Going back, tio, you're going to see all open up some of the themes projects over and over again just because so many steps in our processes kind of feed off from that and there's a little bit of overlap here where I think it's necessary that we're not re inventing things that oh, I'm familiar with what we did there, so let's, move on to the next step. So I've got this the basketball here, and what I've done is I've duplicated this, uh, loop the looping file so it's duplicated, so runs out for ten seconds here and it's, the little cartoon one there. So what I want to do is create sub calms, basically sub calms there's two different ways we can do that, we can select several layers, so let me say, I want to select five layers I just shift select those aiken, right, click on that, and I can select pre compose, and what that does is it gives me, uh, chance to put them all into one composition and then give them a new name. And I could say, let me to say, this is, uh, that's five loops, so...

I'll just call it five loops, okay, and then we'll see here oh, here's a new composition here that has five loops in it so it's no longer this stair stepping here I've just got five loops in there and then that's it so that's a sub compra pre composed comp if I undo that another way to do this is to just allow all of my layers with all this crazy stuff going on in here, which is just loops and this works too if you have say, I've got something animating with the ball or maybe I got text with something on dh I want to then take that animation and repurpose it over here then that way I can get this cycle, but I can animate that cycle then and that's what we're going to do, we've got thes balls bouncing here is just the one ball so I can create a new cop here and that's just what I did, I just created a thirty second cop. Now another thing here I'm going to show you little pieces little buttons, little tools, little helpful tips along the way here instead of just going right on down the line, showing every single tool and tip I like tio kind of bring them up as they're necessary. I created a new calm, but I didn't give it a name just give me a new car I can change the name of my khan by right clicking on it and in the project panel and select uh re name and I'm going to call this uh crazy animation uh you can call it whatever you want I'm calling it crazy animation because this could be crazy s o now I've got the other calm this one here with the bouncing ball that's that cop that's open biking drag it right here from the project panel and just drag it down here and it treats it as a single layer notice I don't have all those different layers in there it's now considered a sub comp and that's the beauty of being able to split up your cops like that so now what I could do is if I wanted to make this you go on longer and longer I could then loop that in the same manner right stair step it make it go longer but it's no no need to do that what I want to do now is take this ball bouncing uh comp and I want to animate it to make it look like the ball is actually going across the state so I'm going to start with it uh at my beginning position gonna hit p for position and in this case I'm just going click and drag my ex access which is the left numbers is click and drag that off so it's just off screen a little bit then I'm going to click the stopwatch and then it's going to take a while to come across the stage I'll come around on four seconds and I'm just going to click and drag it across another way could do it's just click on the layer out here in the cop window of course and do it that way but I like using the numbers sometimes now when I play that back will see that it will bounce across the stage and it's taken it's time to get over there boing boing you gotta add your own sound effects when you'd animating out now if that's I think that's the number one rule of an animator I think of the old looney tunes days and those guys made their own sound effects and of course they're exaggerated when they really did the fully work on him but you have to make your own sound effects toe really get into the animation right so that was going boing boing boing so it's taking his time getting across okay so now what I've done is I've got one ball going across the stage and that was really easy to do now instead of having to take the ball and make its motion path go up and over and then up and over and over again I've just got this loop the ball bouncing right and being able to move that in time I can speed up or slow down the ball bouncing move so I can slow it down so it's going to just do a quick round preview here and so it's really taken it's time to get across but the bouncing itself is still still going at the same rate esso I could change that by going into here and changing squishing all of my my layers closer together or I could come up here and right click what's one a doubleclick want to right click on the layer and come up here to time and I could do time stretch so this let's me treat that nested er comp that little subcompact let's me treat that like it's a piece of video footage now I can say I want it to be longer I wanted to be shorter and by doing that say if I wanted to be longer just click here and drag it over you see my percentages go up I'm going one hundred fifty percent and you could see that was ten seconds and now it's fifteen seconds I click okay and now I can render that well see that it should slow it down it's just doing iran preview that's not really time playback so after it's done karan preview there we go now I've slowed down the action and notice that uh the motion blur that's in the nested compass still active by stretching out my time it is on ly changed it's all it's all data that's the thing to think about with with after effects when you're moving things and after effects it's data so the data is actually saying this object is moving along this time so this speed so it will automatically adjust the motion blur for you without you having to render it out and then bring it back in your question so if you were changing the time and the sub calm for your nest uh it's only going to affect sub uh sub camp it's only going to affect that layer in this comp if I go back to my sub cop, it doesn't change that at all that still plays back at the rate that I made it you beauty but if I change it here I'm basically changing how the data is perceived along that time. So if I had rendered out that this file here, if I rendered this as a movie with, um with transparency and then brought it in the motion blur would stay at this rate so it would be over exaggerated motion blur if I decided to slow down the animation, the motion blur would still be there just like with video footage. If I took this bottle was on video and I threw it across the room there would be this little blur you know, on defiance to slow that down in slow motion you see that in slow motion, you know, jerry springer show somebody's throwing a chair and they slow it down is or well, the chair doesn't look like it slow it just leaves the big blurry thing right and that's what happens? But in here since we're dealing with data, I've slowed this down so I get a little bit of motion blur the motion blur doesn't really kick in till it's about halfway down then you see it it blurs a bit there it blurs a bit there, but then it's a little less affected than if I'm in here you see the motion blur is much more exaggerated all the way to the very top see it starts right away so that's the beauty of using the motion blur in after effects now I can also turn on motion blur here and enable it uh that way as I'm moving feigns across time and here it's also adding mohr motion blur as necessary so if I move it side to side and remove it again it's going teo be affected. So with that being said, I can now duplicate this sub kant by commander control d I'm a duplicate a few of these guys and they're all the same because they're exactly what I just did down here but let me hide them and here's something that we really haven't covered much in here is in the timeline this is just like layers in photo shop think of it it's like an animated layer palate the ones on top are the ones most visible, the ones below are you are underneath so it's just like an animated layers palate and photoshopped these little eyeballs I can turn those off and that hides whatever layer doesn't have the libel on, so I'm going to look at this one and say, I want teo change my timing on this one, so I'm going to do my time stretch and uh this one's going toe actually speed it up so it'll become shorter. The problem with that is I still need to adjust my position. No, I didn't actually considered that with it since I already added the position from left to right stage it did it for me so that's that's always good to do that before he animated because your key frames go with it. So now that's going at that rate if I turn on my original so that one slowed down this one's sped up so I've got two balls there once going faster ones going slower um then I can turn on another layer and change my time on that one time stretch and say I want one hundred percent, so I wanted one to one and then I've got another one in here that I want teo time stretch and let's go to this let's go two hundred with this wants its lot slower um I got more than I need here. I'll do. I'll just do a couple more here on just very time timing on him, just so they're off a little bit. C one, seventy five, and then we'll do another one that's, like one twenty five or something. Let's. Hear time, time, stretch. Now you know why. As an animator, you should always charge by the hour, because it takes a lot of time to do this. That's, my professional tip, my business, too.

