(electrical buzzing)

(bang)

(bang)

(peaceful music)

- [Kris] Hey, what's up, guys?

This is Kris Truini for Kriscoart Productions,

and welcome to this tutorial which will cover

the basics of After Effects.

I know it's not the most exciting tutorial

that you've ever seen,

but in order to get to the fun stuff,

we need to get the basics out of the way.

Now, I know that this interface looks pretty intimidating,

but once you get the basic mechanism of it

and you know where everything is,

everything else builds upon that basic knowledge.

In other words, this tutorial will try to include

all the basic needs to get you started into one video.

All right, enough talking about the tutorial.

Let's actually jump into it.

So the first thing that we see in this interface

is that it's divided into panels.

You have your Project panel over here,

which also shares the Effects Controls panel.

The Project panel is where all your media,

which can be footage, audio, images,

anything like that will be stored here.

Anything that you use will be imported in the Project panel.

Right next to it, there's a Composition panel.

This is pretty much your monitor.

This is where everything

that you do in your timeline will appear.

Before we start exploring the rest of these panels,

let's actually import some footage

so that we can get a better understanding

of what everything does with an actual example.

So to import your footage,

you can either double click into this Project panel area,

and this will open up this Import File window,

or you can import files through File, Import,

File, or Multiple Files.

So you see they'll pretty much give you the same thing.

Or, if you have a folder open already

with the footage that you need,

you can simply just drag it over onto this box

or into the Project panel area.

Okay, so we now have some footage imported,

and you can see that there is some basic information here.

It gives you the resolution, the frame rate,

the amount of colors, and the type of compression

that this video has.

So, moving on from here,

what you wanna do is create a new composition.

There are a couple of ways of doing this.

You can either drag the footage onto this little icon here,

which will create a composition

based on the settings of the footage.

So it'll have the same frame rate, the same resolution.

Now, another way to do this

is to go under Composition, New Composition.

You can notice that the shortcut for that is Command + N.

For PC users, I'm pretty sure it's Control + N.

Okay, so now that we have a composition created,

let's look at other ways to import files onto your timeline.

So what I have here is a simple picture

that I'm gonna import.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create for this example

a small logo overlay in the lower third of this video.

So there are two different ways to bring this image

into our timeline and see it in our Composition panel.

One way is to actually select it

and drag it over the composition panel.

And you can see that this little box appears,

and what that is is pretty much the size of the image.

So we can see that up here it's 900 by 900,

and that's actually what's showing

into our Composition panel.

And you can pretty much drag it anywhere you would like,

and as soon as you let go, it'll place it in that position.

Now, the other way is a little bit different,

because instead of working on where you wanna place it,

it works on when you wanna place it.

So you can see that this black line forms

soon as we drag it over to the Timeline panel,

and that is because you're telling it first

if it should be on top of the clip or under the clip.

If you place it under the clip, you're not gonna see it

because our footage is actually covering it up.

But if we bring it up by selecting it,

bringing it on top of the clip,

you can actually see that it appears over our footage.

Now, another important thing of this technique is that,

let's say I'm dragging it over,

you not only get to choose in what order it is placed,

but you also get to choose when in time it is placed.

So once again, if you drag it over the Composition panel,

you're choosing where your item is placed,

but if you drag it over the Timeline panel,

you choose when it is placed.

Now, if you notice,

whenever you drag an element onto the Timeline panel,

this secondary timeline indicator knob appears,

and that's pretty much telling you

where the beginning of that layer will be placed in time.

Okay, so again, it's very basic stuff,

but we're actually getting somewhere.

We're starting to get more comfortable with After Effects.

However, if you have a short attention span like me,

I think it's probably time for a break.

So here's some slow motion stock footage for your enjoyment

mixed in with some dubstep.

Enjoy.

(dubstep music)

All right.

I feel much better.

So, let's get back to work.

So once again, what we were trying to do in this example

is to create a lower thirds looking logo overlay.

Instead of having the logo appear over here,

I'm just gonna drag it back to the beginning

so that we immediately see it.

