Getting Started – Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom in a Book [Book]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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. Book title:. Publication Name:. Adobe after Effects Cs4. Item Length:. Adobe Press. Publication Year:. Classroom in a Book Ser.

Item Height:. Adobe Creative Team. Item Width:. Item Weight:. Number of Pages:. About this product. Product Information Visual effects and motion graphics pros of all stripes – from broadcast professionals to VFX supervisors to Web designers who need to produce occasional video segments – will welcome the dramatically accelerated features provided in the brand-new After Effects CS4.

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The Tools, Character, and Paragraph panels contain a wide range of text controls. 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.

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 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, you can select the layer name to exit text-editing mode.

Animating Text Using the Character panel The Character panel provides options for formatting characters. 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. If a type layer is selected, the text in the Composition panel takes on the newly selected font. Using the Paragraph panel Use the Paragraph panel to set options that apply to an entire paragraph, 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.

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. After applying an animation preset, you can customize it and save it to use again in other projects. To help you choose the right animation preset for your projects, you can preview them in Adobe Bridge.

Adobe Bridge plays a sample of the animation in the Preview panel. Nothing appears to change in the composition. Previewing a range of frames Now, preview the animation.

The letters appear to evaporate into the background. It looks great—but you want the letters to fade in and remain onscreen, not disappear. 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 letters now fade into rather than disappear from the composition.

Previewing the scale animation Now, preview the change. The scale animation ends shortly before The movie title fades in and then scales to a smaller size.

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 compass as well. Road Trip. This sets the Road Trip text layer as the parent of the compass layer, which in turn becomes the child layer.

As the child layer, the compass layer inherits the Scale keyframes of its parent layer Road Trip. Not only is this a quick way to animate the compass, but it also ensures that the compass scales at the same rate and by the same amount as the text layer. Road Trip because Road Trip is now the second layer. Alternatively, you can select the compass layer in the Timeline panel and press P to reveal its Position property.

Then enter , Both the text and the compass scale down in size, so that it appears that the camera is moving away from the scene. If you entered Position values for the compass, select the compass layer, and press P to hide the Position property, too.

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.

Animating imported Photoshop text If all text animations involved just two short words, such as Road Trip, life would be easy. But in the real world, you may often have to work with longer blocks of text, and they can be tedious to enter manually.

Because you imported the credits. Click OK if you see a warning about missing fonts. 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. Then select layer 2 again. Then, in the Text Color dialog box, select a green color. The easiest way to do this is to use another text animation preset. You should see two keyframes for Range Selector 1 Start: one at , and one at 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.

The text on the path is obscured by the movie title. Customizing the preset path First, you need to change the placeholder word pipes to directed by. 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. 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. Using a text animator group Text animator groups let you animate individual letters within a block of text in a layer.

Then expand the layer to see its Text property group name. 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. 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. 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. This adds an Easy Ease to all keyframes.

To remove only one animator, select its name in the Timeline panel and press Delete. Then press N to set the end bracket for the work area at the end of the composition. Animating Text 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 your name.

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.

This process may take a while, depending on the size of the project. Give yourself a pat on the back. You just completed some hard-core text animations.

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.

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. This lesson will take approximately an hour to complete. You can animate shapes, apply animation presets, and add Repeaters to intensify their impact. You can customize and transform an individual shape or its entire layer to create interesting results.

In this lesson, you will use shape layers to build a dynamic background for the introduction of a reality series called DJ Quad Master. The period indicates that there are no units in that position. To specify 10 minutes, type Shape attributes are all represented in the Timeline panel, and you can animate each setting over time. The same drawing tools can create both shapes and masks. Masks are applied to layers to hide or reveal areas of an image, while shapes have their own layers.

When you select a drawing tool, you can specify whether the tool draws a shape or a mask. Press Enter or Return to accept the new layer name. Drawing a polygon By default, the Polygon tool draws a shape using the settings of the last shape drawn with that tool.

However, by adjusting the points, position, rotation, outer radius, outer roundness, and other values, you can dramatically alter the initial shape. Select the Solid Color icon , and then click OK. Click OK.

Twisting a shape The Twist path operation rotates a path more sharply in the center than at the edges. Positive values twist clockwise; negative values twist counterclockwise. To move the shapes closer together, use a smaller value for the x axis; to move them farther apart, use a larger value. Now the shapes are farther apart. To move all of the shapes, you need to move the entire shape layer. Change the Position to , The shape layer is now in the upper-left corner of the composition. Rotating shapes The suns should rotate on the background.

