Design Practice: Adobe After Effects

This was the first session of learning Adobe After Effects. I already know a little bit of the program but it is useful to go through everything taught in detail as there might be things that I have missed or don't know that could make life a lot simpler for me.

The first thing to note about After Effects is that it is a program which works differently to Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign because it works with time as well as composition.

This means that After Effects works both Spatially and Temporally.

As well as this, everything in the program is contained within one application window instead of several separate windows.

One of the first things to see of use in the program is the Workspace menu in the top of the window. It has a drop down menu which can change the different panel configurations or can reset them to standard if you accidentally lose a panel.

Next is to look at each of the panels. Below is the Project panel. This is similar to a library in other applications but the purpose is essentially the same. This panel will contain all of the assets that will go into the project (E.g. Music, Sounds, Images, Type etc.). To import ready items into the project panel you just go File > Import > File... as shown below.

The next panel is the Timeline panel below. This is where all the assets will be arranged and transformed across the duration of the animation/ video. This is the panel used to decide when and how everything happens.

Finally this is the Composition panel which is where all the parts of the composition will be seen and where you can view and playback the animation. This would be called the workspace or canvas in other Adobe programs.

Every animation created in After Effects must have at least one composition as this is effectively the workspace. To create a new composition, just click Composition > New Composition...

This is the Composition Settings menu where all of the attributes that the composition should have are checked and set.
The most important part of this screen is the Video Standards. Here you can choose from a list of presets which should usually contain all of the option you will need.
It is important to think about the video standards and the regional coding which needs to be taken into account. The issue is that different regions of the world encode videos and other electronic entertainment differently so you need a compatible device to play them back.
I think there are about 7 or 8 different regions and then 1 regional coding used for aeroplane films.
After Effects by default contains the UK and the US national video standards and it is important to get the right one. Obviously we need to use the UK standard which is PAL.
PAL will work all across the UK and has a FPS (Frames per second) playback of 25.
The American standard is NTSC and has 29.9 FPS video playback so the two are not easily compatible across the different playback devices.

So we know that we need a D1/DV PAL and also that it needs to be widescreen as is stated in the brief.
The other issue is whether to choose D1/DV or D1/DV Square Pixel. The reason that the two differ is because digital video cameras actually have slightly rectangular pixels whereas things created on the computer in Photoshop or Illustrator have square pixels. This can mean that strange things happen to the aspect ratio when the two are mixed and things like circles can become elipses.

Because the brief is working with type and computer created assets, square pixels should be selected.

You can change the width and height of the composition but selecting the number and dragging it left or right.

Or you can just double click the number and input the numbers manually.

You can also set the frame rate. As you can see it is the default PAL frame rate.

You can also set the length of the composition and how far in it starts. The brief says 5 seconds so that is what I set the composition duration for.

Finally you can set the background colour of the composition to whatever colour you find easiest to work on.

Now you can see that the project window has a composition in it called Comp 1. If you click on the composition you can see all the details about it such as duration, size and frame rate.

Below you can see the timeline has now changed to show a few different bits which are all used to manipulate different parts of the composition.

To create new objects just select Layer > New and in this instance I have created a Solid.

Here you can choose the different settings for the solid such as the size and the colour. For this example I have just created a green square which is 100 x 100 px.

Now in the project panel you can see that there is the original Comp 1 composition and a new folder called Solids. Inside that folder is the green square. When clicked on, it shows its details above.

And the screen grab below shows the square in the composition in the Composition Panel.

The red bar below in the timeline shows that there is something in the composition now. By default the shape will be on the composition for the entire duration, but this can be changed by dragging either end of the red bar and changing its position on the timeline. At the top of the timeline you can see the measurement of time. In this case it is quite far zoomed in so the measurement is in blocks of 5 frames which must be 1/5 of a second as the project is set at 25fps.

These are now some screen shots of me messing around with the composition and creating new solid shapes to manipulate. I already have a fairly good knowledge of using key frames and transformations so I just messed about with some of the transformations.

One good thing that I learned was about the shortcut keys that can be used when manipulating keyframes and objects:

P - Position

A - Anchor Point

R - Rotation

S - Scale

T - Opacity

U - Show all layers with modifications

UU - All Modified keyframes

Finally I learned how to export the movie properly. First you select Composition > Add To Render Queue and then this window below comes up. It has two main setting groups; "Render Settings" and "Output Module"

The output module settings are the most important for compressing the video for playback to make sure that the file size is not too big. This will mean it takes less time to load, download and upload. The default setting was set for a completely lossless 'Best Quality' export which would make a much larger file size and take ages to render. To format the Quicktime options you just press "Format Options" in the Video Output section of the window.

That takes us to this screen when you can choose the codec best suited to whatever the video needs to be done for. This codec is suitable for quick internet viewing because it makes a small file size but retains and ok quality.