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Adobe after effects cs4 tutorials pdf free.
Dragging to change values is called scrubbing. Adding an exposure effect To punch up the brightness of this layer, you will apply the Exposure colorcorrection effect. This effect lets you make tonal adjustments to footage. It simulates the result of modifying the exposure setting in f-stops of the camera that captured the image. This will make everything brighter in the layer to simulate an overexposed image.
This keyboard shortcut displays only the Position property, which is the only property you want to change for this exercise. Leave the y coordinate at You will move this layer to the right.
Now you can see the three waveforms—left, center, and right—in the Composition panel, hanging like a beaded light curtain. To contrast the left and right waveforms with the center waveform, you will reduce their opacity. It all looks great, but how about some movement? For this exercise, you will animate the Position property of a text layer using keyframes, and then use an animation preset so that the letters appear to rain down on the screen.
About the Timeline panel Use the Timeline panel to animate layer properties and set In and Out points for a layer. In and Out points are the points at which a layer begins and ends in the composition. Many of the Timeline panel controls are organized in columns of related functions. Time zoom slider F. Composition marker bin Before delving too deep into animation, it helps to understand at least some of these controls.
The duration of a composition, a layer, or a footage item is represented visually in the time ruler. On the time ruler, the current-time indicator indicates the frame you are viewing or editing, and the frame appears in the Composition panel.
The work area start and end brackets indicate the part of the composition that will be rendered for previews or final output.
When you work on a composition, you may want to render only part of a composition. Do this by specifying a part of the composition time ruler as a work area. To move to a different time, drag the current-time indicator in the time ruler or click the current-time field in the Timeline panel or Composition panel, type a new time, and click OK.
For more information about the Timeline panel, see After Effects Help. This composition is the layered Photoshop file you imported. Two layers, Background and Title Here, appear in the Timeline panel. The Title Here layer contains placeholder text that was created in Photoshop.
To display the flowchart, tap the Shift key when a Composition, Timeline, or Layer panel is active. At the top of the Composition panel is the Composition Navigator bar, which displays the relationship between the main composition Bgwtext 2 and the current composition Bgwtext , which is nested within the main composition. You can nest multiple compositions within each other; the Composition Navigator bar displays the entire composition path. Arrows between the composition names indicate the direction in which pixel information flows.
Before you can replace the text, you need to make the layer editable. A T icon appears next to the layer name in the Timeline panel, indicating that it is now an editable text layer.
The layer is also selected in the Composition panel, ready for you to edit. Then, type Substrate. Each footage item, layer, and composition in a project has its own duration, which is reflected in the beginning and ending times displayed in the time rulers in the Composition, Layer, and Timeline panels. The way you view and specify time in After Effects depends on the display style, or unit of measure, that you use to describe time.
Note that the figures are separated by semicolons in the After Effects interface, representing drop-frame timecode which adjusts for the real-time frame rate , but this book uses a colon to represent non-drop-frame timecode.
To learn when and how to change to another system of time display, such as frames or feet and frames of film, see After Effects Help. Press Shift after you start dragging to constrain the operation to the vertical axis. An orange diamond appears in the Position bar for the layer in the time graph, indicating the new keyframe. A keyframe marks the point in time where you specify a value, such as spatial position, opacity, or audio volume.
Values between keyframes are interpolated. When you use keyframes to create a change over time, you must use at least two keyframes—one for the state at the beginning of the change, and one for the state at the end of the change. Press Shift to constrain the drag operation to the vertical axis. Your final Position values should be approximately , The blue lines at the top, bottom, and sides of the Composition panel indicate title-safe and action-safe zones.
Television sets enlarge a video image and allow some portion of its outer edges to be cut off by the edge of the screen. This is known as overscan. The amount of overscan is not consistent between television sets, so you should keep important parts of a video image, such as action or titles, within margins called safe zones.
Keep your text inside the inner blue guides to ensure that it is in the title-safe zone, and keep important scene elements inside the outer blue guides to ensure that they are in the action-safe zone. Easing into and out of animations keeps the motion from appearing to be too sudden or robotic.