This setting causes the shape to rotate three times in 10 seconds. Blending shapes with the background The rotating suns look good, but they contrast with the background too much. The value would apply to all the duplicates as well. Press Enter or Return again to accept the new name.

A polygon is simply a star without an Inner Radius or Inner Roundness property; both tools create shapes called polystars. Drawing a star The Star tool is grouped with the other shape tools. To draw a star, drag the Star tool in the Composition panel. The radius values change the shape of the star. Negative values pucker a shape; positive values bloat it.

This star shape will go well in the background. Now you can duplicate and animate it. Now there are six stars on the screen. When you change the Transform properties for the Repeater, the change is multiplied by the number of copies created.

The same concept applies to each of the Transform properties. Each star is more transparent than the one before it. Each duplicate star will be smaller than the one before it. Now you want to animate each star to rotate around its own axis. Incorporating video and audio layers The background is in place.

Now you can add the video of the DJ and the audio track that accompanies it. The DJ. Trimming the work area The DJ. If you rendered this movie now, the DJ would disappear halfway through the movie. You can drag the current-time indicator in the Timeline panel, or click the Current Time box and then type First, it smooths the layer, removing a great deal of detail. Therefore, it works best on video footage rather than a graphic layer, such as the background in this project.

These settings control how much detail is removed and how it is smoothed. Higher values remove more detail. These settings determine how color is reduced and how gradients are preserved. The layer becomes black and white temporarily. These settings reduce the number of black lines on the subject. This makes the image even more cartoonish. The only thing missing is the title to identify the program.

Creating a self-animating shape Wiggle Paths turns a standard rectangle into a series of jagged peaks and valleys. Because the operation is self-animating, you only need to change a few properties for the entire shape to move on its own.

Then change the Size to and the Detail to In the Character panel, select a sans serif font, such as Arial Black, and specify a size of 60 pixels. Adobe Bridge opens, displaying the available animation presets. Press the spacebar to stop the preview. To use the Brainstorm feature, select the layer or properties you want to include, and then click the Brainstorm icon. The Brainstorm dialog box displays multiple variations of your image, based on randomized settings. You can save one or more of the variants, apply one to a composition, or redo the Brainstorm operation.

The Brainstorm feature works especially well with animation presets. Soloing excludes all other layers of the same type from the Composition panel.

To see all the variants in action, click the Play button. The feature randomizes the properties and displays variants. Name the button to match its function, such as Play Movie or Scene Selection.

Then use the menus to assign up to three highlight layers and one video thumbnail layer. Review answers 1 A shape layer is simply a layer that contains a vector graphic called a shape.

To create a shape layer, draw a shape directly in the Composition panel using any of the drawing tools or the Pen tool. The feature makes it possible to explore numerous possibilities quickly and easily, and to save or apply them with a single click.

You will animate an illustration of the artist driving a car on a city street. This is a complex animation. You will start by animating the background and some objects so that the virtual camera appears to move from left to right across the scene.

You may delete the sample movie from your hard disk if you have limited storage space. The CarRide composition is already open in the Composition and Timeline panels. Now, you will use it to synchronize the movement of the objects in three layers—the leaves, full skyline, and the FG foreground layers—with the BG background layer of the animation. BG from the pop-up menu. This establishes the three selected layers as child layers to the parent layer, which is layer 8, named BG the background.

This, in turn, will animate the child layers in the same way. Then type the desired time without punctuation as in for , and press Enter or Return. The background now moves across the composition, and because the leaves, full skyline, and FG layers are child layers to the BG parent layer, they also move horizontally from the same starting position. You will animate it next. The bee is not visible at in the Composition panel. Then click the stopwatch icon to create a Position keyframe.

You can trim footage by changing the In and Out points in the Layer panel or the Timeline panel, depending on what you want to change. Previewing the animation A quick manual preview will show you how the elements in the scenery move. The animation of the background, leaves, bee, foreground objects, and the objects in the skyline makes it appear as if a camera is panning across the scene.

The red car is on the Artist layer. To edit the anchor point of the Artist layer, you need to work on the Artist layer in the Layer panel. This is a temporary position that lets you see the car onscreen while you mask the driver into place, which is your next task. With the car positioned onscreen, you can add the driver. You will use a custom animation preset to create a mask from a shape layer.