And the next thing we gotta do is pretty much scale it down

and position it down in the bottom.

So there's a couple ways to do this,

like most things in After Effects.

One is to shrink it or resize it or stretch it

with these little points on the edges of the picture.

Or you can click one of those points and hold Shift,

and that will uniformly scale the element.

Another way to scale layers is to select them

and hit S on your keyboard.

That will bring up the scale property of that layer.

So over here, you can see that we can click

and just drag it in and out.

Or, if you want, you can select it

and type in the value that you would like.

All right, so let's scale it down to what we want,

so I'd say that's pretty good.

And we wanna position it down here.

So all you gotta do is just click the layer

and drag it over.

Now let's say you have

many layers and elements in your composition

and you can't really click them.

Well, just how we brought up the scale over here,

you can select it and hit P,

and that will bring up the position of the layer.

And then you have the X and Y coordinates

and you can drag

and position the layer

where you want it to be.

Now, while we're here,

let me just mention a few other things.

You now know that with hitting S, you bring up scale,

hitting P, you bring up position.

Well, here's a couple other ones.

If you hit R, it brings up rotation,

and you can actually rotate your layers.

If you hit T, it'll bring up the opacity.

And opacity is pretty much how transparent your layer is.

So if you bring that down,

you can see that we start seeing more of what's behind it.

Another cool keyboard shortcut is

instead of seeing them individually,

if you hold Shift, you can actually bring more than one up.

Okay, so before we move on

to animating some of these properties,

let's actually see a couple other keyboard shortcuts

that can help you import things quicker

and work with your timeline a little bit faster.

So let's say you wanna import something

down in the middle of your composition.

There's actually a keyboard shortcut for that.

You select a layer that you wanna import,

and you hit Command, or PC, Control,

and the question mark key on your keyboard.

So if you hit that, you'll see that

it will import the layer in the middle of your composition

above everything else.

So that's a quick little trick

to import files into your timeline.

Speaking of which,

let's actually go a little bit more in depth

with navigating in the timeline.

Now, you see that we have this current timeline indicator,

and this is pretty much what you use to

scroll through your footage.

And you can see that if we click anywhere in this top part,

the timeline indicator will jump to where your mouse is over

in that point in time.

So a few keyboard shortcuts.

If you wanna go to the very beginning,

instead of just dragging it to the beginning,

you can hit the Home key on your keyboard,

and you can go to the end of your timeline with the End key,

not N, End key, E-N-D.

You can also navigate frame by frame

by hitting Page Up and Page Down,

or you can actually jump 10 frames at a time

by holding Shift while you're holding

either Page Up or Page Down.

Just to wrap up the basics of the timeline,

let's also look at this area right here.

You can notice that these icons over here look like eyes,

and that's because if you click on 'em,

it actually shuts that layer off,

so it makes it not visible.

And you can turn it back on whenever you want.

This is a pretty useful feature

when you're working with multiple stuff

or if you're trying something out,

you don't really wanna delete it,

you can just shut it off momentarily and then bring it back.

Another thing that you can do is also solo a layer.

So let's say I wanna focus on this and really work on it

or color correct it or do whatever I want,

I can really focus on this single element by soloing it.

You can also solo multiple elements.

Obviously, we're gonna go back to what we had

because these are the only two layers in our timeline,

so by soloing both of 'em,

it's pretty much like not soloing anything.

But again, going back to

organization being key in After Effects,

this is actually a really helpful feature.

One last thing that I wanna point out,

you saw that we can jump forward into time

by clicking on the seconds bar over here.

Another way to do this to be actually more specific,

you can click this time code,

these time code numbers over here,

by the way, these represent

frame, seconds, minutes, and hours,

so you can actually click on this, and you can jump forward

to whatever specific time you would like.

All right, so that's pretty much all we're gonna cover

as far as the timeline in this tutorial.

I think we're ready to move on to animation,

which sounds like a big chapter in this tutorial,

but it's really, really simple.