- Hey guys, Caleb Wojcik of DIY Video Guy here!
And I'm actually here with Phil Ebiner
of Video School Online.
He drove down from Orange County to come
do a little bit of a collaboration with me.
And in this video we're going to be talking
about After Effects.
Now, I know After Effects is really scary
and it's been very scary for me
and Tim who works with me.
We open it sometimes and we just kinda
get real scared and we close it and run away.
And so, I wanted to have Phil here
to tell us a little bit about After Effects
and why you should use it.
- Yeah, I know exactly how you feel in terms
of the scariness of After Effects.
The first couple times I opened it I shut it down,
ran away, and it wasn't until I took an actual class
in college about visual effects that I had to learn it
and it's an amazing program.
And my goal for your viewers, for you,
is to teach you just how to get started,
how to use the basic tools.
This is going to be a series of three videos.
- Mm hmm.
- So, hopefully you guys are interested
and in the first video we're gonna be going over
just opening After Effects, getting comfortable
with the layout, and in the next video we'll be looking
at using the tools, and then the last video in the series
will be creating a lower third, so actually putting
our knowledge to use in creating something.
So, it's gonna be fun.
I'm happy to be here.
- Alright, so, let's get started
and let's open After Effects.
- Yeah, so, the first thing you're going to do
is when you open After Effects for the first time,
we're using the Creative Cloud version, the latest
update, and if you are using Creative Cloud, perfect.
If you're using a previous version, it's okay.
The general layout is similar.
It might look a little different, the look and feel,
it has changed, but, when you open up After Effects
for the first time, you will get this welcome screen.
And if you have created projects in the past,
they will show up here, but for most of you,
if you're starting out, you're just going to go ahead
and click New Project.
Now, to get on the same page, what I want everyone to do
is to just look around and see what panels we have open.
All of these little boxes are panels and you're probably
scared already, you see all these buttons.
You see a bunch'a different windows and text
and you have no idea what you're going to do with it.
- And for me it's, oh it looks like Premiere,
but it's not Premiere, I'm scared, I'm gonna run away.
- Yeah, and I always get that question, what's
the difference between Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects?
Adobe Premiere Pro is for editing your videos, for clipping
together different types of video, adding your music,
adding sound, adding some basic titles.
- Mm hmm.
- But, After Effects is really for adding more advanced
titles, motion graphics, if you're doing any green screen
work, visual effects like explosions.
You can do all this kinda thing right within After Effects.
So, that's why we would use After Effects.
And yeah, it does look like Premiere Pro, but it's not
Premiere Pro. (laughter)
So, nothing like that.
So, the first thing I want everyone to do
is to go up to Window,
then you're going to drag down to Workspace
and make sure that we are on the Standard workspace.
And that's why we should see a project window up here,
a composition window up here, and you can see the text
at the top, it says composition.
You'll see a couple panels over here on the right side
that we don't have to pay attention to, yet,
so, just disregard those.
Then, down here, right now it says none, but that
is our timeline, so, that's where we will be working
a lot, too.
- And is a timeline in Premiere called a composition
in After Effects?
- So, in Premiere Pro-- - [Caleb] Or a little bit
of both?
- Yeah, so, in Premiere, when you open up
a new sequence, that's what you open up.
You open a new sequence, it opens up a new timeline.
- Mm hmm.
- Within After Effects it's a composition.
- Okay.
- And we'll be going over how to actually start
a composition at the end of this video.
- Okay.
- So, the first thing, up in the top left,
is your project panel.
This is where you will import your assets.
You will organize your assets, so, you could bring
in photos, Illustrator files, video clips, audio.
This is your project panel, similar to in Premiere Pro.
In the center, this is your composition panel,
and actually, to go ahead and see what this looks like
when you do start a new composition, we'll go ahead
and start a new composition.
There's a couple ways to do it, one is by clicking
this New Composition button down here at the bottom
of the project window.
It looks like a little film clip.
Or you can right click and choose New Composition.
It's going to open up a little module
where we set our composition settings.
Now, the key thing to remember with After Effects,
if you're working on a project in Premiere where you are
creating some sort of graphic in After Effects
for that video, you wanna make sure that
the settings are the exact same.
- So, like the same resolution, if you're at 1080p
or 4K, same frame rate, those are the main two, really.
- [Phil] That's really the main two and they have presets,
right here, in the Composition Settings window that you can
drop down and pick or you can just go ahead and type in
your different settings.
So, you have your width of 1920 by 1080, so that would be
your 1080p or 1080i setting.
If you're doing something like 4K you're going
to have to change that.
If you're doing 1280 by 720 you can change that.
- [Caleb] Mm hmm.
- [Phil] Below, this is set to Square Pixels,
your aspect ratio, just leave that at Square Pixels.