As the text approaches its final position, it will ease to a smooth stop. The keyframe icon changes to an arrow. Applying an animation preset will bring it to life. Remember, you can go to the time by dragging the current-time indicator or by clicking the Current Time field in the Timeline panel or Composition panel. The Effect Controls panel opens so that you can customize the Echo effect, which is a component of the animation preset. The default settings are fine for this project.
After Effects provides several methods for previewing compositions, including standard preview, RAM preview, and manual preview. For a list of manual preview controls, see After Effects Help. All three methods are accessible through the Preview panel, which appears on the right side of the application window in the Standard workspace. Using standard preview Standard preview commonly called a spacebar preview plays the composition from the current-time indicator to the end of the composition.
Standard previews usually play more slowly than real time. The number of frames played depends on the amount of RAM available to the application. In the Timeline panel, RAM preview plays either the span of time you specify as the work area, or from the beginning of the time ruler.
Before you preview, check which frames are designated as the work area. When all of the frames in the work area are cached, the RAM preview plays back in real time. You can control the amount of detail shown in either the standard or RAM preview by changing the resolution, magnification, and preview quality of your composition. About OpenGL previews OpenGL provides high-quality previews that require less rendering time than other playback modes.
It provides fast screen previewing of a composition without degrading resolution, which makes it a desirable preview option for many situations. When OpenGL does not support a feature, it simply creates a preview without using that feature. For example, if your layers contain shadows and your OpenGL hardware does not support shadows, the preview will not contain shadows. Complex compositions can require a large amount of memory to render, and the rendered movies can take a large amount of disk space to store.
Otherwise, you can just save it, and continue getting acquainted with the After Effects workspace. Customizing the workspace In the course of this project, you may have resized or repositioned some panels, or opened new ones.
As you modify the workspace, After Effects saves those modifications, so the next time you open the project, the most recent version of the workspace is used. You can save any workspace configuration, or use any of the preset workspaces that come with After Effects. These predefined workspaces are suitable for different types of workflows, such as animation or effects work.
You can also change workspaces using the Workspace menu at the top of the window. The Paint and Brushes panels open. The Composition panel is replaced by the Layer panel, for easy access to the tools and controls you need to paint in your compositions. If a project with a custom workspace is opened on a system other than the one on which it was created, After Effects looks for a workspace with a matching name.
Controlling the brightness of the user interface You can brighten or darken the After Effects user interface. Changing the brightness preference affects panels, windows, and dialog boxes. You can click Default to restore the default brightness setting. Finding resources for using After Effects For complete and up-to-date information about using After Effects panels, tools, and other application features, visit the Adobe website.
To search for information in After Effects Help and support documents, as well as other websites relevant to After Effects users, simply enter a search term in the Search Help box in the upperright corner of the application window. You can narrow the results to view only Adobe Help and support documents, as well. For additional resources, such as tips and techniques and the latest product information, check out the Adobe Community Help page at community. For more up-to-date information, view the Help files online or download the current PDF for reference.
You can easily obtain these updates through Adobe Updater, as long as you have an active Internet connection. The Adobe Updater automatically checks for updates available for your Adobe software. Select how often you want Adobe Updater to check for updates, for which applications, and whether to download them automatically. Click OK to accept the new settings. Review answers 1 Most After Effects workflows include these steps: import and organize footage, create compositions and arrange layers, add effects, animate elements, preview your work, and export the final composition.
An After Effects composition has both spatial dimensions and time. Compositions include one or more layers—video, audio, still images—arranged in the Composition panel and in the Timeline panel. A standard preview plays your composition from the current-time indicator to the end of the composition, usually more slowly than real time.
A RAM preview allocates enough RAM to play the preview with audio as fast as the system allows, up to the frame rate of the composition. You can drag panels to new locations, move panels into or out of groups, place panels alongside each other, and undock a panel so that it floats above the application window. As you rearrange panels, the other panels resize automatically to fit the application window.
