:47 55Animating Our 3D Scene
07:38 56Create Stars in After Effects
05:11 57Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)
58Using the Rotoscope Tool
06:55 59Cleaning Up Your Edges
07:21 60Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation
07:33 61Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool
62Easy Screen Replacement with Masks
09:56 63Replacing a Screen Version 2
13:49 64Screen Replacement with Mocha
07:13 65CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin
05:08 66Quiz: Rotoscoping
67Using the Puppet Pin Tool
04:33 68Animating Your Puppet Pins
03:04 69Animated Blinking Eyes
08:21 70Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds
07:10 71CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool
02:08 72Quiz: Screen Replacements
73Applying Text Animation Presets
05:59 74Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn
10:05 75Radial and Linear Wipes
03:20 76Color Correction in After Effects
03:33 77CC 2019 Update - Selective Color Adjustments
03:25 78Quiz: Puppet Tool Animations
79Motion Tracking Basics
09:51 80Tracking Text and Visual Effects to Video Clip
06:21 81Tracking Rotation and Scale
11:33 82Adding Details to Our Text
04:04 83Quiz: Motion Tracking
84Intro to Character Animations
01:31 85Design Your Character
14:32 86Rigging Your Character
02:50 87Animating Our Character
09:55 88Adding the Animated Background
09:12 89Adding Details to Character Movement
06:46 90Adding the Paper Cut Out Look
05:29 91Quiz: Character Animations
92Exporting an H264 File from After Effects
07:03 93Exporting from After Effects with a Transparent Background
04:03 94Exporting from After Effects through Adobe Media Encoder
04:40 95CC 2018 Update - Exporting an Animated GIF from Adobe Media Encoder
02:14 96Create an Animated GIF from After Effects CC 2017
07:03 97Audio Tips for After Effects
02:19 98Working with Premiere Pro
05:54 99Quiz: After Effects Workflow & Tips
100Expressions Basics
07:24 101Animate a Flickering Light with Expressions
17:35 102Quiz: Expressions
103Conclusion
00:44 104Final Quiz
Lesson Info
Starting a New Composition
let's start a new composition. There's multiple ways to do everything in after effects. Usually there's a button in the interface, there's often a keyboard shortcut, which you can get to if you go to help and then click on keyboard shortcuts. This will take you to the adobe website which has shortcuts for both Mac and pc users, which is really helpful. And then lastly there might be a menu option up here in the top. So if you go to composition, for example, you'll see the new composition button which will also show you the keyboard shortcut. I'm using a Mac so it's going to be command n or just click this button down here in the project panel. This brings up your composition settings window. Remember think of this as an individual video or maybe an individual clip that you're working on. You can always rename this later. But for example, I would just call this after effects one. You can name it whatever you want. Then you have all of your sequence settings under the basic settings, you...
have different presets. So if you're using a particular type of camera or footage, you would just select this one of these presets. For example, a lot of videos that I create. I'm shooting at 1920 by 1080 pixels. This is what you your standard HD footage is And I shoot at 29.97 frames per second. So I could find one of those presets that matches those settings such as this one. HD tv 10 18 29. that changes the width and height to match that. It also changes the frame rate down here and you can customize this stuff for yourself. For example, if you want to create a square graphic for example if you're putting on social media like facebook or instagram which like square graphics, you can just click in the width or the height and type in the pixels that you want. So if we want a square we can do 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels and that would work fine. Typically your pixel aspect ratio should just be left at square. If you run into an issue or if someone wants you to do it differently, you would select these but for most of the projects you're using just leave it at square next. You have your basically your timeline window options. The duration is an important one. This can also be changed later but this is where you set the duration of your composition which is different than again referring to premiere pro where if you start a new sequence, it can basically be as long as the video you add, you can keep adding clips. It can start out as a minute. But then as you add more clips It turns into two minutes, 10 minutes an hour. With After effects you set the duration in the beginning. So if you want a clip Or an animation to be five seconds long then you would set it as five seconds long. Like it shows here If you need it to be 10 seconds you would change this to 10 seconds. For example, this can also be changed later but it's good to start out with something shorter like so background color. This is the background of the composition. This just depends on how you want it to look. While you're editing. This doesn't actually change the background of the video itself. We'll be showing you how to add a background color in a future lesson. This is just think of it as the transparent background so that you can work in your project. Some people like a white background just to see what that looks like. Typically I'm just going to leave it as black when you're happy. Just click OK. And now you can see two things happen. One in our project tab. Over here we have this composition and then down here our timeline has sort of opened up and you can adjust your timeline to zoom in and out. You can see now that our timeline goes from zero seconds, 25 seconds. And then you have the frames in between 10 frames 20 frames then one second to zoom in. You can take this top bar the time Navigator and zoom in by dragging to the left or right. There's also this little slider at the very bottom for you to drag in and out and that allows you to zoom in and out. You can also use the plus or minus keys on your keyboard. Just a few more things about your composition panel down here at the bottom. You have different ways to adjust the view on the left, you have this percentage. This will depend on the resolution of your screen, you can zoom in According to a percentage and this will zoom into your composition at that percentage. So if you just want to set it at a smaller percentage, you can choose like 25%. So this is Moving your 100% resolution composition and shrinking it to 25%. If you want it to just match the size of this panel, You can choose fit up to 100 and now you can adjust the panel size by clicking on the edge and dragging upward down. And this is helpful because oftentimes I'll find myself adjusting the size of these panels so that I have more room in the timeline for example, and that way the video or the composition adjust while I change that panel. The other thing I want to mention right now is this resolution right now I have it set for full and this is the playback resolution, not necessarily the export resolution of your video and this helps if your computer is a little bit slower. Oftentimes my after effects students asked my computer is running slow. It's it's lagging the video, it plays back choppy, How do I make it play back smoothly? Usually the issue is that you don't have enough memory or RAM processing power in your computer. I recommend at least 16 gigabytes of RAM on a Mac. You can see that information by clicking the apple button and clicking about this Mac and you can probably find a similar setting on your pc as well in your computer settings. So here you can see that my memory is GB right here. Even still when I'm using with using high resolution footage like 4K footage, I do get a little bit of playback lag and so to fix that, we can actually decrease the resolution of our playback. This will play back at a lower resolution. So you're seeing a little bit lack of quality but that's better than having a choppy playback. In my opinion, the last thing I want to talk about right now with this composition panel is this button right here, which is the toggle transparency grid button. So see if I click that you get this checkerboard view when you see the checkerboard think transparent. So if you actually wanted to export this video right now with transparency, what you would get is just a blank video with nothing. It wouldn't even be a black background even though the background of our video is set to black. Remember what I talked about in the composition settings which you can get back to if you go to composition composition settings or command K on your keyboard. See the background color is black. If I set this at white, for example, click OK. And then click OK. If I click the transparency grid button again, it still shows that it's a transparent background. We're going to see how this comes to play when we create graphics like titles and we want to put them on to other videos in the future. But just know that you can click this button to see what in your composition is transparent. That's the basics of starting new compositions. In the next lesson, we're going to be importing graphics into our project panel and then we're going to be moving on and actually working with our composition and adding new layers.
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