- [Caleb] Yeah, unless you're working in Hollywood
and it's gonna be anamorphic or somethin' not normal,
then just don't even touch that, basically. (chuckles)
- [Phil] Yeah, don't even touch that.
I don't know if I've ever even changed that.
- [Caleb] Yeah.
- [Phil] In my entire life.
And then frame rate, this is where you set your frame rate,
so, a lot of us will be using 29.97, 23.976.
If you're doing something, a higher frame rate,
you can choose a higher frame rate.
- [Caleb] Mm hmm.
- [Phil] And then below, this is a little bit
confusing, but this is how long you set your composition to,
so the duration, right here, is set to 30 seconds right now.
For example, I'll just say five seconds.
So, you have your hour, minute, seconds,
and then milliseconds down here, and that's how you set it.
And all this stuff, keep in mind, can be changed later,
if you want to change it after you--
- Yeah, you can always go into the composition settings
and be like, oh I want this is 4K, now, and change it,
and might have to tweak it, but--
- That's, yeah, that's the one really nice thing about
After Effects is you can change it later, you just have
to resize things.
- Mm hmm.
- But, it's really easy to change after the fact.
So, that's your Composition Settings.
So, now, we're going to go ahead and click Okay.
And you can see this opened up
a black screen screen, right now.
The main thing you wanna know as a beginner, right now,
is this little percentage at the bottom left.
This is the magnification of your composition.
It's set to 200 right now.
I'm gonna drop this down and go ahead
and set 100.
So, now, it's 100% of the composition.
This is 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels tall.
- And, depending on your computer or the resolution
of your screen, you may or may not get to do 100%.
This is a retina screen, so there's way more pixels
than 1080p, but if this was a 4K comp, and we did 100%--
- It'd be a lot bigger.
- It'd still be zoomed in on it.
You'd have to change it to fit or whatever you wanna do.
- Exactly.
And some of you guys, you probably see me moving
these panels around, so, I'll just mention that briefly.
If you do want to adjust the size of any of these panels
you can just go to the middle where you get this
little mouse thing with the two arrows.
- [Caleb] Mm hmm.
- [Phil] Drag to the left or right.
If you want to get rid of any of these panels
you can do that by right clicking them
and then saying Close Panel.
So, let's just go ahead and do that for this info panel.
Right clicking and clicking Close and Audio,
because we don't need that for what we're going to be
doing right now.
- [Caleb] 'Kay.
- [Phil] So, that's the composition window.
Again, there's lots of other things down here
that you don't necessarily need to know about right now.
The other key thing down here
is the Toggle Transparency Grid.
If I click that button, you'll see that it creates
this checkerboard pattern, which represents
what is transparent in your video.
And so, if you're creating a title, if you're creating
some sort of shape motion graphic, it's important
to know and to see what's transparent or not.
And so, while clicking this off doesn't mean
you're going to have a black background, it's just sometimes
easier to work with the black background.
- [Caleb] Yeah, if you're making little lines and you can
see 'em a little better.
- [Phil] Exactly.
- [Caleb] Yeah.
- [Phil] And again, all this stuff can be changed
and I'll show you how by going up to Composition,
Composition Settings.
- [Caleb] And that takes you back
to that first page that we had?
- [Phil] Exactly.
- [Caleb] Gotcha.
- [Phil] And see, this background color,
that's what we have the background set to, this black.
You can change it to white, whatever color you want,
but it's not actually changing the background,
it's just the, in the After Effects program
what it looks like.
- [Caleb] Gotcha.
- [Phil] Not what the video is actually doing.
On the right side we have these other panels.
The effects panel is something you'll probably dive into.
This has all sorts of presets, adding different types
of graphics, different animations for your text.
It's all right in here.
Green screen work.
There's hundreds if not thousands of different effects
that you can dive into.
We're not gonna look at that today.
- [Caleb] Mm hmm.
- And then, down below, this is the last thing,
is the timeline.
And so, the timeline, here you have your time indicator.
You have your time markers up here
so you can see that it goes from zero seconds
all the way to five seconds.
The two things to note about this are the two
bars above the timeline.
The one at the top, if you click on either end,
you can click and drag and that zooms into your composition.
And you can zoom in and then click and drag
the center of this bar and move it around this timeline.
And then this bar down below, this is your composition
work area.
And what this is doing, this is kind of a preview portion
of your timeline.
So, when I'm creating graphics, sometime I'm doing
really intricate little motion graphics for a split second
and I wanna see it on a loop to just be able to see how
it looks and review it.
- So, you drag over that section and then what do you hit,
like enter, and it'll just start looping that?
- [Phil] So, now, in Premiere, or in After Effects CC,
you should just be able to press the spacebar to play.
- [Caleb] Oh, and then it starts looping.
- [Phil] Yeah, and so it will loop in that preview area,
exactly. - [Caleb] Okay, gotcha.