In this lesson, you will continue to learn the basics of the Adobe After Effects project workflow. You will animate the newscast ID so that it fades to become a watermark that can appear in the lower-right corner of the screen during other TV programs. You can use them to create great-looking animations quickly and easily. When you begin the lesson, restore the default application settings for After Effects. When asked whether you want to delete your preferences file, click OK.
After Effects opens to display a blank, untitled project. However, After Effects also offers another, more powerful and flexible way to import footage for a composition: using Adobe Bridge.
You can use Adobe Bridge to organize, browse, and locate the assets you need to create content for print, the web, television, DVD, film, and mobile devices. You can drag assets into your layouts, projects, and compositions as needed; preview assets; and even add metadata file information to assets to make files easier to locate. In this exercise, you will jump to Adobe Bridge to import the still-image file that will serve as the background of your composition.
If you receive a message about adding an extension to Adobe Bridge, click OK. Adobe Bridge opens, displaying a collection of panels, menus, and buttons. Click the arrows to open nested folders. You can also double-click folder thumbnail icons in the Content panel.
The Content panel updates interactively. Information about the file, including its creation date, bit depth, and file size, appears in the Metadata panel.
Alternatively, you can drag the thumbnail into the Project panel in After Effects. Adobe Bridge returns you to After Effects when you place the file. In Lesson 1, you created the composition based on footage items that were selected in the Project panel. You can also create an empty composition, and then add your footage items to it.
This preset automatically sets the width, height, pixel aspect ratio, and frame rate for the composition to NTSC standards. The foreground object is a layered vector graphic that was created in Illustrator. The Illustrator file is added to the Project panel as a composition named 5logo.
A folder named 5logo Layers also appears. This folder contains the three individual layers of the Illustrator file. You should now see both the background image and the logo in the Composition panel and in the Timeline panel. The composition opens in its own Timeline and Composition panels.
Leave all other options in the Character panel at their defaults. Leave all other options in the Paragraph panel at their defaults. Notice that when you switch to the Selection tool, the generic Text 1 layer name in the Timeline panel changes to NEWS, the text you typed.
This will apply the effect to all of the layers nested in the 5logo composition. Effects that are turned off do not appear in the Composition panel and typically are not included when the layer is previewed or rendered. By default, when you apply an effect to a layer, the effect is active for the duration of the layer.
However, you can make an effect start and stop at specific times, or make the effect more or less intense over time. However, when you apply an effect to an adjustment layer, the effect is applied to all layers below it in the Timeline panel. Effects can also be saved, browsed, and applied as animation presets. The effect you create next will be applied only to the logo elements, and not to the background image of the bridge. A soft-edged shadow appears behind the nested layers of the 5logo layer—the logo graphic, the rotated type, and the word news—in the Composition panel.
You can set these values by clicking the field and typing the number, or by dragging the orange, underlined value. The drop shadow is nice, but the logo will stand out even more if you apply an emboss effect. Then, click the triangle next to Stylize to expand the category. The Color Emboss effect sharpens the edges of objects in the layer without suppressing the original colors. You will learn several ways to animate text in Lesson 3. The text appears, letter by letter, until the word news is fully onscreen at To do this, you need to precompose the other three layers of the 5logo composition: rotated type, 5 logo, and crop area.
Precomposing is a way to nest layers within a composition. Precomposing moves the layers to a new composition. This new composition takes the place of the selected layers.
When you want to change the order in which layer components are rendered, precomposing is a quick way to create intermediate levels of nesting in an existing hierarchy. Then, click OK. This new, precomposed layer contains the three layers that you selected in step 1. The Dissolve — Vapor animation preset includes three components—a master dissolve, a box blur, and a solid composite, all of which appear in the Effect Controls panel.
Press the spacebar to stop playback at any time. Adding transparency Many TV stations display logos semi-transparently in the corner of the frame to emphasize the brand.