Adobe Bridge opens. You can close Adobe Bridge or leave it open to use later in this lesson. For example, you can use shape tools or the Pen tool to draw a mask. Artist from the Parent menu. Animating a Multimedia Presentation 5 Go to , and change the Position values for the Artist layer to You can create a motion path for the position of the layer or for the anchor point of a layer. A position motion path appears in the Composition panel; an anchor-point motion path appears in the Layer panel.

The motion path appears as a sequence of dots in which each dot marks the position of the layer at each frame. A box in the path marks the position of a keyframe. Dots close together indicate a slower speed; dots farther apart indicate a faster speed. Then click the stopwatch to set a Scale keyframe. Previewing your work Now that the keyframes are set for the moving car, preview the entire clip, and make sure the driver is framed to create a pleasant composition. The blue car is actually on a precomposed layer that also contains a yellow car.

In this example, the vehicles layer contains one nested layer with a blue car and one nested layer with a yellow car. Press Shift after you start to drag to constrain the movement vertically. Animating the buildings Animated buildings? You bet. Notice that this composition has three layers: skyline, building, and buildings.

Press Shift after you start to drag to constrain the horizontal axis. Naturally jumping buildings? Aw, come on. This is fun. This adjusts the speed of change as the motion approaches and retreats from the keyframe. Do the same for the skyline layer. This applies motion blur to all of the nested layers. Take a look at the animation from the beginning. If you change settings for a solid that is used by more than one layer, you can apply the changes to all layers that use the solid or to only the single occurrence of the solid.

Use solid layers to color a background or to create simple graphic images. In the Solid Settings dialog box, name the layer radio waves, and then click the Make Comp Size button.

Then click OK to create the layer. By default, the radio waves layer lasts the duration of the composition. Then, in the Composition panel, click to set the producer point at the top of the pyramid. You just need to parent the radio waves layer to the full skyline layer so that the waves travel with the building across the composition. You may need to expand the Preview panel to see all the options.

Then press the Home key, or move the current-time indicator to the beginning of the time ruler. However, this slide-show technique could easily be adapted to other uses, such as presenting family photos or making a business presentation. To help you choose, use Adobe Bridge to preview them. Currently, the Artwork layer is set to start at You need to adjust the timing of the layer so that it appears at This drops out the pure white in each image and replaces it with the softer white of the canvas.

Now the artwork appears gradually. Continuous rasterization means that graphics stay sharp as they are scaled up. The FLV and F4V formats are container formats, each of which is associated with a set of video and audio formats.

Adobe Bridge lets you preview audio. Click the Pause button or press the spacebar to stop. Luckily, this music track has been composed to loop cleanly. A Time Remap property appears for the layer in the Timeline panel, and two Time Remap keyframes appear for the layer in the time ruler.

The audio is now set to loop in a cycle, repeating the clip endlessly. All you need to do is extend the Out point of the layer to the end of the composition. The motion path appears as a sequence of dots, where each dot marks the position of the layer at each frame. Use solid layers to color a background or create simple graphic images. You may delete the sample movies from your hard disk if you have limited storage space.

Click Close to close the Welcome screen. Resize the Name column to make it wider and easier to read, if necessary. Similarly, there are two layers for the two lighting conditions outside the window: Window and Window Lit. The Window Pane layer includes a Photoshop layer style that simulates a pane of glass. About Photoshop layer styles Adobe Photoshop provides a variety of layer styles—such as shadows, glows, and bevels—that change the appearance of a layer.

The layer style properties are available for the layer in the Timeline panel. Soloing the layers isolates them to speed animating, previewing, and rendering.

 
 

Adobe after effects cs4 classroom in a book free

 
Adobe® After Effects® CS4 Classroom in a Book®. © Adobe Systems Incorporated and its licensors. All rights reserved. If this guide is distributed with. Getting started with After Effects (CS4, CS5, CS, CS6, & CC) Apprentice and the excerpt from the After Effects Classroom in a Book. Designed around a single complex project that’s broken down into manageable lessons, this book-and-DVD package mimics a real-world workflow – but one that.

 

Adobe after effects cs4 classroom in a book free

 
Designed around a single complex project that’s broken down into manageable lessons, this book-and-DVD package mimics a real-world workflow – but one that. I’m a Flash developer/animator and AE newcomer. After Effects is a very deep program, and this book covers a lot of it’s capabilities.