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Adobe After Effects Introduction Part 1

Hello guys, I'm Sunil Kumar Nerella and this is my first post in this blog VFXMonks. In this post
you can learn the very basics of Adobe After Effects where a beginner can start with this post who wants to learn Adobe After Effects. With this post you can learn the stuff like

·        Adobe After Effects User Interface
·        Understanding the Project, Composition, Timeline windows.
·        Importing Footage Items

                              So without wasting any time let's start with the software.


              
                       As started with the word Adobe After Effects, After Effects is a software which is used to composite a different types of media like Videos, Images, Audio and creating the scene by using those available media files. It is also usd to do some basic works in VFX(Visual Effects) like Motion Graphics, Rotoscopy, Wire removal etc,. Adobe after effects is an entry level software for the VFX. There are so many softwares like Nuke, Fusion, Silhouette to  do all the above works but these are a high level softwares like node based. After Effects is a layer based software which can be used like same as Photoshop. Small difference between Photoshop and After Effects is Photoshop is, working on the single image and Aftere Effects is, Working on the sequence of images or video.

               I'm using Adobe After Effects CS6 as it is basic requirement for my work. You may use a higher version or Lower version of AE, but the basics will be same for all the versions except some of the changes.

Opening Adobe After Effects:
                If you are ready to start, and if you already downloaded and installed Adobe After Effects on your Computer, just click on the After Effects icon on your desktop. Otherwise go get your software.
Download Adobe After effects from this 

After Opening the icon After Effects Splash screen can be visible almost like below image.


               Don't worry about the screen, it is loading all the files and effects from the folder and getting ready to open the After Effects window. It may take some time to load according to the effects and plugins installed on your system for After Effects. I have too many 3rd party plugins installed on my computer and will take almost 30 seconds to load. After loading all the files the User Interface may look like the below image.


        User Interface:
                Your User Interface windows may change from mine, because when AE is opened first time the Workspace shown at top right of the AE window will be set to "Standard", but mine is set to "Animation" shown in the picture. There are many presets for the workspace like Standard, Animation, Effects, Motion Tracking etc,. Those all presets contain their preferred workspace to dedicated work on the project effectively. We can also create a new workspace according to our choice by changing the windows to our dedicated placement of usage of that window.

                    While there are a lot of elements in the User Interface, we'll start by focussing on just four sections of the user interface.


  1. Project Window tab
  2. Composition Window tab
  3. Timeline Window
  4. Toolbar

                1.Project Window tab: on the left side of the User Interface, In After Effects the project file is the main document which references all your project assets like Media files, Audio files etc,. Whenever you start a new project, you will create a new project file to hold all of the assets for that project. When you save in AE you are saving the project file, and this is the file you will open next time you want to work on that project. The standard extension for AE projects is .aep ('after effects project'), and while it is not necessary to use this extension on the Macintosh it is useful to help you distinguish your project files from other files.


                2.Composition Window tab: The composition tab is your main workspace in AE. The area in the center represents your video, and any footage items you place in a composition will be visible here. At the bottom are several buttons which control how your composition will be displayed. We are only concerned with three of these at this point.


  • On the left side you will see the zoom menu, which lets you choose how far to zoom in or out on the composition. By default it is set to 100%.
  • The fourth item from the left is the current time indicator. This is just shows you  where the currently visible frame exists on your timeline.
  •   Over near the right side is a menu which says 'full. this lets you choose the resolution to display your previews at. By default it is full, but you can also choose half, third or quarter. Lower resolution will preview faster, but the quality will be less when compared to full i.e. there will be no much details in the display.

                We will discuss the remaining buttons as they become relevant to our projects, but for now you can just focus on those three areas.

                3.Timeline Window: Each composition has an associated timeline, and it is displayed in the timeline tab whenever you open a comp. The timeline tab is similar to the layers palette in Photoshop. It shows all of the current layers of a composition, with the topmost layer being the front item in the composition. on the right side of the window each layer has a coloured bar which represents its duration. The Duration Bar  for the currently selected layer has a slightly darker colour to it, and the layer colours correspond to the label set in the project window.



                There are a lot of little switches, buttons and icons in the timeline window, and if you try to learn them all at once it can be overwhelming. The main areas you need to be concerned with for now are the layer names, their duration bars and the play head.
  • To change the name of a layer, Select it's name in the timeline and hit the 'Enter' key for windows and 'Return' key for Mac. This will highlight the name and you can type a new name in.
  • To change the in and out points of a layer, Click on the black arrows at either end of the duration bar and drag it to increase or decrease the duration of the layer.
  • To change the current frame, Click and drag the blue play head arrow at the top of the timeline. As you move it, the comp window will update to reflect the currently selected frame.

                As we move into more advanced projects we will discuss the other controls as needed. For now, just get comfortable with these three basics.

                4. Toolbar: The toolbar is just like the toolbar in Photoshop. You click on a button to select the tool you want to use. However, AE has far less tools in its toolbar than Photoshop, and  even then some tools are used very rarely. Right now you just need to know about three tools, all of which should be familiar to you if you have worked with Photoshop before.


  • Arrow tool (leftmost button) is the most commonly used and default tools in AE. You use this tool to select and move footage items in the comp window, and you can drag the corner handles of a layer to scale the layer with this tool as well.
  • Hand tool (second button) lets you move your composition around in the comp window if you have zoomed in far enough that you can't see the whole composition at once. If you can see the whole composition this tool will do nothing.
  • Zoom tool (Third button from left) zooms in on your composition. If you hold down the option key this tool will zoom out instead.     


                With this User Interface basics I'm closing this post for now and in my next post the second part of the basics i.e. Understanding project, composition and timeline windows will be covered. This is Sunil Kumar Nerella Signing off. You can also download this post by downloading the PDF file link which will be uploaded here in this post.




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As some great random individual said " A long time ago the persons who sacrificed their relations, happiness , time they are called monks and at present they are called VFX artists".

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