these are tips that when I learned them I thought how did I not know this already
existed if you've been using After Effects for a while you'll probably
already know a few but I'm sure there'll be some gems in there that will save you
a lot of time and trouble in your projects let's get started
You've got some layers one has some cool effects on it that you'd like to apply to the others
we can copy these effects up here in the effects control panel and paste them
onto another layer but you can also select those effects go to edit and
select copy with property links paste them onto another layer and if you
change those effects in the original layer they will change on every layer
they were copied to wherever they are in the project alright we've got this
texture set to multiply and we want to apply it to this Pentagon but we don't
to deal with any maps or masks we can simply select preserve underlying
transparency down here and it'll only apply to already visible layers in your
composition you can apply the blending mode stencil alpha to make visible only
layers that appear underneath that layer you can also use the blending mode
silhouette alpha to get a reverse which makes everything underneath that layer
transparent say you've got a logo or a vector element when you scale it up it
goes all blurry or pixelated if you tick continuously rasterize down here it
turns nice and crisp we've got two layers doing some animation with their
position to move them to the left with that pre-comping might be tricky but we
can create a new null object parent those two layers to that null move the
null over to the left where we want them and then delete the null removing all
evidence that we were ever here if you've got a timeline full of layers and
you need to see more of it if you've got your cursor over it and press the tilde
key which is the curly one next to the one on the top left of your keyboard
press it over that panel and it will make it full screen and if you press tilde
again it will minimize it back to your previous view it works on any panel if
you want to navigate through your project quickly use the mini flow chart
if you go into this text comp and press tab on our keyboard it'll bring up this
flow chart wherever your cursor is it shows the comp that we're in and on the
left it shows all the comps that this is nested in and on the right it shows all
the comps that are inside this comp the stars and the balls the blue line
indicates which comp you came from in that case it was comp 7
if you want to change something in your pre-comp and see what it looks like in
the above comps you can split your view by looking at comp in your view here
opening another comp and dragging that out now you can go inside and make any
edits in this comp on the right and they will update in the main comp on the
left here and you can easily see how it will affect the comps above it
if you want to alliance of objects together you can do that with guides
just simply drag out some guides select view snap to guides and whenever you
move an object it will snap into position if the duration in your comp is
too long you can drag over your work area in your timeline view and then
simply right click trim comp to work area if you want to reduce the size of
your comp perhaps to fit a layer click on the region of interest down here and
drag out the area that you would like it to crop to and then select a composition
crop comp to region of interest if you want to parent one layer to another but
you don't want it to inherit all other properties you can alt or option click
on the property you want to parent and then pick whip that to the specific
property on the other layer now our Pentagon is inheriting our square's
rotation but not its position we want to create a mask on this Pentagon that our
pen tool just keeps drawing shapes if we select tool create mask and draw
over the top now it creates a mask the different blur effects and After Effects
work slightly differently box blur and camera lens blur get a more natural
blurring but it does take longer to render and gashing blur tends to be the
fastest so choose wisely if you blur an image it will automatically assume the
edges of the image are transparent so you'll get this halo effect on the edges
we see the layer underneath tick repeat edge pixels to stop that happening but
don't feel too bad the walking-dead titles didn't realize this until season
3 to cycle through the film or stroke modes hold alt and click on the square
next to the mode and it will cycle through all of the options you can also
hold alt and click through to cycle all the different tool modes if you want to
duplicate a layer press control D to get another version and if you want to split
that layer press ctrl shift d and it will split it at your playhead
to move the start of your layer to your player press the left square bracket on
your keyboard and press the right square bracket on your keyboard to move the end
to your playhead to a trim your layer press alt and hold the left square
bracket to trim it at the beginning and alt and the right square bracket to trim
it at the end if you've animated some transform properties like scale position
rotation on your layer and you'd like to add more while keeping the existing
animation without adding a null or pre comping you can add the effect transform
and this will give you more options to keyframe if suddenly you're bounding box
disappears and you don't have the outlines of your shape layers visible
you might have accidentally turned them off I did this all the time to turn the
back on click this bounding box button here or go up to view show layer
controls if your project panel suddenly disappears to get it back press ctrl and 0
I do this all the time as well because that is the fit to view shortcut in
Photoshop and I do it without thinking if you want to line up elements from one
comp to another or quickly reference another comp you can take a snapshot of
it by clicking this camera icon here and then from whatever other come you're in
you can click the view snapshot button and it will make that snapshot visible
for you to use as a reference
we've got the square moving with its position
property to get the rotation to follow along
we can select layer transform Auto Orient and select orient along path and
now the rotation follows along to create a quick sine wave select your line go to
add select zigzag toggle that down adjust the size and the amount of ridges
and then change the points from corner to smooth
if you're tired of flat vector shapes use the roughen edges effect
and tweak some of the settings to add a
bit of grit to your animation
if you want to slightly expand or reduce the
edges of your layer simply add the effect a simple choker and adjust the