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Jeff Foster

Jeff Foster is a published author of several computer technology, animation and video production VFX books. He has been an Adobe® Certified Expert and has served as an instructor and featured speaker at conferences such as Photoshop World, Macworld, Adobe

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Motion Graphics

Ratings and Reviews

jackflash

Jeff Foster seems like a great, knowledgeable guy. But this course is so disappointing. The classes are disorganized, convoluted yet shallow, and waste an awful lot of time. And they’re just lectures — you’re just watching him do stuff — no lessons where you can work along with him to really absorb what’s going on. My biggest complaints are 1) It seems like he didn’t prepare very much, so we end up watching him go through features one by one, sometimes just to try to find the thing that’s going to illustrate the point he’s trying to make; and 2) he’s unnecessarily confusing. Here’s an easy example. In the “parenting” class, which hinges on one layer’s relationship to another, he created identical layers and named them identically. So he’s explaining that “blue solid” is the parent to “blue solid.” And then he proceeds to discuss the layers, which are numbered #1, #2, #3, by calling them “the first layer” (#3), “the second layer” (#2), and “the third layer” (#1.) After Effects is complicated enough! Maybe I’m spoiled by having learned Illustrator with a wonderful Creative Live course. This is not that.

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Creating Sub-Compositions

Creating Sub-Compositions

Lesson Info

5. Creating Sub-Compositions

Lessons

What's New in Adobe After Effects Creative Cloud?

Navigating the Interface & Managing the Workspace

Importing Assets & Layer Styles

Blending