Click the stopwatch icon to set an Opacity keyframe at this location. After Effects adds a keyframe. When you place your composition in the render queue, it becomes a render item that uses the render settings assigned to it. While After Effects renders the item, you are unable to work in the program. You will prepare this animation for two formats so that it can be used for broadcast purposes as well as on a website.
The Render Queue panel opens automatically. By default, After Effects uses lossless compression to encode the rendered composition into a movie file, which is fine for this project. However, you need to identify where to save the file. After Effects displays a progress bar in the Render Queue panel as it encodes the file, and issues an audio alert when all items in the Render Queue have been rendered and encoded.
For that purpose, you need to render and export the composition in SWF format. The SWF format is a widely used vector graphics and animation format for the web. It is a compact, binary format that can contain audio and vector objects. Before exporting to SWF, you need to adjust the composition a bit for online display. After Effects applies the new web-appropriate resolution— x pixels—to the composition.
As a result, both the background and 5logo layers are about twice as big as the composition, which is now smaller, has a different aspect ratio, and has a different frame rate 15 fps. So you need to reposition and resize the layers for the new output medium, including centering the logo in the composition. Nested layers are rasterized. This setting preserves image quality nicely but also reduces the file size somewhat.
Leave all other settings at their defaults, and then click OK. After Effects displays a progress bar as it renders the file and exports it to SWF format. When you locate the asset you want to use in an After Effects project, double-click it or drag it to the Project panel. Precomposing moves the layers to a new composition, which takes the place of the selected layers. Adobe After Effects offers many ways to animate text. You can animate text layers by manually creating keyframes in the Timeline panel, using animation presets, or using expressions.
You can even animate individual characters or words in a text layer. This lesson will take approximately 2 hours to complete. As you start the application, restore the default settings for After Effects. Importing the footage You need to import two footage items to begin this lesson. This makes After Effects an incredibly powerful application for compositing and motion graphics work.
Arrange the layers so that Lotus. Now, position and scale the Lotus. Because the two values are linked , changing one value automatically changes both. The lotus moves to the lower-left corner of the composition, so that only a small amount of the flower is on the screen. About text layers In After Effects, you can add text to layers with flexibility and precision. You can create and edit text directly on the screen in the Composition panel and quickly change the font, style, size, and color of the text.
You can add horizontal or vertical text anywhere in a composition. The Tools, Character, and Paragraph panels contain a wide range of text controls. You can apply changes to individual characters and set formatting options for entire paragraphs, including alignment, justification, and word-wrapping. In addition to all of these style features, After Effects provides tools for easily animating specific characters and properties, such as text opacity and hue.
After Effects uses two types of text: point text and paragraph text. Use point text to enter a single word or a line of characters; use paragraph text to enter and format text as one or more paragraphs. You can apply effects and expressions to text layers, animate them, designate them as 3D layers, and edit the 3D text while viewing it in multiple views. As with layers imported from Illustrator, text layers are continuously rasterized, so when you scale the layer or resize the text, it retains crisp, resolution-independent edges.
The main differences between text layers and other layers are that you cannot open a text layer in its own Layer panel, and that you can animate the text in a text layer using special text animator properties and selectors. The text you enter appears in a new text layer. The small line through the I-beam marks the position of the text baseline.
Then, press Enter on the numeric keypad to exit text-editing mode and to select the text layer in the Composition panel. Or, select the layer name to exit text-editing mode. Using the Character panel The Character panel provides options for formatting characters. If text is highlighted, changes you make in the Character panel affect only the highlighted text.
If no text is highlighted and no text layers are selected, the changes you make in the Character panel become the new defaults for the next text entry. Using the Paragraph panel Use the Paragraph panel to set options that apply to entire paragraphs, such as alignment, indentation, and leading. For point text, each line is a separate paragraph. You can use the Paragraph panel to set formatting options for a single paragraph, multiple paragraphs, or all paragraphs in a text layer.
