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Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom in a Book by Adobe Creative Team - PDF Drive.

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Adobe after effects cs4 classroom book pdf free free.

The value you use depends on the original size of the star and on the width of the flowerpot. The star falls as it becomes a flower, but its trajectory is straight. You want it to fall in a slight arc. If you want to change the path, you can add Position keyframes at other points in the time ruler.

Animating fill color Currently, the star remains yellow with a red stroke as it becomes a flower. Animating using parenting When you parent one layer to another, the child layer adopts the attributes of the parent layer. You can simply parent the leaves and stem to ensure they move together. It will have a slightly thicker stroke than the flower, but no fill, and it will rise to meet the flower. Change the Stroke Width to 3 px. Before releasing the mouse, drag the Bezier handle to create a subtle curve in the stem.

Then click the stopwatch icon to create an initial keyframe at its final position. Press Shift as you drag to move it straight down. Working with Shape Layers 11 Press F2 or click an empty area of the Timeline panel to deselect all layers. Before you release the mouse, drag the Bezier handle to create a curved leaf. Then rename Shape Layer 2 Leaf 2. The Leaf 1 and Leaf 2 layers will move in relationship to the Stem layer. Select the Leaf 1 layer and Shift-select the Leaf 2 layer.

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. Sometimes you want to connect a single point to another layer—for example, the top of the stem in your animation to the flower itself. The Create Nulls From Paths panel lets you do just that. A null object is an invisible layer that has all the same properties as other layers so that it can serve as a parent to any layer.

The Create Nulls From Paths panel creates null objects based on specific points, which you can then parent to other layers without having to write complex expressions. Nulls From Paths panel works only with masks or with Bezier shapes shapes drawn with the Pen tool.

To convert a shape drawn with a shape tool to a Bezier path, expand the shape layer contents, right-click the path e. You must select a path in the Timeline panel in order to create a null using the options in the Create Nulls From Paths panel. After Effects creates two nulls, corresponding to the two points on the stem path.

The null objects appear in gold in the Composition panel, and as layers named Stem: Path 1 [1. You only need the null for the top point. Then go to , and click the stopwatch icon to create an initial keyframe at its original rotation. Animating layers to match audio You can time animation to match the beat of an audio file. First you need to create keyframes from the amplitude of the audio which determines loudness , and then sync the animation to those values.

After Effects adds the Audio Amplitude layer. After Effects creates keyframes that specify the amplitude of the audio file in each frame of the layer. Expand the channel you want to use. Then Alt-click Windows or Option-click macOS the stopwatch icon for the property whose animation you want to sync with to add an expression; with the expression selected in the time ruler, click the pick whip icon on the Expression:[property name] line, and drag it to the Slider property name in the Audio Amplitude layer.

When you release the mouse, the pick whip snaps, and the expression in the shape layer time ruler now means that the property values for the layer will depend on the Slider values of the Audio Amplitude 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. Then click next to the handle or point you want to use as a snapping feature, and drag the layer close to the point to which you want to align it.

After Effects highlights the points to which it will align when you release the mouse button. Animating a Multimedia Presentation 4 In the Sky. Through Creative Cloud Libraries, you can also use Looks, shapes, and other assets you create with Adobe Capture and other mobile apps.

Even Adobe Stock images and videos are available in the Libraries panel: Search and browse assets within the panel, download watermarked versions to see how they work with your projects, and license the ones you want to keep—all without leaving After Effects. The same search bar you use to search Adobe Stock makes it easier to find specific items in your Creative Cloud Libraries, too. Animating a Multimedia Presentation 3 Drag the Sky. The balloon will float across the Sky.

The far right of the image contains the canvas-wrapped clouds that appear at the end of the scene. Adjusting anchor points The anchor point is the point around which transformations, such as scaling or rotation, are performed.

With the Pan Behind tool, you can move the anchor point without moving the entire layer in the Composition window. Parenting layers This composition includes several layers that need to move together. Balloon from the pop-up menu. This establishes both the Head and Upper arm layers as child layers of the Balloon layer.

When the Balloon layer moves, the other two layers will move with it. Head from the pop-up menu. The forearm should move with the upper arm as well. Upper arm from the pop-up menu. Now you need to ensure that the fire video travels with the balloon. The Fire layer should be between the Yellow Canvas layer and the Eyes layer. To see the flame in action so you can position it correctly, drag the current-time marker across the first second of the time ruler.

Precomposing layers moves them to a new composition, nested inside the original composition. The four layers you selected in the Timeline panel are replaced by a single Canvas composition layer.

You may need to change the magnification. Increasing the width of the composition and then moving the canvas to the far left side will give you room to animate the canvas layers later. You moved the canvas to the far left side of the Canvas composition, revealing the uncovered balloon in the Balloon composition.

