and in this video, I'm gonna go over the basics

and intro to Adobe After Effects.

So I know this program can be very confusing

to a beginner or if it's your first time looking

at the program.

Or maybe if you're just comfortable with Photoshop

or Premiere and you never really got into After Effects.

So I'm gonna try to explain what this all is,

how you can demystify it and what it's all used for anyway.

So you got a whole bunch of stuff popping up here.

Basically, it starts off with a get started menu

and these new updates and from here,

you can open new projects, recent projects.

You actually don't have to create or open anything,

you can actually just close it if you want too

and just pop up with your After Effects window.

So what is After Effects in the first place

and why would you use something like this

in comparison to other video editors like Premiere Pro

or Final Cut, you know, what's the difference?

So the best way that I can try to explain this

to help you understand is After Effects is kind of like

the Photoshop for video.

See instead of being a program like Premiere

or Final Cut of Sony Vegas where you have a timeline

and you can drag clips and videos in order

on the sequence.

After Effects is a compositing and motion graphics

video editing software so that means

you can compose many pieces and layers

on top of one another and you can also create

different motion graphics because it has better

and different unique stronger tools and engines

in those areas like things like the rotoscoping brush,

camera motion tracking, different complex effects.

But let's start with our basic menu.

This is our composition menu by the way, this right here

which you can usually see the preview

in most video editing softwares

and you can open a new composition or drag in clips.

So I've got a folder on the desktop

with a couple video clips in it and for example,

I'm gonna actually highlight these and throw them

in the project media bin which is

on the left hand side here.

So I'm gonna make sure I have it open

and I can actually just throw these clips

in our project media bin and now they're loaded.

We have movie clip 2978 and 2984.

So these clips happen to be 1920 by 1080 which I can see

when I highlight them so if I do just drag one

onto the timeline, it'll create a new composition

based on this footage like it says there.

So now we have a new 1080 by 1920

standard high definition composition

or we could have also went to composition,

new composition in the menu on the top

and set all these settings.

But now that I have the clip here,

you can start to see kind of the basic ways

that After Effects is laid out.

So you have our layers menu and you have a bit of a timeline

but remember, this isn't really working left to right.

It's more so working up to down and stacking

like a composition.

So if I take the other clip that I had

and dragged that on the timeline as well,

you can see we have both of the clips,

one on top of the other, you can't really see

because it goes by layers, you know top is seen

and then the bottom is not so you can hide visibility

and both of these are together.

This little green line shows how long the clip is

so this clip of the flower happens to only be

about 7 seconds whereas the clip of the statues

and water fountain happens to be a little bit longer.

And also notice when I created the composition

just by dragging the clip in, it makes the composition

only as long as that clip automatically

so if you wanted to change that, you could also go

to composition settings and you can see here

the duration is 10 seconds in this case

'cause the clip was 10 seconds

but I could make it 30 seconds and it will be longer.

On the bottom, we can scroll left to right

and see all that new space that we've added.

But what else do we have going on in our menus?

So on the left hand side,

we have the project effect controls.

On this top side here, we have our menu

with tools so the move tool, text tool,

different brushes and rotobrushing which is like

a quick selection tool.

On the right hand side, we also have different menus

like our brushes tool.

If we did have a brush, we could choose what size

and type and paint and color.

We also have different effects and presets

in this menu and you can also access these

in the effects menu so let's say I want to add

an effect onto this clip, what I can do is either use

a preset that's set for me in this right hand side.

So these are all different presets.

Or I can build my own effect out and you notice how

I did need to highlight this layer to get that to be active

and be able to work on it.

So let's say I just want to add a simple blur.

Let's add a gaussian blur, a very basic function

that's in a lot of programs and you should see

once I add this onto the clip, it'll pop up

in our effects control menu or panel for us to adjust.

So each effect has different aspects that you can adjust

on it so this one has blurriness which I can increase.

And it also has blur dimensions so I can go horizontal

and vertical which will give us a soft blur,

just horizontal or just vertical

and these little icons right here are key frames

which you can create animation with.

