Hello, welcome to this lesson in After Effects. In this lesson, we will review the After Effects workspace, toolbars, and panels. When you first open After Effects, you will see this screen. This is the After Effects workspace. Please note, I will be pointing out the location of the various panels based on the Effects workspace layout. This Effects workspace layout can be found right here under the Window, Workspace, Effects Menu. At the top, we have the Tool panel, where you will notice some tools are grayed out. This is due to the fact that a composition has not been set up yet. On a top left is your project panel. Here you will import and see a list of assets and compositions as they are created. Further down and across the bottom of the workspace is the timeline panel. This is where you arrange and adjust your layers and add and adjust key frames. The center screen is a composition viewing panel, where you can visually see the combination of your layers, similar to Photoshop. On the right hand side are the stack panels. Here you can mix and match panels that you use most in your workflow. The first thing you want to do as you begin a project, is import your assets. You can import in several ways. You can navigate to the File menu, and select Import. Import File. Go and select this video clip. You can also right-click inside the Project panel, Import File. I'll select another video clip. You also have the option of dragging and dropping assets from your File Manager. One reminder, you can delete any imported file listed here. Such as this. This file will not be deleted in your hard drive, this is simply a link to your media. The next step is to establish your main composition. You can do this by selecting a new composition from the Composition window. Here, you can name your composition, set the resolution, frame rate, and runtime. In this example, we will name this composition Tutorial. We'll set it at 1920 by 1080 resolution, frame rate of 30 frames per second. And we'll make the composition 10 seconds long. Once all the settings are in place, click OK. Now we can start editing out layers of assets in the order we need. There are several ways of adding assets to our composition. You can drag directly into a composition panel if you don't need exact placement of footage. If you want your footage centered in the composition, drag into the Timeline panel. I'm going to delete the top layer, just to show you the footage now properly centered. I will bring in another asset, by double-clicking in the Project panel. Double-clicking on the File, where I do Select File and Open. You can also add a layer to the composition by clicking the asset, dragging it into the timeline window, and selecting what layer you'd like it on, whether above or below the previous layer, you will see a blue line. In this case, blue line is above the last layer, I'm gonna let go of the mouse. It is not a topmost layer. The timeline panel allows you to rearrange layers, set keys, and change your in and out time and composition, among many other things. You could rearrange composition layers by clicking and dragging. Again, look for the blue line. Setting key frames are simple enough, for instance, we wanna select a position. I'm gonna open up the twirl down to the Transform. Open the Transform layer. Set a key frame on position. Select my object, move it to one position. Go to another spot in time by clicking and dragging in a timeline. Then I'm gonna click and drag my asset to another position. Go back to this frame zero, hit the spacebar to play it back. To add an effect to your composition, you can find effects and presets from right-hand stack panels. You could search for an effect, or select from the list. In this case I'm going to search for the word glow, by typing in the word glow. And I have several options. I'm gonna select the stylized glow effect, and click and drag it on top of my top layer. I can do that either in the composition panel, visually, or in the timeline itself on top of the layer, and you'll see it highlight. Once an effect has been dragged onto an object, you will see the effects control come up, and this is where you can adjust the different variables of the effect. The adjustment I will make will be adjusting the global radius, by clicking and dragging, you'll see a double arrow. And I can make it less or more. Also note, I no longer see my Project panel. You could easily navigate back to the Project panel, if you do not see it, by clicking the double arrows, and selecting Project. Once again, to preview your animation, scrub to the beginning, and you can hit the spacebar. And your animation will play back. Now this animation is playing between two key frames, and we also have a glow effect on top of the butterfly. Before we wrap up this lesson, I would like to show you a very useful technique. First I'm gonna import some more footage. This will be an alternate butterfly. If you did a lotta work on your first composition, and your top layer has animation and effects added to it, and you don't wanna recreate all this effort, and yet your client wants to change the actual image. You can select the image, select the layer, hold down the Alt key on your keyboard, click and drag. And that asset will be replaced, but the key frames and effect will stay the same. Thanks for watching, stay tuned for the next lesson, where we show you how to use keyboard shortcuts that will greatly enhance your workflow. So let's go check it out.