choke map this is also great for adding rounded corners if you want to quickly
offset or stagger your layers select them all trim their lengths to the
amount you want to offset right click select keyframe assistant sequence
layers click OK and then drag out the ends of all of them
to convert text to a shape layer with the text tool selected right-click and
select create shapes from text now got your text editable as paths
if you want to morph a square into a circle keyframe its roundness at zero move ahead and
drag it up to its maximum roundness where it will be circle and there you
are you can do basic math operations in any number fields if the number is
inconvenient to calculate yourself let After Effects do it this square is 400
pixels wide and I wanted to move that far to the right so with its position
property I'm gonna select its current position and add + 400 and press
Enter and there we go you can use multiply and divide in here
two if you need some free space on your hard drive your disk cache might be
using up more than it needs to you can clear your disk cache by going to edit
purge all memory and disk cache and click OK to clear out some memory from
projects you might not have opened in years if your project is getting bloated
with a bunch of assets and comps that you no longer need you can go to file
and then down to dependencies and remove unused footage you can also reduce the
project only the files needed in the comps you have selected and you can also
collect all of your files and every linked asset into a folder which is very
useful if you need to have the project on to someone else on another machine or
using another server if you want to know what comp an asset was used in you can
right click over in the project panel and select reveal in composition which will
take you to it you can also do it in Reverse - you can right-click select
reveal reveal layer source and project and you can also right-click and select
reveal reveal in Explorer to find the exact source of that file if you need to
replace a file or composition you can select it down in your timeline find the
layer of comp you'd like to replace it with in the project panel hold alt and
simply drag it into your composition or timeline window and it will replace it
keeping all the original animated properties select your comp in the
project window and drag it onto the new composition window and that will create
a new comp with the exact same sized duration of that original comp with that
comp nested inside if you want an image or comp to be the exact height or width
of a comp without doing it by hand and eyeballing it with a scale property
select layer transform fit to comp height or width
depending on your needs use the search bar down in your timeline to easily
access properties like path or stroke width
without toggling down a whole bunch of layers we've got this pre comped
animation of a snowman shape bouncing and we want to add a quick shadow to it
we can duplicate it with command D add a fill effect select our shadow color then
add the CC slant effect adjust the slant and the height send that layer behind
and now we've got an animated shadow if you've got an animation in the pre comp
you can change the speed by right-clicking and select a time time
stretch 50% makes it twice as fast 200 makes it twice as slow to reverse it
right click and select time time reverse layer if you have nothing selected in
your timeline to add markers to the comp press * on your keyboard and
it'll create a marker here if you do with the layer selected it will create one on
the layer you can double click to add a comment to that marker or if you hold
alt and click the asterisks it will open up that dialog box as you create the
marker you can also hold alt on your keyboard and drag a marker to extend it
to encompass a duration rather than a single point if you want to reverse some
properties of an animation you can select the key frames you want reversed
right click select keyframe resistant and time reverse keyframes and that will
swap the values of those keyframes if you want to an extended animation they
keep the same timing you can select all the keyframes and while holding alt
select the first or last keyframe and drag it out to keep those proportions
exactly the same you can also press J and K on your keyboard to jump your
playhead to the nearest keyframe J goes to the nearest previous keyframe and K
to the nearest upcoming keyframe if you've got a whole bunch of layers
taking up your timeline and you don't need to see them all for now select all
of the ones you want to hide click the shy icon lock the layer over here
completely shy icon over here now they're hidden and there's no chance you
accidentally gonna move them now you've got a lovely clean timeline and if you
just need to view one or a couple of layers in your composition window you
can click the solo button here on as many of layers as you need so you're not
distracted by the other layers and so After Effects doesn't need to render
those layers as well very useful if you're using a lot of effect
or a render heavy comp if you want to apply an effect to the whole scene and
know just one element instead of pre comping you can use an adjustment layer
create a new adjustment layer by going up to layer new just Millea and whatever
effects you applied to that layer will affect everything beneath it change the
color of your layers in your timeline to keep it organized
click the colored square down here and choose any color you want if you choose
select label group I'll select all layers with that color very handy when you're
working with a lot of layers if you've pasted something and after effects has
pasted them in the wrong order here our bottom text should be underneath
this rectangle to get it to paste in the right order you need to select your top
layer first then the others copy or cut and then paste them and the layers that you've selected
first or right on top in the layer stack if you want to quickly test a bunch of
fonts select your text click in the font drop-down area and scroll through with
your arrow keys till you find the font you like you can also click this star
over here on the left and they will put them in this favorite folder so you can
access the fonts you always use if you're annoyed that when you create a
new shape layer the anchor point goes to the middle of the comp rather than the
middle of the shape layer you can fix that by going to edit preferences
general and select Center Anchor Point in new shape layers isn't that nicer I
made a short playlist of some related videos that'll think you'll enjoy if
you've made it this far I'll see you in the next video and please consider
subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week
Subtitle: Zoe J Marriott