This aligns horizontal text to the center of the layer, not to the center of the composition. This scales the layer to fit it to the width of the composition. Now, you can position the text layer using a grid. Press Shift after you start dragging to constrain the movement and help you position the text. The easiest way to do that is to use one of the many animation presets that come with After Effects. After applying an animation preset, you can customize it and save it to use again in other projects.
After Effects applies animation presets from the current time. To help you choose the right animation preset for your projects, you can preview them in Adobe Bridge.
Adobe Bridge opens and displays the contents of the After Effects Presets folder. Adobe Bridge plays a sample of the animation in the Preview panel. After Effects applies the preset to the selected layer, which is the The Pond layer.
Nothing appears to change in the composition. Previewing a range of frames Now, preview the animation. Although the composition is 10 seconds long, you only need to preview the first few seconds, which is where the text animation occurs. The letters appear to evaporate into the background.
It looks great—but you want the letters to fade in and remain onscreen, not disappear into the murky depths of the pond. So you will customize the preset to suit your needs. Customizing an animation preset After you apply an animation preset to a layer, all of its properties and keyframes are listed in the Timeline panel.
The Offset property specifies how much to offset the start and end of the selection. This command switches the order of the two Offset keyframes so that the letters are invisible at the beginning of the composition, and then emerge into view.
The letters now fade into rather than disappear from the composition. After Effects adds a new Scale keyframe at the current time. The scale animation ends shortly before The movie title fades in and then scales to a smaller size. Adding Easy Ease The beginning and end of the scale animation are rather abrupt. In nature, nothing comes to an absolute stop. Instead, objects ease into and out of starting and stopping points.
The keyframe becomes a leftpointing icon. The keyframe becomes a right-pointing icon. Animating using parenting The next task is to make it appear as if the virtual camera is zooming away from the composition.
The text scale animation you just applied gets you halfway there, but you need to animate the scale of the lotus flower, as well.
The Pond. This sets the The Pond text layer as the parent of the Lotus layer, which in turn becomes the child layer. As the child layer, the Lotus layer inherits the Scale keyframes of its parent layer The Pond. Not only is this a quick way to animate the lotus flower, but it also ensures that the lotus flower scales at the same rate and by the same amount as the text layer. Both the text and the lotus flower scale down in size, making it seem like the camera is zooming away from the scene.
Creating a parenting relationship between layers synchronizes the changes in the parent layer with the corresponding transformation values of the child layers, except opacity. For example, if a parent layer moves 5 pixels to the right of its starting position, then the child layer also moves 5 pixels to the right of its starting position. A layer can have only one parent, but a layer can be a parent to any number of 2D or 3D layers within the same composition.
Parenting layers is useful for creating complex animations such as linking the movements of a marionette, or depicting the orbits of planets in the solar system. For more on parent and child layers, see After Effects Help. Animating imported Photoshop text If all text animations involved just two short words, such as The Pond, life would be easy. But in the real world, you must often work with longer blocks of text, and they can be tedious to enter manually.
Fortunately, After Effects lets you import text from Photoshop or Illustrator. You can preserve text layers and edit and animate them in After Effects. The imported file is added as a composition to the Project panel; its layers are added in a separate folder.
Because you imported the credits. Click OK if you see a warning about missing fonts. Now the text layers can be edited, and you can fix the typos. Then, change the k to a c in documentary. This is because the original layer name was created in Photoshop. We used Myriad Pro. Leave all other settings as they are. Animating the subtitle You want the letters of the subtitle, an animated documentary, to fade onscreen from left to right under the movie title.
The easiest way to do this is to use another text animation preset. At that point, the title and lotus have finished scaling to their final size. This will work nicely.
You should see two keyframes for Range Selector 1 Start: one at , and one at You still have a lot of animation to do in this composition, so you will speed up the effect by 1 second. After Effects includes several animation presets that animate text along a prebuilt path. These presets also provide placeholder text with formatting when you apply them, so in this exercise, you will enter and format your text after you apply the animation preset.
