After Effects for Beginners 2023 - Simple Overview

Today I'm going to be talking about my favorite motion graphics program, Adobe After Effects. Maybe you just heard about motion graphics and you're getting started and you open up After Effects and you freaked out because the interface is crazy and you don't know how to do anything in there. So this video is going to be for the absolute beginner or the person that is really interested in getting started but just needs that little extra push and that guide to get going and start animating. So let's dive into After Effects and start moving things around. And getting comfortable with After Effects so you can, you can make cool stuff for yourself or for clients. And I will stop rambling, so let's open up After Effects. All right, here we are in After Effects. I'm on a MacBook Pro, so you're going to see my dock down below, and then I have a menu over the left-hand side that disappears. In the middle of my After Effects screen is my stage. This is where all the magic happens. This is where you drop photos, images, text, vectors, everything you can think of can go into Adobe After Effects. You can do WAV files, MP3 files, everything. Think of this as if you're working on a desk and you're working on a painting or like a collage, this is the main part where all the magic happens. All the artwork comes together, the animation comes together. This is where it all happens. So I'm going to show you one. I'm going to dive in like most people would take you over to the interface all around this, and I will get to that, but I want to show you one thing that happens when you're working in After Effects that makes you get lost in the weeds a little bit. So what you saw I just did was I double-clicked on a vector image on my stage, and you get taken to this separate tab here, and you're like, wait a minute, I can't animate anything. What is this thing here? So when that happens, just go up to the tabs up top and you can see I'm— I just opened up a file from 2017. So this video is being made in 2023. Don't freak out that you see 2017. I wanted to open up a file that's disconnected and a complete mess so I can show you how to get things back in order if you ever happen to be in that position. So just click back to this tab. Now you're going to be back on your main stage, and you can see I have text flying all over the place because I probably don't have these fonts installed. Um, But that's if you ever get lost in After Effects, right from the beginning, that's what's happening. You've double-clicked into one of these images or videos and you're in this other tab here, the No Person's Ville. So sometimes this is useful for rotoscoping. We won't get into that today, but jump back to your main tab. This is your main composition. Now I want to give you a shortcut on the keyboard that is going to get you back to the information for this. What's called a composition. So press Command+K or Control+K on your keyboard, and you can see that this pops up your composition settings. Think of this as like your file name or your, your main dashboard to control this composition. This controls the size, the frame rate, the length of the composition, the resolution of the composition, and the name of the composition. So I'm going to go ahead and change this name to Real 2023, and you're going to see down here on the left-hand side, the name is going to change. So now I'm updated here, and I have— this is the main composition timeline that I'm working on. Anything that goes into this timeline down below is going to show up on this stage as long as the, um, the layer is not shy, not— or is visible. So let's Let me show you something, and I'm just going to jump around here, like thinking about all the problems I had learning After Effects when I started. Here's a layer here that's a vector, and I have this little star thing checked here. I don't even know what to call this. What are these? If you roll over the top of the menu, the Collapse Transformation for vectors. So when you have this on, it means your vector is going to be nice and sharp. And I have my resolution set to a quarter here. I'm just going to go ahead and set that to full. So you can see that no matter what size this vector is, as long— I'm going to turn off motion blur. You can see the edges are nice and sharp. So I'm sure you're going to be working with vectors in After Effects a lot. Sometimes you might bring it in and it might look like this. You might be like, why is this blurry? My resolution's set to full. I'm not on a quarter resolution. What's going on here? The answer is just check this little collapse transformation. So No matter what size your vectors are, they're going to be sharp. You always want that on. Now, if you're impatient like me and you like to see some good stuff going on, let's see, this, this logo animates in right here like this, but you want to say, well, I see that like blur when things animate in, and we haven't even gotten to animation yet, but I'm just going to give you the good stuff that to let you know that it's here, like you can get to this, you don't have to wait to learn the absolute basics of animation to make this stuff happen. But if you want to get that blur going, that's just