My Lynda Practices

This blog will demonstrate my key knowledge of Adobe After effects.

COMPOSITION

Composition holds the settings for your video, it’s at as a canvas to fill. It enables the user to adjust the settings to the requirement of the video their making, you can adjust the Resolution, Frame rate, and video spec.

The advanced composition setting offer a 3D Feature.

I used the composition to set my animated sequence.

LAYERS

Layers are taken from the composition and are set within the timeline sequence, to have a piece of footage to appear in front of another layer overlap then you set that layer above it.

They eye ball icon enables the that the layer in the timeline is visible.

Layers are used to build up an image in the composition, you can arange what the scale is, the positioning of the fooatge.

INTERFACE

Looking at the interface its a important to recognise the diferent screens so not to confuse them. You can can see how the projects is built, how to alter the setting. An o

range outline means that pannel is active.

When opening After Effects on the left hand side there will be highlights of recent projects which allow you to open them, on the right hand side is a useful tip of the day.

In the setting you should keep the video settings as standard. Double click on comp and it will open up the time line so you can see the separate components.

KEY FRAME ANIMATION

Pressing the stop watch will set a key frame on the time line.

Records current state of parameter at that moment in time.

You can access the Transform setting by clicking the discolosure arrow highlighted in the corner.

In the transform settings in a layer position allows the arrangement of where the other layers are placed on screen, you can take a short cut by pressing P on your keyboard, P stands for position so that’s a useful reminder.

To watch the animation results press zero. By pressing N it will set the end of the play back range, allowing you to see the animation on repeat.

To delete a key frame on the time line simply highlight and delete it, if you want to delete all the key frames select the stop watch.

you can remove the key frame at the start of the timeline, then reposition the image off screen, then when you play it back it creates the animation of the object moving on screen.

The dots between the moved object and its inital position indicate the velocity.

By pressing K you'll move down the timeline, and pressing J will move you up the time line.

UNDERSTANDING EFFECTS

The effects tab is visible on the Right hand side of the work screen.

Effects Icon

You need to select a layer in order to apply the effect, you can equally add a key frame to the effect, to delete the effect you need to sellect the layer in the control pannel, you must select the name of the layer, otherwise you'd delete the entire layer.

MOVING 3D SPACE

Right clcik on the layer name and sellect switcehs in collum,

In the layers click the box to enable 3D capibility,

The Red arrow is the X Axis, the Green arrow is the Y Axis

the Blue arrow is Z Axis, the X Y Z feature enbales you to rotate the 3D Text

2 view equels enables you to see the positionining from a different angle.

Seletc active camera to return to 1 view.

RENDERING

To render the video results go to compostion and Add to Render Queue.

Be sure that there's enough space on your hard drive computer to store your rendered video, its also uesful to keep an external lacie hard drive to store your video, is size and codec is important.

SPECIFYING PREFERENCES AND CACHE SETTINGS

Prefference settings. You can limit the ammount of undos.