Design Practice: Adobe After Effects

This second session of after effects started by giving a quick reminder of what we learned last week and then went into helping set up a document in other programs which could be imported into after effects.

To start with we learned that Photoshop documents can be set up to work with after effects as film assets. In the settings for a new document you can choose this film and video option from the presets menu which will automatically alter the settings to be video based. Below is the settings window which shows all the things that can be edited for the photoshop file in relation to video.

The first option to note is the type of video shown as "Size". By default photoshop will have selected NTSC so you have to make sure to change it to PAL and because it is all being done on the computer it needs to be square pixels. After that it shows the actual document dimensions and then the resolution. For screen based media 72ppi is a good resolution and the document is in RGB colour space so all these settings are fine.

Above is what the document will look like and shows the blue guides which are important to designing for video. The blue guides show the safe areas when designing for film or video.

Basically they show certain areas that are 'safe' to put assets in and the areas that aren't.

For example, the middle square is called the Title safe area and it is the area which will always be seen by all televisions for the PAL settings. Basically it means anything important should go in the middle section.

The section outside of that is called the action safe area. This area is not always visible by all televisions but it is visible by some so you have to assume that anything being edited or designed could be in that area and make sure that it has been taken into account.

The area outside of that is the invisible area.

I will go into a bit more detail about safe areas in a separate post in design context.

Here you can see an example of the word enter on the canvas in photoshop. Each letter is on a different layer and the word is inside the title safe zone so we know that it will always be visible. This image is ready to be put into AfterEffects.

Below shows the exact same document setting up as Photoshop but this time in Illustrator. You can see that it is pretty much the same but with a few more options. Basically you just need to select video and film from the preset menu and then the rest of the settings are similar to photoshop.

The canvas/ workspace is a bit different to the one in Photoshop but it has roughly the same layout. It still has the safe areas marked out but it also has rulers and does the strange transparent background thing and all the guides and rulers are green for some reason.

This is going back to the photoshop document. Here you can see the layer window for the Enter.psd document. Each letter is separated to a different layer and aligned back into place in the word.
This means that if I want to I can import it into After Effects so that each letter is separate on layer in that program too which will make it easier to animate.

The two file types that are best supported for importing a file like this are PSD files and TIFF files, however PSD is the only photoshop extension that will allow you to keep the layers separated so it is the best choice in this case.

When importing a photoshop file into after effects there are 3 options available shown here on the left.

The first two options are very similar although really the footage option is for footage not an image asset. The other two options are the most important.

In this example I have imported the composition as just a normal composition. You can see it above in the project window as 'enter.psd' under comp 1 and 2. When you double click the asset it opens up as its own composition like the image below.

The issue with importing as a composition is that the layers are kept but their sizes aren't. The layer below that is selected is actually the large E, but as you can see the bounding box stretches to the outside of the background colour. It is still split into layers but it is almost as if each layer has the same attached transparent background which will make it much more complicated when trying to animate especially in terms of the anchor point when rotating and scaling.

In this example the PSD file has been imported while retaining the layer sizes. This means that the bounding box for each letter stretches only as far as the outer most part of the letter itself which makes it much simpler to deal with when animating.

You can see in the image below that the bounding box is just around the E this time.

After learning all of this I started messing around with another file that Mike had prepared called shatter.psd. In this file the word was 'Shatter' instead of enter and it had been cut up into several parts. I imported it with the layers and made sure they retained the bounding box and then started to experiment with what could be done to animate the word and represent the meaning of shatter.