up in this motion blur. Just click this thing, make sure that's on, and then motion blur. Follow this motion blur icon. See, these icons are the same. Follow that down to the layer and make sure that's checked. So you can see it's going to make my animation blur a little bit. So you don't need to frame by frame animation that or frame by frame animate that. It's ready to roll right there. So we have a little animating icon. I'm using an extension called Animation Composer, which is one of my favorite things of all time that clearly I need to update. No, it's good to go. I'm going to drag it over here, and you can see how it— you can place panels. If you've ever used a computer in your life, you know how to move panels around. I'm not going to get into that. I do like to organize my workspace with things that— let's see, I also have another extension called Motion4. This gives me nice smooth animation. I like to keep this to the left of my main window here. I won't get into Motion4 here. Super cool. Maybe I'll make a whole video on that. But let's get in. Let's do a— let's, let's jump around the user interface. And you can see I don't have a script for this video at all. I'm just like opening it up and thinking about what would freak out the beginning user. So let's just go through the, the user interface real quick. Over here on the left-hand side is the project panel. Think of this like you're sweeping your arms and grabbing all your paintbrushes, all your paper, and you're putting in your art bin. This is your— this is where all of your assets live. If you ever see this icon right here, that means After Effects is calling a file outside of this project window that isn't in that location, and you need to either replace that footage or reload that footage or just delete that footage. This is— this Owl City video is not linked up because I moved this folder 500 times since I made the video, and I need to relink it or just delete it. In most, like, most cases, I'll delete it. And then let's see if I can find— most of the videos here are missing, which is really irresponsible of me to make a tutorial with all of these missing videos. So let's see if we can— let's replace this. Let's just go to replace file. Let's call Owl City. Unbelievable. All right, we'll go with a short clip. Now here's a Let's go with the shh. Let's go with the full video. So it's going to be replaced here and you're going to see this icon is going to change to, I believe this is a QuickTime file. It's going to take a minute to download here. So maybe I'll talk about something else while I do that. Behind my project panel, I also like to put, and now After Effects is going to be super slow here. I also like to put the effects tab. So right now I have There's effects over here which you can drag and double-click and put onto each one of these layers to make things happen. But there's going to be an effects panel that I need to go into this Windows panel once After Effects stops freezing and downloads this full video. I shouldn't have replaced it with a massive size video that needs to be downloaded from Google Drive, but it's happening. Maybe I'll just let that happen and I'll skip forward once this is done. Okay, you can see After Effects, 9 additional missing files have been found. When you replace one, After Effects is going to go around your folders and try to find as many of, many of these as possible. So my video is ready to go. When you want to drag anything from this, this project folder onto the timeline, just drag it and drop it. You can see there's a little, this gray gap here, that means you can't see it, but then you will see it here where this layer is. And you can just drag and shift these. One of my favorite shortcuts is Alt bracket left or right, and that will trim this file. And now it's just this little piece of video I can, I can drag here. And you can see some of the properties of this video file. The sound is on, the video is visible. This little eye icon will let you see what is visible and what is not. Sometimes this icon, this eye icon, comes in handy because I like to put what's called a null in my videos, in my video timeline, because I like to attach— anything can be attached to a null. So I drag and drop this little picker, and now I can press the P icon on my keyboard, and I can drag around this video layer without changing the position properties of the video. So a reason, a way this is handy is let's say I want to rotate this video or this element around, but I also want to change the position of it, I can do that using the null object and drag this over. Now I have a rotating video with the position moving, but these properties are on different layers. So if I ever need to go in and change, say, oh no, I want the video to go up, my position property is different from my rotation property and vice versa. You can You know, you can use the shortcuts P for position, R for rotation, S for scale. That's for sizing things up and down. Let's see, what else do I use? I think that's it. I also— you can also hold down Shift and you will see if you press Shift+S, Shift+R, hold down Shift and P, you're going to get all these different properties that you can keyframe in. And the way I keyframe is you just, um, move