At the beginning of the animation, though, the canvas should be on the balloon. Balloon from the pop-up menu so that the canvas will follow the balloon. The layers appear in the same order they were when you copied them, and they retain all the properties they had in the Balloon composition, including parenting relationships. Placing initial keyframes The balloon will enter the scene from the bottom, drift through the sky, and eventually depart from the upper right corner of the frame.

We used Position values We used 19 degrees. We used We used the following values: Position You can use the values we used or create your own path, as long as the balloon stays fully visible on the screen until a little after 11 seconds, and then slowly makes its way offscreen. We used Position We used 9. Save your work so far. Using Bezier handles to smooth a motion path The basic path is in place, but you can smooth it out a bit.

Each keyframe includes Bezier handles that you can adjust to change the angle of the curve. Then move the current-time indicator to a position where you can clearly see the motion path in the Composition panel. Between 4 and 6 seconds is probably good. Our final path is shown below in the image on the right. Animating a Multimedia Presentation 6 Preview the balloon on the path by moving the current-time indicator across the time ruler. Make any adjustments you want. Animating additional elements The balloon swoops and swirls through the sky, and its child layers go with it.

Animating a Multimedia Presentation 5 Repeat steps 1—4 to copy the Upper arm Rotation property keyframes. Now the character tilts his head up each time he tugs the cord. Then preview the animation. Positioning and duplicating a video When the character tugs the cord, flame should emerge from the burner.

The Fractal Noise and Directional Blur effects will work well. Adding a solid-color layer You need to apply the effects on their own layer, which will be a solid-color layer. About solid-color layers Use solid layers to color a background or to create simple graphic images. You can create solid images of any color or size up to 30, x 30, pixels in After Effects. After Effects treats solids as it does any other footage item: You can modify the mask, transform properties, and apply effects to a solid layer.

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. The Fractal Noise effect will create the gust of wind. The Directional Blur effect will create a blur in the direction the canvas flies. Double-click the Fractal Noise effect to apply it. Now you need to add the Wind composition to the Balloon Scene composition.

Animating precomposed layers Earlier, you precomposed the four canvas layers, creating a composition called Canvas. You then positioned the Canvas composition layer to match the balloon, and parented the two.

Animating a Multimedia Presentation 5 Go to All four canvas layers become nearly horizontal. Vary their motion paths to make them more interesting.

You can add intermediate rotation and position keyframes between and , edit Bezier curves, or just drag the canvas layers off the edge.

You can use an adjustment layer to apply an effect to all the layers beneath it at once. A new adjustment layer is automatically added to the top of the layer stack. Then click the stopwatch icons to create initial keyframes for each of them. Animating a Multimedia Presentation 1 Go to Animating the background The movie should end with the revelation that the canvas from the balloons has been draped on the clouds.

But right now, the canvas flies off and the balloon floats away. You need to animate the sky so that the canvas-covered clouds are centered at the end of the scene.

Our values are — The canvas should be completely offscreen before the canvas-colored clouds appear. The bare balloon should float in front of at least a few of the canvas-colored clouds before it disappears.

Then, double-click an empty area of the Project panel to open the Import File dialog box. The music changes just as the canvas flies off the balloon. Expand the Soundtrack. For more substantial edits, use Adobe Audition.

Audition is available with a full Adobe Creative Cloud membership. You can use Audition to change the length of an audio file, alter its pitch, or change its tempo. You can apply effects, record new audio, mix multitrack sessions, and more. Then, make your changes in Audition, and save the file. The changes you made are automatically reflected in your After Effects project.

Review answers 1 When you animate the Position property, After Effects displays the movement as a motion path. 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, where each dot marks the position of the layer at each frame.

A box in the path marks the position of a keyframe. After Effects treats solids as it does any other footage item: You can modify the mask, transform properties, and apply effects to the solid layer. Use solid layers to color a background or create simple graphic images.

This lesson provides more practice animating the layers of a Photoshop file, including dynamically remapping time. In this lesson, you will import a layered Photoshop file of a theater marquee, and then animate it to simulate the marquee lighting up and text scrolling across its screen.

This is a stylized animation in which the motion is first accelerated, and then reverses and moves forward again. You may delete the sample movie from your hard disk if you have limited storage space. When you begin the lesson, restore the default application settings for After Effects.

When prompted, click OK to delete your preferences file. After Effects opens to display an empty, untitled project. Importing the footage You need to import one source item for this lesson.

Animating Layers 4 Click Import or Open. Before continuing, take a moment to study the layers of the file you just imported. Resize the Name column to make it wider and easier to read, if necessary.