So if I drop down this menu,

you can see all the different properties

of each layer that you have and do different things

with them so you can see all the effects

that are applied onto here,

right now just the gaussian blur.

You can transform it so the size, the position,

opacity, et cetera.

So you know I can turn the opacity down to 50%

and now we get a interesting blending of these clips.

And let me add a simple key frame here.

So I'm gonna go to the beginning

or wherever I want to start.

I can add an anchor point by clicking on this stopwatch icon

and then I can move over let's say a couple seconds,

make the blurriness go really intense.

And you should see a little diamond is created

and then I can move over even more,

maybe make it go less intense.

So I'll type in 20 and this is just one example

of some sort of creative animation that you can do.

I don't know what type of project you'd be working on

but you can see

we've got the flower getting blurry, less blurry.

I could do the same thing with key framing animation

but that's just basic key framing.

You can look up another tutorial of mine for more

about general key framing principles.

But you can see you can stack many effects

on top of each other and beyond just your basic blurs,

After Effects has some really interesting and powerful tools

that are not present in your basic non linear editors

like Premiere Pro or Final Cut so things like CC Burn Film

or just random ones like this, I'll show you for example,

are much more complex in function

than a lot of the stuff you'll find in other places.

So you see this one kind of gives it

a burned paper animation which the same thing

I showed you about key frames earlier,

you can add the stopwatch diamonds and make it go

from 0 to 100 to act as a cool transition.

You can also adjust different things about this

but you can see it stacks the effects together.

You can also drag effects and rearrange

the positioning of them so if I put the blur

after the burn, you see everything gets blurry

but if I put the burn after the blur,

then the burn is still solid.

So keep that in mind.

Some more things to consider in After Effects

are that you can create clean text and motion graphics.

So let me go to composition, new composition

to start a new 1920 by 1080 black 30 second composition

and it'll open in a different composition menu

so this is another thing to keep in mind.

You can have many different compositions open

at the same time and kind of play off of one another

and they're all open in tabs down here,

kind of like tabs on an internet browser.

So in this new composition, I don't have to drag any clips

or anything in but you notice that you still have

the same project menu so you can have

many different compositions in the same project

and have the same media throughout and the compositions

actually pop up as a media object as well

but I can click on the text tool, for example,

click there and add text and move this around.

So now you have a text layer that pops up

and you still have all the same properties

on the text from adjusting the position,

opacity, things like that.

And just to show you a quick example,

let's go to the effects and presets menu

that we pointed out earlier and let's look

for some animation presets for text

and we can see there's actually a lot of really cool

built in presets so for example,

we can do animating in and let's just choose

a fun one here, spin by character.

So I can just click and drag this right on

to this text object and you can see it places two key frames

two seconds in by default since this isn't animate in

and if I drop that down, you can see the animator

and all the different things but if I press play,

it's kind of cheesy looking but there's a lot of cool

different ones that you can play around with.

Presets are always kind of cheesy looking

but here's a cool one, typewriter.

I can click and drag that on

and

it'll create the key frames from the point

that my timeline cursor was on currently

so this'll add the text letter by letter

like a typewriter and you can also go into

the effects control of this actual text,

the dropdown, and adjust these different

animation properties.

You can also add shape layers so if I go to layer,

new, shape layer, I can create things

either with the rectangle, ellipse, star, whatever.

So I can create rectangles and then I can use

After Effects motion and key framing tools

to create animations on these as well

so this is a cool way that you can create lower thirds

where things might smoothly pop in and out,

reveal text and all that.

So I have different individual tutorials,

project by project, little quick videos for you

to check out if you want to look at creating

a lower third or quick selecting an object

or learning about camera tracking

and different text animation.

I don't want to try to fit those all in at once

but hopefully you're seeing a little bit

of the different tools and menus

and you can see the basics of it.

We've got a preview menu right here in the middle.

We've got a layer menu, different tabs

of different compositions if we want.