your timeline head over and just tap the keyframes here. And then, excuse me, change the properties here. Do a little rotation. And then you can see from the— these are keyframes here. From here to there, it's going to shift. And I'm just dragging back and forth to show you. So you can zoom into videos, do quick transitions. And that's like a crash course on animating with keyframes and dragging things from the project window into the timeline. Let me go, go in here and make sure my effects is on window panel. See, properties I don't need. Uh, let's see. Oh, here are my effects controls. This is the tab that I was talking about before. I keep it to the left or to the right of the project window. And then you can also save your workspace. So if you create your workspace and it goes away when you open it back up, put things together and just go to Window, Workspace, and Save as New Workspace. So let's just call this RyRy. So I have my effect controls. These are different because the effects you're going to pick over here. And let's say an effect that I always use is Let's say 4-color gradient. So I'm going to apply that over top of my video here. Now you can see in the effect controls, when you click on your element that's on your timeline, you can see that these effects are shown in the effects control panel. If you have multiple effects, let's add another one, they stack on top of each other. So I don't know if that'll— yeah, so I I stack these curves on top of each other, and now whatever effects you put on last are going to show up before. So if I drag these above the 4-color gradient, now the 4-color gradient rules. And I can turn down the opacity on this, and you can sort of see through here. So that's project window, dragging on the timeline, a little bit about keyframing, and a little bit about adding effects to things. Now let's go and create a new composition because I want to show you how to size things. So I have an automatic set, 1920 by 1080. This is a good size for YouTube, a good size for all my client videos. This is— I usually call it main when I open up a file. And when you do this, you have a composition here. This is everything that is within this white window is going to show up when you export out your video. And you can export out by going to Composition and adding to Media Encoder, which sends it to Adobe Media Encoder down here, or you can add it to Render Queue. This will add it, export it directly from After Effects. So let's collect or create some animation here with text. When I grab the Text tool, I like to create a text box And let's call this, um, just get some text going on the screen. I think it typed in pretty slow, so I'm going to retype this. Rye Rye Art. Nah, a little bit slow when I'm doing a screen recording, but here's my text. I like to add a text box here because if you just tap the text icon on the screen and you you type it across, you can't really shift things around and constrain the text. So I like to add a text box there, and then once you have your text going, you can change the character. I assume you, you've used other programs before, so you know what, you know how to style things. Let's pick a different font here. I'm going to scroll up. These are all mostly installed from Adobe. Adobe Fonts. And let's just say you want to animate in— let's look, I'm going to— you can uncollapse the text animation in the timeline, click this little animate arrow. Let's say I want to animate the tracking. This is the— this is where I want my animation to end. So I'm just going to click these little keyframes and I'm going to drag these keyframes out, and I want it to happen over 2 seconds. So this tracking, this is going to space my text out. And now whenever you want to preview an animation, you just hit spacebar on the keyboard and you have things, um, your animation previewing. Let's— so let's say I want this to bounce a little bit. I'm going to shoot in a negative tracking for that keyframe. So we're going to get to this point, squeeze in, and I'm just going to copy and paste this keyframe and relax out a little bit. And you can cut— you can select these keyframes and drag them. And if you select multiple keyframes and you hold down the Alt key and drag them, it will squeeze them together like that. So let's drag all these. I want it to happen over about 1 second and Give me a little— oh, messed that up. All right, so let's do— let's make sure that negative tracking is in place here. Let's just squeeze it all together. Make sure one keyframe is selected. Looks a little wonky. So let's make sure my overshoot is just really quick. Boom. And then I can Control-click this and go to Keyframe Assistant. Do an ease out. There we go. That's just a very simple text animation. And let's say you want the overall text to shift. I'm just going to select the text, hit P, keyframe my main position. And let's just say this is my ending position. I'm going to slide over here. Let's Drag it down a little bit. Let's Shift+S and let's scale out. There we have some animating text. Now you can add— you could transition this in, out. I'm going to show you really quickly. I use this Animation Composer. This video is not sponsored in any way by them.. But I can do— you can do very