In addition, there is one layer representing the initial marquee with plain light bulbs Unlit marquee and a second layer that represents the final marquee with the bulbs brightly lit Lit marquee. Preparing layered Photoshop files Before you import a layered Photoshop file, name its layers carefully to reduce preview and rendering time, and to avoid problems importing and updating the layers: Organize and name layers.

If you change a layer name in a Photoshop file after you have imported the file into After Effects, After Effects retains the link to the original layer. However, if you delete a layer in a Photoshop file after you have imported the file into After Effects, After Effects will be unable to find the original layer and will list it as missing in the Project panel. Simulating lighting changes The first part of the animation involves lighting the marquee.

However, you want the marquee to appear dark and then lighten. To accomplish this, you will make the Lit marquee layer initially transparent, and then animate its opacity so that the lights appear to turn on over time. Now, when the animation begins, the Lit marquee layer is transparent, which allows the Unlit marquee layer to show through. The bulbs around the marquee transition until they are brightly lit. You can use the pick whip to create expressions that link the values of one property or effect to another.

When you release the mouse, the pick whip snaps, and the Depth property is red. Animating Layers 7 Drag the current-time indicator from to Notice that the Opacity value for the Lit marquee layer and the Depth property for the Starburst layer match. The area around the starburst and the marquee light bulbs brighten in sync.

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. After Effects can preserve these layer styles when you import Photoshop layers. You can also apply layer styles in After Effects.

Though layer styles are referred to as effects in Photoshop, they behave more like blending modes in After Effects. Layer styles follow transformations in the standard render order, whereas effects precede transformations. The layer style properties are available for the layer in the Timeline panel.

You work with expressions in the Timeline panel or the Effect Controls panel. You can use the pick whip to create expressions, or you can enter and edit expressions manually in the expression field—a text field in the time graph under the property.

You can create expressions using the pick whip, by using simple examples and modifying them to suit your needs, or by chaining objects and methods together. For more information about expressions, see After Effects Help. Using a track matte to confine animation Text should scroll across the bottom of the marquee, but only in the black field.

Animating the text The text should start scrolling after the marquee lights up, and it should continue scrolling until the end of the clip. Only the first character of the text appears in the black ticker area. The last character in the text is visible in the ticker field. Press the spacebar again to end the preview. Creating the track matte The text scrolls well, but it overlaps the rest of the marquee, and even the lights on the left side.

The alpha channel of the layer above Scroll area 2 is used to set transparency for the Scroll text layer, so the contents of that layer appear only within the area defined by the Scroll area layer. Animating Layers About track mattes and traveling mattes When you want one layer to show through a hole in another layer, set up a track matte. You can animate either the track matte layer or the fill layer.

When you animate the track matte layer, you create a traveling matte. If you want to animate the track matte and fill layers using identical settings, you can precompose them. You define transparency in a track matte using values from either its alpha channel or the luminance of its pixels. In both alpha-channel mattes and luminance mattes, pixels with higher values are more transparent. In most cases, you use a high-contrast matte so that areas are either completely transparent or completely opaque.

Intermediate shades should appear only where you want partial or gradual transparency, such as along a soft edge. After Effects preserves the order of a layer and its track matte after you duplicate or split the layer.

Within the duplicated or split layers, the track matte layer remains on top of the fill layer. For example, if your project contains layers X and Y, where X is the track matte and Y the fill layer, duplicating or splitting both of these layers results in the layer order XYXY. Track matte layer: A solid with a rectangular mask, set to Luma Matte.

The mask is animated to travel across the screen. Fill layer: A solid with a pattern effect. After Effects enables Motion Blur for the entire composition, and the text layer appears less sharp in the Composition panel. The Shutter Angle setting imitates the effect of adjusting a shutter angle on a real camera, which controls how long the camera aperture is open, gathering light.

Larger values create more motion blur. Using the Corner Pin effect is similar to animating with the Photoshop Free Transform tool—the effect distorts an image by repositioning each of its four corners. You can use it to stretch, shrink, skew, or twist an image, or to simulate perspective or movement that pivots from the edge of a layer, such as a door opening. Soloing the layers isolates them to speed animating, previewing, and rendering.

Small circles appear around the corner points of the Starburst layer in the Composition panel. With the Corner Pin tool, you can move each handle a different amount.

Notice that the x and y coordinates update in the Effect Controls panel. After Effects adds keyframes. Instead of dragging the handles, you can manually enter the values shown in the following figure. Your corner-pin locations should be similar to those in the figure below. Press the spacebar to preview the animation. Simulating a darkening sky The lights come on, but the sky and building remain in daylight. The background should darken as the marquee lights up, showing off the marquee contents and creating a sense of excitement.

