Web and Video

Intro to After Effects CS3 was led by Steve Whatley. Steve works for Adobe as a solutions/systems sales engineer. This was an excellent intro to After Effects - I really think that if you haven’t worked with the product at all, this session would get you up and running for sure. It was a nice refresher course too - I’ve only used AE from time to time over the past 6 years (6 years ago I used it a lot), and I feel a bit more confident in my skills again

No slides! YAY! This is entry level After Effects session - assumes you don’t know anything about After Effects.

How do you use the application… how you deliver doesn’t matter. If you know Photoshop, this is a piece of cake. You’re going to add filters, move things, and so on - you just have the ability to animate that stuff.

Workspace layout - look in Project folder. You will typically have folders and compositions. You start with an empty project and then you create a new composition.

If someone wants real video and put it on YouTube or whatever - you can select from a Preset in the new comp dialog - makes all the settings for size, aspect ratio, framerate, and so on. Thing about AE is you determine ahead of time about how long you’ll think it’ll be - set the duration in the new comp window.

Web video is all square pixels. Photoshop is square pixels, IL, and so on. If you want something different, you change it in the new comp window- width and height too.

Makes a timeline and comp window when you click OK.

Timeline is like a layer window in Photoshop - same scenario. Right click in comp window, and create a new solid (like creating a new layer). Determine size, or select “Make Comp Size” button.

You can change solid settings Layer > Solid settings.

Can name your solid layers, or switch back to Source name clicking it in the Timeline if the original name is important (swap).

Tilde key is your friend. You put your pointer over a panel, press the tilde and it will fill the workspace. If you have tons of layers or assets, this can be really helpful.

Twirl down parts of the timeline (arrow pointing right, click it and attributes become visible — like a tree).

Anchor point - sits in the middle of the selection/layer — where the object rotates from.

Attributes in the timeline are hot-scrubbable (you can scrub and change values).

When do animations, typical to start in Photoshop or Illustrator. Build what you plan to animate. Build it what it looks like when you’re done moving it. In animation, lots of cases you’ll work backwards. IF exact placement is critical. If at 6 seconds I want something “to be there” you scrub to that location and set a keyframe (click clock in timeline).

Then you scrub back to the 0 second point, and move it,. You look on the path and see an “extra heavy dot” and you can move the handle to create a curve. Then the object will animate along that path you have created.

zero on keyboard is shortcut for RAM preview.

Have attributes independt of each other, so youcan set things like scale independently. So you can set a keyframe for scale at 2 seconds between 2 seconds and 5 seconds, position changes between 0 and 6 and so on.

The green bar is content being rendered first and playing back at real time.

3 gigs of RAM or better if you use AE a lot. 2 gigs of RAM if you’ll use AE sometimes.

The blue bar between the timeline layers and the numeric seconds determines how long the animation is — work area.

You can select and copy and paste keyframes to other layers and so on.

Ease in and ease out - linear keyframes are also what do this. Helps you create animations that create the illusion of “landing softly” (there are lots of places you can refer to this in more detail, fair readers). Right click > Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease In and so on. Ease out to “take off slowly”, Ease in to “land softly”. Ease out the beginning keyframe, and ease in at the last keyframe.

Importing footage.
Double click in Project panel or Ctrl+I. Importing Photoshop install folder > Samples > Flower.psd.

Motion menus on DVDs are usually a movie animation created in AE, when you click the menu, Encore says play this movie and then play the real movie.

When you import, you get some questions. Import Kind - Footage. Layer Options. Choose Layer if you want a select layer, or you can merge the layers (flatten layers before you bring it in). OR you can import as a composition. You can retain all the styles and filters and stuff when you bring it in. Choose Cropped layers to bring in all the layer styles you want to change over time. Click OK.

Brings in all of the layers, and an immediate composition to the size you created in Photoshop. Now go to composition and double click.

Trim comp to work area.

Select the layer, press “P” for position in timeline — dont’ have that big list of things when you twirl down a layer.

Make sure something happens before another thing stops - keep up that level of interest.

Click button below … Toggle Switches/Modes. Click to right of layer name, and you get modes in pop-up menu — normal, dissolve, multiply, etc. Blend modes. Press Shift and + or - to go through list.

Adding effects.
Going to add Soundbooth becuase there are 1500 sound effects you can use. First add a lens flare and then a sound effect.
Add a new layer. Adding a solid or an adjustment layer. You can put anything on an adjustment layer.
Move layer to start at about 4 second mark, and then add effect. Go to Effects and presets panel, and type in “lens” to find the lens flare. You can drop it onto a selected layer, and it will add it.

Then you see the effect control window, and you can add as many effects you want onto that. SElect the effect in this window, and you can adjust the center point by clicking the center button, change size, and so on.
If you go to the timeline you can see keyframes too (only difference).

A black layer and put a screen - turns into transparent.

Reset the workspace using the menu in the upper right hand corner. If you get lost or something, you can use this menu to get back to the standard/default.

Then you can export out to SWF or FLV and so on.

If you need to do something other than web (ipod, psp), and there are presets that you can use.

Steve then quickly ran through some of the other features in AE, many of them new in CS3. There was a very favorable reaction to the Vanishing Point/Photoshop > import to CS3 feature (we have a video on this in the CS3 video workshop on design center). He also showed the Puppet Tool, which is very cool too (and also has a video tutorial in the workshop).

(5 votes, average: 4.2 out of 5)

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