Adobe After Effect’s interface, basic tools & useful shortcuts

As mentioned in the first post, in this second post, I will shows you some of the most used and efficient shortcuts in After Effect which will boost your workflow.
First of all, open your After Effect, if you have not yet get used to the interface, this is a quick run out of the software’s interface and basic tools which you only need to mind for now.

1. This area (Bin/Project’s files) is where you will see all the files of you’re your current project, including the ones you create in After Effect or the ones you import in. The best practice is to have different bins/folders for all the files, as you get more familiar with AE and if you may have to do big projects in the future, you will have tons of files – so putting them neatly and logically in folders will improve your workflow. Note that files in folders don’t appear on your video/work yet if you have not yet out it in a composition.
2. Composition’s files: This is the place where you will see all the files you have in the composition you’re working on. You will be working on this area a lot while animating as a huge common effects can be easily made here, goes from simply adjusting the size, the transparency to tracking path.
3. This is the timeline space; this place allows users to decide in which order will they put all the compositions/objects so that these will appear in aiming sequence.
4. Work space is the area where you should see what’s going on in your final work – your video. You can set up the dimension of your final video when you first create the project – this can also be changed if you so wish. After setting the dimention, you will have a frame indicates the size of your video everything inside the frame will be shown as the output, and on the contrary – everything outside it will not appear.
5. Palette is where you can find all the effects, and supporting information which help you to creating your masterpices.
   This is the Standard default After Effect layout, the software allows users to change the place of all the tools and spaces as well as adjusting their sizes – this serves users with different preferable set up.

There are some shortcuts of tools you need to remember to work much more efficiently with this software. They are:

1. Position (shortcut is P): with Position, users can adjust the object’s position in workplace (or screen), by simply changing the value on the X (vertically) or Y (horizontally).
2. Rotation (shortcut is R): with this feature, you can easily rotate the object around its Anchor Point, this can both be done by either hover around your object on working screen till you see the double pointed arrow or changing the value in the layer section.
3. Anchor Point (shortcut is Y): this is one of the most major factors of all objects, because by simply changing the anchor point’s position, the effect can turn out completely different.
4. Scale (shortcut is S): Scale helps user to change the size of the objects.
5. Opacity (short is T): this helps adjust the transparency of objects.
6. Redo (Ctrl + Z): Go to the previous stage.

Now, you should know a litle bit more about After Effect – hopefully! In the next post, I will have a tutorial on how to animate the rising sun in MoGraph style – which should be interesting.

Thank you – and see you soon!