Creating a mask You want darkness to fall on the building and sky behind the theater sign. After Effects adds a Lit marquee 2 layer to the layer stack, immediately above the Lit marquee layer. With the current-time indicator at the beginning of the time ruler, most of the image will darken, because neither the Lit marquee layer nor the Lit marquee 2 layer with its mask are visible yet.

When you invert the mask, the unselected area becomes masked instead. Animating Layers 11 Press the Home key or move the current-time indicator to the beginning of the time ruler. As the lights brighten and the text begins to move, the surrounding building and sky gradually darken. Your scene is complete. Time remapping lets you dynamically speed up, slow down, stop, or reverse footage. You can also use it to do things like create a freeze-frame result. Animating Layers After Effects creates a new composition named Pre-comp 1, which replaces the layers you selected in the marquee 2 composition.

Now you can remap all of the elements of the project at once. After Effects adds two keyframes, at the first and last frames of the layer, visible in the time ruler.

A Time Remap property also appears under the layer name in the Timeline panel; this property lets you control which frame is displayed at a given point in time. It displays two time rulers: The time ruler at the bottom of the panel displays the current time. The Source Time ruler, just above the time ruler, has a remap-time marker that indicates which frame is playing at the current time. That will change as you remap time. Over the first four seconds, the lights come on slowly.

This remaps time so that frame plays at In other words, the clip now plays back at twice the speed for the first two seconds of the composition. The composition now runs at doublespeed until , and at a slower speed thereafter.

Press the spacebar again when you have finished previewing the animation. Viewing time remapping in the Graph Editor Using the Graph Editor, you can view and manipulate all aspects of effects and animations, including effect property values, keyframes, and interpolation.

The Graph Editor displays changes in effects and animations as a two-dimensional graph, with playback time represented horizontally from left to right.

In layer bar mode, in contrast, the time ruler represents only the horizontal time element, without a graphical display of changing values. Animating Layers The Graph Editor displays a time-remap graph that shows a white line connecting the keyframes at , , and The angle of the line is steep up to , and then becomes shallower. The steeper the line, the faster the playback time. Using the Graph Editor to remap time When remapping time, you can use the values in the time-remap graph to determine and control which frame of the movie plays at which point in time.

Each Time Remap keyframe has a time value associated with it that corresponds to a specific frame in the layer; this value is represented vertically on the time-remap graph. When you enable time remapping for a layer, After Effects adds a Time Remap keyframe at the start and end points of the layer.

As you move the keyframe up or down in the time-remap graph, you adjust which frame of the video is set to play at the current time. Animating Layers 5 Go to , and then press the spacebar to preview the results. Watch the time ruler and Source Time ruler in the Layer panel to see which frames are playing at any given point in time. The animation progresses rapidly over the first two seconds of the composition, and then plays in reverse for a second, and the lights go out.

The entire animation plays again. Having fun yet? Keep going. Then move the next keyframe to , so that the lights blink off.

Shifting the keyframe affects the timing for the rest of the clip as well. Notice how the angle for the rest of the animation changes as a result; it becomes steeper because there is more animation to cover in less time. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. You can customize and transform an individual shape or its entire layer to create interesting results. Read more Read less. Customer reviews. How customer reviews and ratings work Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon. Top reviews Most recent Top reviews. Top reviews from the United States. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Verified Purchase. After Effects is a very deep program, and this book covers a lot of it's capabilities.

As someone just starting After Effects work, it's a great intro. I don't have any other books to compare it to, however like I said, just starting out.

One thing that does concern me a bit: while following lesson instructions you are asked to do some routine things that will make sense to someone used to working in Flash or a 3D animation program, and only a cursory explanation is given as to why you would do this. Mostly workflow and best practices kinds of stuff. While I did not have a problem with it due to related experience, I think someone just starting out cold might.

That said, it is rare for me to be able to work through the entirety of a book of this type. It's nice to have different projects for each lesson; many books of this sort seem to create a movie project replete with every feature the program has to offer that you follow from beginning to end. This usually makes me lose interest -- especially if the project is incredibly lame.

These projects are all pretty lame visually lame - they are informative and useful but you only have to deal with a particular project for a few hours and then it's off to new footage and assets.

I haven't had any problems with any of the lessons or files, except: one JPG that was corrupted on Lesson 5 there are more to choose from , not a show stopper. In lesson 8, Creating a Walk Cycle: One of the X positions on the graph on page is incorrect -- it needs a "-" sign before the coordinate. I think it was for the torso at , but I can't recall for certain.