simple text animations with it. And let me just go in here and reset all this if I want to remove all the keyframes. There we go. I can just select this and go to Text Presets, Transitions, Animate Characters, and go to Position and Rotate Basic. And all I do is click this and do in Let me show you that I have some animating text in, and I can do that same thing with animating out. So if you want to add a scene where text animates in and you have a scene where text animates out, Animation Composer is a huge time saver. I think it's like $100 or something like that. Not telling you to buy it, but I use it all the time. Huge time saver. You can also use it— so these same animation principles apply for adding shapes and graphics to your stage. So let's just add a square behind this. Let's just click on the layer here called Square, and let's add a trim path. This is one thing that I love in After Effects. I add a trim path through this little add arrow, and then I just set my keyframe here, drag back to the beginning of the timeline, and then— I love that. So this is— this shape is a stroke. You can see the color of the shape is here. It just has an outline with a negative or an empty fill. If I wanted this to fill up, just go like that. Kind of cool. You can also scale this at the same time if you wanted to. Just give it a little scale so it's just constantly growing. A little primitive animation, but it gives you an idea of that's text, that's shapes on a timeline. And then let me introduce you to another concept of the solid. So a solid, you can think of just a sheet of paper basically that you're putting on the stage. When you create one, it'll, it'll be created to the size of the stage or the size that you set. And let me see, new composition, layer, new solid is Command+Y is the shortcut. So if you want to create another solid here, you can set the size of it, say 450 by 450, scale it down and rotate it. And let's just select both of these and set that position. I'm going to select this and go here. This is super basic stuff, but hopefully it gets you started creating. And let's just drag this into the background. Oh, T is another shortcut for opacity. I'm going to hit T and I'm going to turn these down a little bit. And then I have all this crazy stuff animating in. I will never use this animation for anything, but that gives you text, that gives you shape, that gives you solid, that gives you stage sizing. Another thing you're going to need to do when you're creating your videos is know the platform that you're posting to. YouTube, 1920 by 1080 or 4K resolution. Then you're going to want to create— I create most of my content in the center of that frame so I can pretty easily create vertical video out of that, either 1920 or 1080 wide by 1920 vertical, or you can even do square or 1350 by 1080 for a taller vertical Instagram video size. So I like to do that by, um, just adding some guides here, just some rough guides, letting myself know that most of the action needs to take place in the middle of this frame so I can quickly resize this. Um, And let me see what else I use in here. So up top you're gonna have your toolbar with your, your arrow that moves things around, your hand which will shift the, your, your stage around. Z, I usually use, uh, never use the magnifying glass. I usually do a Command+ or Command- to zoom in. When you have a 3D object I'm just going to select this, turn this to a 3D object, drag it in the stage. Then these controls are set. So let me show you rotation. And you get the point. This is, uh, move up and down— or zoom in and out, sorry. This is move up, down, left, right. And this is rotate the camera world around it, I believe. Yeah, that's rotate the camera. This is rotate the object. The anchor frame, or the anchor point, this is very important because sometimes you need to scale things based on where this anchor point is. If the anchor point is at the bottom of the object, it's going to squish down to the bottom of the object. Here it's in the center, so you see the entire object squishing. I use this little anchor frame thing from Motion 4, and then it just, it will move the anchor point. So now it's going to scale from this point. Um, but you can do that manually by selecting this anchor point and dragging and dropping it. Here's the Shape Tool, the Pen Tool. This is good for masking. This will probably create a shape for me. Nope, that gave me a mask. So when you use the Pen Tool over a solid, it's going to give you a mask. When you use the Pen Tool over shape, it's going to give you another shape. Um, Text Tool we went over. We won't go over Brush, Rotoscoping, Clone Stamp, anything like that. The Puppet Tool, uh, I suggest just throwing this stuff on stage and seeing what it does. Watch some YouTube videos on that. Um, yeah, we did the effects, the text, and timeline. I think that's gonna be enough to get you started. Um, those are the things that I was always confused about when starting After Effects. It was like too, too overwhelming. So I thought I'd put together this video and hopefully get you started in a little bit of motion graphics. And if you have any questions, just drop them in the comments. And thanks for watching. Catch you in the next tutorial.