- Well hello everybody, I'm Nathaniel Dodson
from tutvid.com, welcome to this
Adobe After Effects tutorial
where today we're gonna take a look at five
very basic, simple animations
that are perfect if you're just getting started
in Adobe After Effects.
You're gonna learn a whole lot about animation here.
If you do enjoy this tutorial,
well make sure you subscribe to my channel
so you never miss any future video editing,
After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, you name it, tutorials,
and without further ado, let's jump in
and get this thing started.
Alrighty, here in After Effects,
I'm working with a new composition
that I've sized to 2560 by 1440,
and I'm at 60 frames per second as well.
If you're creating a new composition to follow along,
go ahead and use these settings.
You can also go to composition, composition settings,
and change the settings
of an already existing composition in there.
I also have my background color set to the hex code 333333.
Just a pretty dark gray.
I also added this little image to the background,
I set its opacity to 5%, locked the background down
so it doesn't move or I don't accidentally adjust it.
It's not really part of this tutorial,
just if you're looking at it and you see it there,
that's what's going on.
Here's where the good stuff begins.
Alright, let's grab the text tool,
and type out the words, or the number and the word,
"5 easy", and over in the character panel,
I'm going to choose Bebas Bold as my font.
I'm gonna set it to 350 pixels in size.
And then I'm gonna use my align panel
to center this text to my current composition.
Now I'm gonna add some more text
by using the type tool again.
I'm gonna type out the word "animations".
One again I'm gonna use Bebas Bold,
this is a separate piece of text of course,
but this time, the text is gonna be a size of 195 pixels.
And again, I'm gonna align this to the middle
of my composition.
And I'm gonna drag it below my first piece of text
to give a little spacing,
just as much spacing as you think is right,
I'm gonna add a little bit here as I see fit.
Now once again, I'm gonna add even more text
by typing in, this time, "in After Effects",
and, I'm going to again use Bebas Bold,
I'm gonna change the size here to 113 pixels.
Again, I'll align this to the center of my composition
and adjust the vertical positioning
just to give a little space here as well,
so just make sure all this text is spaced out nicely.
After that I can grab the ellipse tool,
and drag out a perfect circle.
I can do that by holding down the shift key.
And here up in the top bar, I'm gonna chose
to give it a white stroke,
I don't want it to have a fill,
so I can click on the word fill
and just make sure I hit the slash in there.
I'm gonna add a 25 pixel white stroke to this shape,
so you can select stroke, make sure it's filled
with solid white, then choose to make sure it's 25 pixels.
Here again we'll use the align panel,
and we'll get the horizontal and vertical centers
aligned to this composition,
and you can adjust it just a little bit
or adjust your text to make sure your text
is perfectly in the middle of this ellipse.
Now, grab all three pieces of text.
In order to align this text,
you may need to first lock the ellipse layer
so you don't select it, because technically
it is on top of all this stuff.
And then just shift click the three pieces of text,
and you can nudge them up or down like I said,
just to make sure they get really into the center
of this circle.
So let's get animating here.
I'm gonna select the largest piece of text,
the "5 easy", but I'm gonna select it
down in the layers area.
And I'm gonna hit the letter S.
That's gonna bring up my scaling options.
Then I'll click on that little stopwatch icon right there,
and that's gonna drop a key frame
and allow me to start animating.
Key frames are essential.
They're the little stopping points in our animation.
I'm gonna set the scaling here to 0%,
it's gonna make the text disappear, don't worry.
And then we're gonna move out a little bit,
and when I say move out, I'm just dragging my playhead
down the timeline a little bit,
I had my playhead all the way at the first frame,
I'm gonna drag my playhead down the timeline
just a little bit, it doesn't have to be too far,
but you could stretch it out as much as you like.
This part is kind of up to you.
Wherever you see fit, and then I'm gonna change the scaling
back to 100%.
And After Effects will auto-add a new key frame
and fill in the animation between those key frames.
But, you can see here, when we play through
this zooming animation, it looks bad,
because it begins at the bottom left corner
and zooms in from there, I want it to look
like a natural zoom up from the middle.
What is going on here?
Well, see this little node thing right here?
That's the anchor point, and the scaling is done,
really, based upon where this point is.
If this point were in the middle of the text,
we'd scale right from the center
and get a proper zooming effect like we want.
Good news is, we can change this.
It's a little weird, but we can change it.
All we need to do is hold down the command and option keys,
or on the Windows, the control and alt keys,
and double click this tool up here in the top toolbar,
it's called the pan behind tool.
It's up here in the toolbar at the top of our screen.
And you can watch the point move, boom, right to the middle,
or right to the center of our text.
And now when we play through the animation,
we don't even need to reanimate anything,
it works exactly like we want,
except that it's still pretty mechanical
and maybe a little blocky looking.
That's because we need to add something called easing.
So let's add some easing to make it look
a little smoother and more natural.
I'm gonna select both key frames by shift clicking them,
and then I will right click on one of the key frames
and choose key frame assistant, and then easy ease.
This is gonna make the whole animation much nicer,
smoother, and just more professional.
Let's move along to another type of animation here,
a fade animation.