Not huge errors for a book of this type, but I would have expected Adobe to hand this to a neophyte for testing -- these should have been caught easily by someone following the instructions. I have not had any crashes or hardware related problems. This is a demanding program, however. I don't know how my home machine would handle it, or the stability of the Vista or XP versions. We customize your eBook by discreetly watermarking it with your name, making it uniquely yours.

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. This best-selling book has been revised to cover all that's new in this upgrade: the ability to import 3D layers from Photoshop; the Cartoon effect that converts live-action footage into stylized imagery; Adobe Device Central CS4, which lets you preview and test animations for mobile devices, and more.

Contains all the lesson files and footage readers need to complete the lessons. All of Peachpit's eBooks contain the same content as the print edition. You will find a link in the last few pages of your eBook that directs you to the media files. Helpful tips:. Entering the URL supplied into a computer with web access will allow you to get to the files.

To make sure this is not the case, try reducing your font size and turning your device to a landscape view. This should cause the full URL to appear. I would like to receive exclusive offers and hear about products from Adobe Press and its family of brands.

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- Adobe after effects cs4 classroom book pdf free free

After Effects includes tools that enable you to modify elements of your composition. Some of these tools—the Selection tool and the Hand tool, for example—will be familiar to you if you use other Adobe applications, such as Photoshop. Others will be new. The following image identifies the tools in the Tools panel for your reference. Selection B. Hand C. Zoom D.

Rotation E. Camera tools F. Pan Behind G. Mask and Shape tools H. Pen tools I. Type tools J. Brush K. Clone Stamp L. Eraser M. Puppet tools When you hover the pointer over any button in the Tools panel, a tool tip identifies the tool and its keyboard shortcut. A small triangle in the lower-right corner of the button indicates that one or more additional tools are hidden behind it.

Click and hold the button to display the hidden tools, and then select the tool you want to use. Now that your composition is set up, you can start having fun—applying effects, making transformations, and adding animation. The easiest way to start is to apply any of the hundreds of effects included with After Effects. Working with duplicates lets you apply an effect to one layer and then use it in conjunction with the unmodified original. A new layer with the same name appears at the top of the stack, so the first two layers are now both named DJ.

Then press Enter or Return again to accept the new name. Adding a Radial Blur effect The Radial Blur effect creates blurs around a specific point in a layer, simulating the effects of a zooming or rotating camera. Notice that layer handles appear around the layer in the Composition panel. To return to the Composition panel, click the Composition tab. After Effects searches for effects and presets that contain the letters you type, and displays the results interactively. After Effects applies the effect and automatically opens the Effect Controls panel in the upper-left area of the workspace.

As you drag the cross-hair, the Center value updates in the Effect Controls panel. The left and right values are x and y coordinates, respectively. Center the blur at approximately , 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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. Is this a limitation of a Kindle purchase? I love this digital book paradigm but if you are doing a classroom type book and it is based on following along with project files, those need to be available. The Kindle version noted using a supplied DVD, but where do we download these files?

I have never had a bad "Classroom in a book". Once the book and project "Hands On" are complete I have always had a working knowledge of the application. From that point it is practice practice practice. This book really helped me a lot in learning After Effects and how to really enhance my videos, this was a great purchase for me and I highly recommend this to anyone wanting to learn this application.

I'm disappointed. I've read the entire book and everything did not work as advertised. I understand that After Effects is a very complex product. I think the book accomplished its mission, which was to provide an introduction to the product. I especially enjoyed the chapters on animating text, multimedia presentations, and layers.

Also, the chapters on color correction, 3d effects, and particle systems were very good. But I had interesting problems along the way, to say the least. Chapter 3 crashed my machine repeatedly. I think the interaction between Adobe Bridge and After Effects was causing memory access violations and services started crashing.

Then the blue screen occurred. This problem is reproducible. In Chapter 5 you create a PDF file with a movie in it, and configure the file for clip notes.

That crashed Adobe Reader, even after I loaded the most recent version of that product. Chapter 7 does not perform exactly as the book's description. The mask hides the movie, and a white screen appears where the movie is supposed to appear. And Chapter 9 crashed my machine with the blue screen. Four out of fourteen chapters caused problems on my machine, which is a pretty new machine less than 1 year old. I hate wasting time, especially considering that it takes alot of time just to figure out how these products work when they work properly.

When they don't work as advertised, I end up wasting time trying to figure out if I've done something wrong. Parenting layers This composition includes several layers that need to move together. Balloon from the pop-up menu. This establishes both the Head and Upper arm layers as child layers of the Balloon layer. When the Balloon layer moves, the other two layers will move with it. Head from the pop-up menu. The forearm should move with the upper arm as well.

Upper arm from the pop-up menu. Now you need to ensure that the fire video travels with the balloon. The Fire layer should be between the Yellow Canvas layer and the Eyes layer.

