When to Use Solid Layers

In this movie you'll learn how to deal with legacy projects saved from older versions of After Effects.

This video outlines the best ways to deal with layer dependency warnings that appear when a project contains fonts that are not available on your system or refers to missing source files.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to avoid situations where your projects lose the link to your source files.

Missing effects alerts can happen when moving work from one machine to another, or if somebody gives you a project that they built on another machine. In this video you'll find out exactly what this all means and how to deal with it.

New users often get confused when they can't access menu items or when the software behaves in an odd way. This video teaches you how to think your way through the problems you may encounter so that you can gain confidence and understanding.

In this video, you'll learn the basic controls in the Project panel for managing footage items and see how the Flowchart panel can be used to get an overview of connections between compositions and footage items.

The Composition panel provides many controls for viewing and assembling compositions, and the Layer panel provides similar controls for working with one layer at a time. In this lesson, you'll learn what each of these controls does and how each can be used to get the right view of your work. You'll alsp earn the controls for using masks, effects, and paint tools in the Layer panel.

In this video you'll learn the basic controls in the Timeline panel for managing, viewing, and modifying layers and their properties. You'll also see how to show and hide columns in the Timeline panel and enable layer and composition switches.

There are many ways to play and preview portions of your movies as you work. In this lesson, you'll learn the basic controls in the Preview panel for playing and previewing compositions, as well as the difference between RAM previews and standard (Spacebar) previews.

After Effects comes with hundreds of effects and animation presets. In this video, you'll learn how to use the Effects & Presets panel and Adobe Bridge to browse, apply, and preview effects and animation presets. You'll also see how to view and save animation presets and effects in the Effect Controls panel.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to activate tools and modify settings for various tools in the Tools panel.

Colors are represented as red, green, and blue channels, and there's an additional channel that defines transparency – the alpha channel. In this video, you'll see how to control how you view the information about these channels. You'll also learn how to pick a color in various contexts and change the color bit depth to remove banding and increase precision.

In this example you'll see how easy it is to create graphics from absolutely nothing, directly within After Effects. You'll also see how to create 3D environments and build scenes for your animations.

This project was a test project for a job for the BBC. They needed a minute of lip-synced animation and I needed to complete the project in a day. This is the project I put together as a test to see if the technique would work. Luckily, it did and I got the job done on time! Audio used by permission. "Memories Of Your Own" - Words and Music by Jason A. Levine

After Effects has great tools for character animation called the Puppet tools. The Puppet Pin tool places a mesh over your footage using the alpha channel. You can add points to this mesh that allow to distort it and animate it, providing some really natural movement for your animations and motion graphics projects. You'll see an example of what can be done with the Puppet tools in this video.

The paint tools in After Effects are usually used for cloning or filling in mattes, but they can also be used to create stop-motion-style animation. In this movie you'll see how they can be used to create a stop-motion style without the need for painful frame-by-frame tweaking of keyframes or drawings.

In this example you'll see how to desaturate an entire movie, leaving only one color, using the Leave Color effect. You'll also see how to change only one color in an image using the Change To Color effect.

This video shows you how to use the Echo effect and the Roto Brush tool to create a blurred trail of after-images behind a moving subject.

This example uses the Cartoon effect and color correction effects to composite two clips together and make them look like a cartoon.

In this video you'll see how to use motion tracking, an adjustment layer, and a blur effect to remove a logo from a movie.

In this video you'll learn how to use the Character panel to create and format text directly in After Effects.

In this lesson you'll see how the Paragraph panel can be used to apply professional typographic formatting to your text layers and prepare them for animation.

After Effects allows you to create vector shape layers right inside the application without having to use other software to prepare the files. This video takes you through the basics and shows you how to use the extensive controls in the Composition panel and the Timeline panel to create organic shapes and patterns for your creations.

Before you can do anything with your source files, you need to get them into After Effects. In this lesson you'll learn how to import files, create a folder, and import footage items into a folder. We'll also look at using Adobe Bridge to browse, preview, and import movies.

In this video you'll learn about codecs and containers and how to determine if your movie files are supported for import by After Effects.

Most high-end visual effects work is done using image sequences rather than movie files, and most motion graphics projects require the use of still images as sources. In this video you'll learn how to import a numbered series of still images as a still-image sequence and use it as a single footage item. You'll also see how to hange footage interpretation settings so that the still-image sequence has the desired frame rate and learn best practices for preparing still images before importing them.

You can import layered image files from Photoshop and Illustrator and preserve the layers for individual animation. In this lesson you'll learn how to preserve layers and how to prepare images before importing them to make animation most efficient. We'll also look at importing Photoshop files and Illustrator files as footage items, with layers merged into a single image.