I'll leave the "5 easy" layer open
so I can see the key frames down there,
I'm talking about leaving it open
down here in the layers panel.
And then I'll open the animations layer.
And I'm gonna move the playhead
to where the "5 easy" animation stops,
and I'm gonna hit the letter T
to bring up the opacity option.
And I'm gonna drop a key frame here
by once again clicking on that little stop watch icon,
and I will choose to reduce the opacity to 0%.
This is gonna make our text disappear.
Then I'll move the playhead down the timeline a little bit.
However far we want.
And I'll change the opacity back to 100.
Select both of these new key frames,
we're gonna do that same easy ease trick,
it all looks pretty good.
Now that we've got our first two animations down,
let's do a pop-out animation
with sort of an added bounce effect
at the end of the animation.
We're gonna take things a little step further here
now that we've gotten two basic animations down.
Select the with After Effects layer,
down in the layers area, and hit S
to once again open up scaling.
And once more, I will hold down the command option
or control alt key, and I'm gonna double click
that pan behind tool.
Again, that's just to reset my anchor point
to the center of this piece of text.
And then I'm gonna drop a key frame
by clicking on the stop watch icon,
where on the timeline the fade in animation completes.
Then I'm gonna go and I'm gonna deselect
that little chain link icon here
between my scaling, this is between the X and the Y axis,
this is gonna allow us to change the scaling
of just one axis of our text,
while not messing around with the other.
I want to reduce the X axis scale to 0%,
and move the playhead down the timeline a little bit
and reset the X scale to 100%.
This will give us this effect
where the text is just sort of shooting out side to side,
from the center of this piece of text.
It's a really neat little animation.
Now what I want to do is select both of those key frames,
again by shift clicking them,
add that easy ease by right clicking
and go down to the key frame assistant
and choose to apply that same easy ease
to these key frames as well.
But with these key frames still selected,
we're gonna click on this little graph editor icon,
to bring up this kind of complicated looking graph.
This is where the magic happens.
I'll drag this little handle and pull the red line
up past the dashed line.
This will tell After Effects
kind of to overextend the animation
before letting it slide or snap back
to the proper 100% size.
We can tweak this graph line here
to perfect the easing as well, if we want.
Now, let's click on the graph editor icon
to get back to the original timeline.
I'll preview the effect and see how it's looking.
Pretty, pretty cool.
There are so many great applications for this effect.
Definitely something you want to remember.
Now let's animate our circle to draw around this text
as soon as it finishes appearing.
That is, as soon as the text finishes appearing.
I'm gonna unlock the shape layer
and twirl down the little arrow and find contents,
and twirl that down, and get down into ellipse one.
I'm gonna hit the little arrow next to add,
right there on sort of the top right corner if you will
of that layer, and I'm gonna choose to add
a trim paths here.
Move the playhead to where the text animation finishes
on your timeline, and reduce the end parameter to 0%.
This is going to sort of zip up and hide
the entire ellipse stroke.
Then just move the playhead a little further
down the timeline, set the end parameter to 100%,
and let After Effects do the auto-key framing
and animation magic for you.
Let's go ahead and preview this effect at this point,
and it's looking pretty good.
I think I'm gonna select both of my key frames here,
and move this animation back,
so it takes place kind of as the final piece of text
is animating in, to help this whole animation
to feel just a little bit tighter
and more well put together.
We can also select both these key frames
and add an easy ease to really complete the animation here.
Now there are also a ton of great animation possibilities
within some of the pretty amazing effects
offered in After Effects.
So let's do something cool here.
Right click within the layers area,
and choose to create a new,
and within the new menu choose solid.
And let's name this solid waves.
Now, we're gonna open up the effects and presets panel
by going window, effects and presets.
And I'm gonna run a search for an effect called radio waves.
Then I'm gonna drag that out
and just drop it onto our solid.
Then we're gonna look for our effect controls panel,
again if it's not open, window, effect controls.
I've got mine over here on the left.
And I'm gonna make some changes in here.
First of all, I'm gonna change the frequency to four.
I'm gonna change the expansion to 25.
Lifespan, we'll shift that to 1.2.
I want the color to be white.
And I'm gonna set the opacity to 0.25, which is 25%,
this runs from a zero to one scale here on opacity.
I'm gonna change the start width to 20,
and the end width, I'm gonna set it to one.
Now what I'll do is I'll drag the solid on the timeline,
I'll drag the edge, so this whole radio wave nonsense
begins right where all the other animation completes.
There might be some better ways to do this,
but this is kind of just a quick and dirty way
to make this work for the time being.
So I'll go ahead and I'll preview this.
And I can watch the entire series of animations
that we covered here today,
all take effect and play out before my eyes.
And I think it looks pretty good,
for a series of beginner level animations.
We talked about a simple zoom animation,
a fade in animation, a one-axis scale animation,
adding that cool little easing bump effect,
and of course, this really cool repeating wave animation
from the radio waves effect.
So that, my friends, I believe will wrap this one up,
for learning about key frames and stop watch icons,
and easing, and bumping and all the little things
we covered in this video tutorial, guys, that's it.
Get it, got it good.
Daniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.
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