To see the flame in action so you can position it correctly, drag the current-time marker across the first second of the time ruler. Precomposing layers moves them to a new composition, nested inside the original composition.

The four layers you selected in the Timeline panel are replaced by a single Canvas composition layer. You may need to change the magnification. Increasing the width of the composition and then moving the canvas to the far left side will give you room to animate the canvas layers later.

You moved the canvas to the far left side of the Canvas composition, revealing the uncovered balloon in the Balloon composition. At the beginning of the animation, though, the canvas should be on the balloon. Balloon from the pop-up menu so that the canvas will follow the balloon. The layers appear in the same order they were when you copied them, and they retain all the properties they had in the Balloon composition, including parenting relationships.

Placing initial keyframes The balloon will enter the scene from the bottom, drift through the sky, and eventually depart from the upper right corner of the frame. We used Position values We used 19 degrees. We used We used the following values: Position You can use the values we used or create your own path, as long as the balloon stays fully visible on the screen until a little after 11 seconds, and then slowly makes its way offscreen.

We used Position We used 9. Save your work so far. Using Bezier handles to smooth a motion path The basic path is in place, but you can smooth it out a bit. Each keyframe includes Bezier handles that you can adjust to change the angle of the curve. Then move the current-time indicator to a position where you can clearly see the motion path in the Composition panel. Between 4 and 6 seconds is probably good. Our final path is shown below in the image on the right.

Animating a Multimedia Presentation 6 Preview the balloon on the path by moving the current-time indicator across the time ruler. Make any adjustments you want. Animating additional elements The balloon swoops and swirls through the sky, and its child layers go with it.

But the character is currently static in his balloon. Use the Hand tool to adjust the image in the Composition window if you need to. You may need to deselect the layers so you can see the action clearly in the Composition window. You may need to zoom out to see the animation. Animating a Multimedia Presentation 5 Repeat steps 1—4 to copy the Upper arm Rotation property keyframes. Now the character tilts his head up each time he tugs the cord. Then preview the animation. Positioning and duplicating a video When the character tugs the cord, flame should emerge from the burner.

Double-click the Fractal Noise effect to apply it. Now you need to add the Wind composition to the Balloon Scene composition. Animating precomposed layers Earlier, you precomposed the four canvas layers, creating a composition called Canvas. You then positioned the Canvas composition layer to match the balloon, and parented the two. Animating a Multimedia Presentation 5 Go to All four canvas layers become nearly horizontal.

Vary their motion paths to make them more interesting. You can add intermediate rotation and position keyframes between and , edit Bezier curves, or just drag the canvas layers off the edge. You can use an adjustment layer to apply an effect to all the layers beneath it at once. A new adjustment layer is automatically added to the top of the layer stack. Then click the stopwatch icons to create initial keyframes for each of them. Animating a Multimedia Presentation 1 Go to Animating the background The movie should end with the revelation that the canvas from the balloons has been draped on the clouds.

But right now, the canvas flies off and the balloon floats away. You need to animate the sky so that the canvas-covered clouds are centered at the end of the scene. Our values are — The canvas should be completely offscreen before the canvas-colored clouds appear.

The bare balloon should float in front of at least a few of the canvas-colored clouds before it disappears. Then, double-click an empty area of the Project panel to open the Import File dialog box. The music changes just as the canvas flies off the balloon. Expand the Soundtrack. For more substantial edits, use Adobe Audition. Audition is available with a full Adobe Creative Cloud membership. You can use Audition to change the length of an audio file, alter its pitch, or change its tempo.

You can apply effects, record new audio, mix multitrack sessions, and more. Then, make your changes in Audition, and save the file. The changes you made are automatically reflected in your After Effects project. Review answers 1 When you animate the Position property, After Effects displays the movement as a motion path. 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, where each dot marks the position of the layer at each frame. A box in the path marks the position of a keyframe. After Effects treats solids as it does any other footage item: You can modify the mask, transform properties, and apply effects to the solid layer.

Use solid layers to color a background or create simple graphic images. This lesson provides more practice animating the layers of a Photoshop file, including dynamically remapping time.

In this lesson, you will import a layered Photoshop file of a theater marquee, and then animate it to simulate the marquee lighting up and text scrolling across its screen. This is a stylized animation in which the motion is first accelerated, and then reverses and moves forward again. You may delete the sample movie from your hard disk if you have limited storage space.

When you begin the lesson, restore the default application settings for After Effects. When prompted, click OK to delete your preferences file. After Effects opens to display an empty, untitled project. Importing the footage You need to import one source item for this lesson. Animating Layers 4 Click Import or Open.

