After Effects CS5 provides many tools to develop and manage your element layers.
As your comfort level with these tools rises, so will your development curve.
After Effects is a funny beast.
There are so many things you can do and so many settings, controls, and options.
Its tempting to skip way ahead to get to the 'fun stuff' and indeed, you should.
Getting the 'instant gratification' of seeing someone teleport into existence, light shimmering off the waters in your animation, importing 3D creations from Cinema4D are all within your reach.
However, I find myself again and again going back to the basics to get a better understanding of how it all really works.
There are great tutorials and 'downloadable' projects that give you a glimpse of possibility and I can't imagine going through the discipline without a few tastes along the way of what 'can be'.
This has been the dance for me.
Rub shoulders with the gurus, take their tutorials, download their projects, then pick them apart to understand how it was constructed enhancing your learning curve each time.
There are many great books that actually take you through the classroom.
A favorite, with high reader ratings, is Chris Meyer's 'Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects'.
When you look at the timeline and its controls in After Effects, you see a lot of icons, a lot of options, and you can choose to display some or part of them in your chosen design mode.
You can also rearrange them so for me to say, 'on the far left', is based on what I consider an 'out of the box' workspace.
In fact, if you look under the 'Window' pull down menu on the top far right you will see several workspace options from 'animation', 'effects', 'standard', and you can save your own workspace design.
In the standard workspace layout you see several options for each single element in your timeline panel.
We won't cover them all in this article but start with the basics and the options that let you choose which to display.
This can be a little confusing in the beginning when you are following an example and you don't see the same options that are being presented.
In the lower left section of your timeline you see three icons that will change your display.
On the far left is 'expand or collapse the layer switches pane' and it looks a bit like the size/expand image we're used to seeing on most of our windows 'sizing' options.
When you click this off and on your layer switches come in and out of view and these switches are options like whether to make a layer 3D, or turn an effect applied to this layer off or on.
On the far right is the option to display your duration panes represented with a bracket '{}' symbol.
Displaying your duration shows when your object enters and exits the composition, how long it is and its 'stretch' factor.
You can 'stretch' an entry and this can be as simple as 'squeezing' a moon rising into a few minutes, or 'stretching' a hummingbird flight into an entire minute.
All of the icons and thumbnail controls in After Effects display their title with a 'mouse hover'.
This same title will locate their documentation in the help provided on the far right pull down menu.
There are a lot of bells and whistles that may seem a bit overwhelming at first, but provide a rich assortment of options and controls that make your job much easier.
As your comfort level with these tools rises, so will your development curve.
After Effects is a funny beast.
There are so many things you can do and so many settings, controls, and options.
Its tempting to skip way ahead to get to the 'fun stuff' and indeed, you should.
Getting the 'instant gratification' of seeing someone teleport into existence, light shimmering off the waters in your animation, importing 3D creations from Cinema4D are all within your reach.
However, I find myself again and again going back to the basics to get a better understanding of how it all really works.
There are great tutorials and 'downloadable' projects that give you a glimpse of possibility and I can't imagine going through the discipline without a few tastes along the way of what 'can be'.
This has been the dance for me.
Rub shoulders with the gurus, take their tutorials, download their projects, then pick them apart to understand how it was constructed enhancing your learning curve each time.
There are many great books that actually take you through the classroom.
A favorite, with high reader ratings, is Chris Meyer's 'Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects'.
When you look at the timeline and its controls in After Effects, you see a lot of icons, a lot of options, and you can choose to display some or part of them in your chosen design mode.
You can also rearrange them so for me to say, 'on the far left', is based on what I consider an 'out of the box' workspace.
In fact, if you look under the 'Window' pull down menu on the top far right you will see several workspace options from 'animation', 'effects', 'standard', and you can save your own workspace design.
In the standard workspace layout you see several options for each single element in your timeline panel.
We won't cover them all in this article but start with the basics and the options that let you choose which to display.
This can be a little confusing in the beginning when you are following an example and you don't see the same options that are being presented.
In the lower left section of your timeline you see three icons that will change your display.
On the far left is 'expand or collapse the layer switches pane' and it looks a bit like the size/expand image we're used to seeing on most of our windows 'sizing' options.
When you click this off and on your layer switches come in and out of view and these switches are options like whether to make a layer 3D, or turn an effect applied to this layer off or on.
On the far right is the option to display your duration panes represented with a bracket '{}' symbol.
Displaying your duration shows when your object enters and exits the composition, how long it is and its 'stretch' factor.
You can 'stretch' an entry and this can be as simple as 'squeezing' a moon rising into a few minutes, or 'stretching' a hummingbird flight into an entire minute.
All of the icons and thumbnail controls in After Effects display their title with a 'mouse hover'.
This same title will locate their documentation in the help provided on the far right pull down menu.
There are a lot of bells and whistles that may seem a bit overwhelming at first, but provide a rich assortment of options and controls that make your job much easier.