Reusing elements from other After Effects projects or collaborating with other artists is easy when you import one project into another. In this video you'll learn how to import one project into another and how to only keep the parts that you need.

When files are imported into After Effects, After Effects makes informed guesses about some characteristics of those files. Sometimes it gets things wrong. In this video, you'll learn how to change how a single footage item is interpreted using the Interpret Footage dialog box; copy and paste footage interpretation settings from one footage item to several others; and modify the rules used for interpretation so that a particular type of footage is always interpreted as you specify.

If After Effects misinterprets field order, or if you don't tell it to separate fields, the result can look rather bad. In this video you'll learn about fields in interlaced video and see how to separate fields before working with a footage item in a composition.

Different video devices record and play video with different pixel aspect ratios. In this lesson, you'll learn how to change the interpretation settings to assign the correct pixel aspect ratio to a footage item and change the composition settings to determine the pixel aspect ratio for a movie.

You often only need a piece of a footage item in a given composition. In this video you'll learn how to trim footage items so that layers based on them contain only specified frames, and how to trim, extend, and slip-edit layers in a composition.

Many of the terms used in After Effects come from traditional animation. Terms like keyframe and tweening are explained here. You'll also discover how these terms relate and compare to the work you do in After Effects.

In this video, you'll learn about the five basic transform properties and how to animate them. We'll start by creating keyframed animation of individual layers, then apply keyframe assistants like Easy Ease to fine-tune the animation.

The paths that your layers travel are determined by Bezier-style motion paths. In this lesson you'll learn how you can change the shape of this path, move it, and even copy and paste it to other layers. Selecting and moving keyframes will also be covered here.

The Motion Sketch panel is every animator's best friend. Here you'll get some familiarity with it and learn about possible pitfalls before they happen to you! You'll also see how you can use the Smoother to smooth out complicated motion paths and the Wiggler to add randomness to an existing animation.

Panning and zooming may seem like a straightforward idea but there are a few gotchas to avoid. This video shows you how to set up After Effects to make this kind of animation a breeze.

In this lesson you'll see how to avoid the gotchas involved with panning and zooming, learning how to animate properties and control motion paths using the Layer panel to control a layer's anchor point property.

The Graph Editor may seem intimidating but really it's a designer's best friend, allowing you to get a visual understanding of motion. In this video you'll also learn about the different keyframe types available in After Effects.

In this example you'll see how you can create some cool animation tricks using the Graph editor that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.

If you spend a lot of time setting up complex animations, you may want to save them so you can use them again in later projects. In this tutorial you'll see how to save your animations as motion presets that can be re-applied to other layers and other projects.

The Align panel may have humble origins but can be a powerful animation tool if combined with a little imagination and know-how. This video takes the Align panel to the limits and shows you how you can really push even the most apparently basic of features to be a powerful creative tool.

After Effects not only allows you to animate an effect, but also allows you to animate practically any property from an effect. The plus side of this is a vast amount of creative flexibility; the downside is that it can be overwhelming. In this tutorial you'll get comfortable with animating individual effect properties.

Layer styles provide a quick, flexible way of adding design elements like shadows, bevels, and glows to layers. These can be imported live from Photoshop or applied within After Effects. In this video you'll learn how to make the most of them.

Expressions are a very small subset of Javascript, but don't let that put you off, After Effects allows you to create them easily and automatically with practically no scripting involved. In this lesson you'll learn how to add your very first expression, and I promise it will be painless!

Text animators offer a powerful and unique method for character animation in After Effects. In this tutorial you'll learn how you can create complex character animation with just a couple of keyframes.

After Effects ships with lots of free animation presets. In this video you'll learn how to add extra properties to the free animation presets in order to customize them to better suit your needs.

It's not hard to import text from other Adobe applications into After Effects and edit it, but this video offers a few tips and tricks that will help you figure this feature out and make the most of it.

You can achieve some interesting effects by combining multiple animators. In this tutorial you'll find out how to do it and will also be warned about the potential pitfalls involved.

Often the supplied animation presets need tweaking here and there but it can be difficult to work out exactly what needs changing. This video shows you some of the different ways you can modify values and properties giving you a much better understanding and a sense of control.

Once you've modified and created your own text animations, you can build up a library of them by saving them as text animation presets. This video shows you how to do this and advises you on best practices.

This lesson breaks down all the categories of shape layers so that you understand them more clearly. It also warns of a few gotchas that you may encounter when working with shape layers.

You can achieve quite stunning effects very quickly and easily by animating shape layer properties. This video shows you how and suggests some cool ideas to work with.