Before continuing, take a moment to study the layers of the file you just imported. Resize the Name column to make it wider and easier to read, if necessary. In addition, there is one layer representing the initial marquee with plain light bulbs Unlit marquee and a second layer that represents the final marquee with the bulbs brightly lit Lit marquee. Preparing layered Photoshop files Before you import a layered Photoshop file, name its layers carefully to reduce preview and rendering time, and to avoid problems importing and updating the layers: Organize and name layers.

If you change a layer name in a Photoshop file after you have imported the file into After Effects, After Effects retains the link to the original layer.

However, if you delete a layer in a Photoshop file after you have imported the file into After Effects, After Effects will be unable to find the original layer and will list it as missing in the Project panel. Simulating lighting changes The first part of the animation involves lighting the marquee. However, you want the marquee to appear dark and then lighten. To accomplish this, you will make the Lit marquee layer initially transparent, and then animate its opacity so that the lights appear to turn on over time.

Now, when the animation begins, the Lit marquee layer is transparent, which allows the Unlit marquee layer to show through. The bulbs around the marquee transition until they are brightly lit. You can use the pick whip to create expressions that link the values of one property or effect to another. When you release the mouse, the pick whip snaps, and the Depth property is red.

Animating Layers 7 Drag the current-time indicator from to Notice that the Opacity value for the Lit marquee layer and the Depth property for the Starburst layer match. The area around the starburst and the marquee light bulbs brighten in sync.

The layer style properties are available for the layer in the Timeline panel. You work with expressions in the Timeline panel or the Effect Controls panel.

You can use the pick whip to create expressions, or you can enter and edit expressions manually in the expression field—a text field in the time graph under the property. You can create expressions using the pick whip, by using simple examples and modifying them to suit your needs, or by chaining objects and methods together.

For more information about expressions, see After Effects Help. Using a track matte to confine animation Text should scroll across the bottom of the marquee, but only in the black field. Animating the text The text should start scrolling after the marquee lights up, and it should continue scrolling until the end of the clip.

Only the first character of the text appears in the black ticker area. The last character in the text is visible in the ticker field. Press the spacebar again to end the preview. Creating the track matte The text scrolls well, but it overlaps the rest of the marquee, and even the lights on the left side.

You can animate either the track matte layer or the fill layer. When you animate the track matte layer, you create a traveling matte. If you want to animate the track matte and fill layers using identical settings, you can precompose them. You define transparency in a track matte using values from either its alpha channel or the luminance of its pixels. In both alpha-channel mattes and luminance mattes, pixels with higher values are more transparent.

In most cases, you use a high-contrast matte so that areas are either completely transparent or completely opaque.

Track matte layer: A solid with a rectangular mask, set to Luma Matte. The mask is animated to travel across the screen. Fill layer: A solid with a pattern effect. After Effects enables Motion Blur for the entire composition, and the text layer appears less sharp in the Composition panel. The Shutter Angle setting imitates the effect of adjusting a shutter angle on a real camera, which controls how long the camera aperture is open, gathering light.

You can use it to stretch, shrink, skew, or twist an image, or to simulate perspective or movement that pivots from the edge of a layer, such as a door opening.

Soloing the layers isolates them to speed animating, previewing, and rendering. Small circles appear around the corner points of the Starburst layer in the Composition panel.

With the Corner Pin tool, you can move each handle a different amount. Notice that the x and y coordinates update in the Effect Controls panel. After Effects adds keyframes. Instead of dragging the handles, you can manually enter the values shown in the following figure.

Your corner-pin locations should be similar to those in the figure below. Press the spacebar to preview the animation. Simulating a darkening sky The lights come on, but the sky and building remain in daylight. The background should darken as the marquee lights up, showing off the marquee contents and creating a sense of excitement.

You can also use it to do things like create a freeze-frame result. Animating Layers After Effects creates a new composition named Pre-comp 1, which replaces the layers you selected in the marquee 2 composition. Now you can remap all of the elements of the project at once.

After Effects adds two keyframes, at the first and last frames of the layer, visible in the time ruler. A Time Remap property also appears under the layer name in the Timeline panel; this property lets you control which frame is displayed at a given point in time.

It displays two time rulers: The time ruler at the bottom of the panel displays the current time. The Source Time ruler, just above the time ruler, has a remap-time marker that indicates which frame is playing at the current time.

That will change as you remap time. Over the first four seconds, the lights come on slowly. This remaps time so that frame plays at In other words, the clip now plays back at twice the speed for the first two seconds of the composition.