- [Phil] And then, so, if you move it and you put
your time indicator within this composition work area
and press your spacebar to play, it will loop
in that area.
Now, you can change what you want
to use to play through your composition
with this preview monitor, right here, your preview panel.
Right now, you see the shortcut is set to spacebar.
You could set it to any of these other options
in case you wanted that.
Or you could even just use this play button right here--
- [Caleb] Mm hmm.
- To play through it, that work area.
So, that's really the basics of After Effects.
I know it was kind of a lot.
We haven't dived into any of these tools that are
lined up right here. - [Caleb] Or any of these
buttons down here in the timeline, or--
- Any of those buttons.
We're gonna be covering a lotta that in the next video.
But, is there anything else that you're kinda confused
about with the layout or with the composition
or anything like that?
- So, this is the standard layout that you use most
of the time?
You don't use any of those other workspaces or anything?
- So, actually, that brings up a good thing,
because for us in this series, what we will be using
are a couple other panels.
- Okay.
- And the ones that I use the most in my own work.
And to open up new panels, what we do is go up to Windows
and you have this list of other panels.
- [Caleb] Okay.
- [Phil] And so, the ones that I like to use are
the Character panel and I'm just going to click that
and you can see that it opens--
- [Caleb] So, that's your font and things, yeah?
- [Phil] Down here.
Yeah, so, this is for all our text.
We're going to be able to edit our text,
how it looks, all that.
- [Caleb] Mm hmm.
- [Phil] Similar to how it is im Premiere Pro
or Photoshop. - [Caleb] Or Photoshop, yeah.
- [Phil] Or most other Adobe products.
And then we're gonna go up to Paragraph
so, that's another paragraph, like text based panel.
- [Caleb] Mm hmm.
- [Phil] And then lastly, Align.
So, this Align panel.
So, I'll go over this when we're actually using the tools
but this will help us align our actual graphics
to parts of this screen. - [Caleb] So it's actually
centered and doesn't just look centered, gotcha.
- [Phil] Yeah, so, you can rearrange these.
You saw me moving them around--
- [Caleb] Mm hmm. - [Phil] Just by clicking
and dragging at the top left of any of these panels.
You can kinda lock them into place.
You kinda see how there's a portion highlighted.
- [Caleb] Yeah.
- [Phil] Of these other panels.
You can lock it into those spots if you want
to move everything around.
- [Caleb] Yeah, and if you royally mess up a workspace
you can always go back and reset it by going to Window
and then Workspace--
- [Phil] And then you could--
- [Caleb] And then Reset or you can save new ones.
- [Phil] Yeah, you can reset.
So, I have some specifically saved for myself
when I'm doing different types of animation.
If I'm doing more a character animation
versus text based animations.
And it's really up to you, whatever you're feel is.
And you'll see the different panels that you work with.
For example, I never use this preview panel, so I have it
off on mine.
- [Caleb] Mm hmm.
- [Phil] Some of these panels have tabs behind them.
So, for example, this Effects and Presets has this Libraries
tab behind it.
- [Caleb] I never use that.
- [Phil] I never use that so I'm gonna close it.
One that you will use is the Effects...
um, let's see where it is...
your Effects Control panel.
So, this is when you add an effect to a layer
or to something in your timeline, this is where
you will actually play with the settings of that effect.
- [Caleb] And tweak the settings and,
is that where you do keyframes or you do
keyframes down at the bottom?
- Keyframes are gonna be down here.
We're gonna dive really deep
into keyframes. - [Caleb] Get all into that.
Yeah, what are we gonna do in the next
couple videos, then?
- Okay, so, in the next video, we're going to be looking
at these tools and actually how do you use them.
So, we're gonna be looking at, specifically, the text
tool, the shape tool, the pan behind tool, which is a tool
that allows us to move the anchor points, which we'll dive
into, and maybe we'll look into the pen tool, as well.
And then, we'll do a brief overview of what a keyframe is,
which introduces us to our last video, which is actually
creating something.
- Mm hmm.
- Which I have recreated your (breath of laughter)
lower third that you put on your videos.
- Yeah.
- It's kind of, not dumbed it down too much, it still
looks really awesome.
- Simplified it.
- Simplified it so that anybody watching this series
will be able to create it for themselves, use it on
their own videos, and will be adding lots
of motion graphics, and making it move and look special.
- So, we made it this far.
After Effects isn't as scary anymore.
Definitely, go check out Phil's YouTube channel,
Video School Online.
His most popular videos are After Effects tutorials.
He also has some courses, as well,
on his website at VideoSchoolOnline.com
and stay tuned for the next lesson where we'll be talking
about the tools and how to keyframe,
so, thanks for joining me, Phil.
- Yeah, thanks a lot for having me and we'll see you
in the next tutorial!
(relaxed music)