Adobe Bridge returns you to After Effects, where the preset automatically creates a new layer, pipes, with a predefined path that zigzags across the composition. The text on the path is obscured by the movie title. Customizing the preset path Now, you need to change the placeholder word pipes to directed by. After Effects switches to the Horizontal Type tool and selects the word pipes in the Composition panel.
After Effects updates the Timeline panel with the new layer name. You may find it easiest to use the arrow keys. By animating tracking, you can make words appear to expand outward as they appear onscreen from a central point. Before you animate it, change it to your own name.
Currently, the text is onscreen for the duration of the composition. That will change once you animate it. Use a first, middle, and last name so that you have a nice long string of text to animate. Then, double-click it to apply it to the selected layer in the Timeline panel. The animation should also occur faster. The letters expand as they appear onscreen and stop animating at the last keyframe. Then, click the stopwatch icon to set an Opacity keyframe.
After Effects adds a second keyframe. Using a text animator group Text animator groups let you animate individual letters within a block of text in a layer. About text animator groups A text animator group includes one or more selectors and one or more animator properties. A selector is like a mask—it specifies which characters or section of a text layer you want an animator property to affect. Using a selector, you can define a percentage of the text, specific characters in the text, or a specific range of text.
Using a combination of animator properties and selectors, you can create complex text animations that would otherwise require painstaking keyframing. Most text animations require you to animate only the selector values—not the property values.
Consequently, text animators use a small number of keyframes even for complex animations. For more about text animator groups, see After Effects Help. Then, expand the layer to see its Text property group name. Then, press Enter or Return again to accept the new name.
Each animator group includes a default range selector. Range selectors constrain the animation to particular letters in the text layer. You can add additional selectors to an animator group, or apply multiple animator properties to the same range selector. Now, any properties that you animate with the Skew Animator will only affect the middle name that you selected Bender, here. Skewing the range of text Now, make that middle name shake and shimmy by setting Skew keyframes.
The other names in the line of text remain steady. After Effects adds another keyframe. This adds an Easy Ease to all keyframes. To remove only one animator, select its name in the Timeline panel and press Delete. Cleaning up the path animation Currently, the words directed by fade in and out as they wind along the Pipes path preset. Now, directed by will be visible throughout the composition. Because the middle keyframe now the last keyframe is set to Easy Ease, the words directed by come gently to rest above the lotus flower.
You also need to adjust the path shape so that it starts and ends off the screen. Drag it far enough off that the dragonfly will not be visible. After Effects copies the Position keyframes from the directed by layer to the dragonfly layer. Now, the dragonfly is facing forward as it flies.
After Effects adds a keyframe, and the text moves behind the dragonfly. The words follow the dragonfly and come to rest above your name, while the dragonfly continues to fly along the path and off the screen. Adding motion blur Motion blur is the blur that occurs as an object moves. Now, apply motion blur to the layers in the credits composition. Then, click the Enable Motion Blur button at the top of the Timeline panel so that you can see the motion blur in the Composition panel. After Effects exports the project.
This process may take a while, depending on the size of the project. After Effects displays a progress bar as it exports the composition. Give yourself a pat on the back. You just completed some hard-core text animations. Review answers 1 In many ways, text layers are just like any other layer in After Effects.
However, text layers are like shape layers in that you cannot open them in their own Layer panels, and that they are synthetic layers that consist entirely of vector graphics. You can animate the text in a text layer using special text animator properties and selectors. Navigate to folders containing categories of text animation presets, such as Blurs or Paths, and watch samples in the Preview panel. Then, double-click a preset to add it to the currently selected layer in the After Effects Timeline panel.
When a layer is made a parent to another layer, the other layer is called the child layer. Creating a parenting relationship between layers synchronizes the changes in the parent layer with corresponding transformation values of the child layers. Text animator groups contain one or more selectors. Selectors are like masks: they let you specify which characters or section of a text layer you want an animator property to affect. Shape layers are created automatically when you draw a shape with any of the drawing tools.
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