The composition now runs at doublespeed until , and at a slower speed thereafter. Press the spacebar again when you have finished previewing the animation. Viewing time remapping in the Graph Editor Using the Graph Editor, you can view and manipulate all aspects of effects and animations, including effect property values, keyframes, and interpolation. The Graph Editor displays changes in effects and animations as a two-dimensional graph, with playback time represented horizontally from left to right.

The steeper the line, the faster the playback time. Using the Graph Editor to remap time When remapping time, you can use the values in the time-remap graph to determine and control which frame of the movie plays at which point in time.

These initial Time Remap keyframes have vertical time values equal to their horizontal positions. Every time you add a Time Remap keyframe, you create another point at which you can change the playback speed or direction. As you move the keyframe up or down in the time-remap graph, you adjust which frame of the video is set to play at the current time. Animating Layers 5 Go to , and then press the spacebar to preview the results.

Watch the time ruler and Source Time ruler in the Layer panel to see which frames are playing at any given point in time. The animation progresses rapidly over the first two seconds of the composition, and then plays in reverse for a second, and the lights go out. The entire animation plays again. Having fun yet? Keep going. Then move the next keyframe to , so that the lights blink off.

Shifting the keyframe affects the timing for the rest of the clip as well. Notice how the angle for the rest of the animation changes as a result; it becomes steeper because there is more animation to cover in less time. Then resize the selection box. E Tip: You can scale 9 Press the spacebar to preview the animation, and press it again to stop it. The lights blink on and off, but the text scrolls across the ticker too quickly.

Then enter for the Time Remap value. Animating Layers 11 Press the Home key or move the current-time indicator to the beginning of the time ruler, and then press the spacebar to preview the animation. The clip plays for ten seconds, but it ends at the 7-second point in the composition. Now the text moves more slowly—and much more realistically—across the ticker. This slows the shift into reverse so that the lights stay bright just a little longer.

You can refine the amount of ease on a transition further by dragging the Bezier handle. If you drag the handle further from the keyframe, the transition is softer; if you drag it down or closer to the keyframe, the transition is more pronounced.

Animating Layers Review questions 1 Why would you import a layered Photoshop file as a composition? Review answers 1 When you import a layered Photoshop file into After Effects as a composition, After Effects preserves the layer order, transparency data, and layer styles from the source Photoshop document. It also preserves other features, such as adjustment layers and type.

The pick whip is also a way to create parenting relationships. To use the pick whip, simply drag the pick whip icon from one property to another. To create a track matte, you need two layers: one to act as a matte, and another to fill the hole in the matte. When remapping time, you can use the values in the time-remap graph in the Graph Editor to determine and control which frame of the movie plays at which point in time. By setting additional Time Remap keyframes, you can create complex motion effects.

Use masks to control what appears. A mask consists of segments and vertices: Segments are the lines or curves that connect vertices. Vertices define where each segment of a path starts and ends. A mask can be either an open or a closed path. An open path has a beginning point that is not the same as its end point; for example, a straight line is an open path.

A closed path is continuous and has no beginning or end, such as a circle. Closedpath masks can create transparent areas for a layer. Open paths cannot create transparent areas for a layer, but are useful as parameters for an effect. For example, you can use an effect to generate a running light around a mask.

A mask belongs to a specific layer. Each layer can contain multiple masks. You can draw masks in common geometric shapes—including polygons, ellipses, and stars—with the shape tools, or you can use the Pen tool to draw an arbitrary path. Begin by previewing the movie and setting up the project. Click New Project in the Home window. After Effects opens to display a new, untitled project. To fill it with the video of a sea turtle, you need to mask the screen. You may need to use the Hand tool to reposition the view in the panel.

To learn more about using the Mocha effect, see After Effects Help. The Pen tool creates straight lines or curved segments. After Effects connects the two points with a segment.

When a circle appears next to the pointer as in the middle image below , click to close the mask path. You need to invert the mask. Working with Masks Inverting the mask For this project, you need everything inside the mask to be transparent and everything outside the mask to be opaque. There are two ways to invert this mask: by choosing Subtract from the Mask Mode pop-up menu, or by selecting the Inverted option.

M key twice in quick succession displays all mask properties for the selected layer. The mask inverts. If you look closely at the TV, you may see portions of the screen still appearing around the edges of the mask.

Depending on the scene, gaps in the mask may call attention to changes being made to the layer, so they need to be fixed. Creating curved masks Curved or freeform masks use Bezier curves to define the shape of the mask.

Bezier curves give you the greatest control over the shape of the mask. With them, you can create straight lines with sharp angles, perfectly smooth curves, or a combination of the two.

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View Larger Image. Part of the Classroom in a Book series. Watermarked eBook FAQ. Description Sample Content Updates. Copyright Edition: 1st eBook Watermarked ISBN ISBN 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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