After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 40 - Trimming and Editing Layers Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hey everybody welcome to another After
Effects cs6 tutorial my name is buddy
Blackford and today we're going to be
talking about editing and trimming
layers so sometimes when you're working
with layers you you need to turn them
off sometimes or maybe you're done using
the layer and it's overlapped by another
layer you can trim the layer or like cut
it so that it doesn't show up or so that
it doesn't render in the background and
take up more computing power than you
really need
so I'm going to show you how to quickly
fix that stuff up and let's get up let's
get on with it so the first way that I
usually use to trim layers is come down
here into the layers panel and this is
the text layer up here and you can grab
the edges of these layers down on down
on the timeline here and you can click
on the edges when there's a double arrow
and drag now if you need to really get
to a spot quickly I usually you can take
your current time indicator and put it
over and hold and drag and hold shift
and I'll snap to where the current time
indicator is so now before the layer
here it's not going to show up and this
way you don't have to Kio pasady or
anything like that you can just have it
pop on if you don't need to look any
fades or anything like that so say you
want this to pop on a few times you can
possibly duplicate it and just just trim
it every like I don't know 3 seconds or
something like that move this one back
and I'll do like a little flashing thing
or something like that this is just an
example so I mean there you go you guys
get what I'm talking about now you can
also just grab the layers with the
selection tool and drag them as you can
see here you need to do that so you do
move them around and trim them different
ways another way you can do this is by
coming down into the bottom left down
here and clicking on this expand or
collapse that in and out duration of
stretch panes so I click on that and
these come up now you can manually
manually type in or so if you click on
it you can manually type in where you
want your endpoint possibly and this
this second section here this is the
rose or not the Rose the second sorry so
this would be two seconds and then you
can see that the bush is gone and it
starts at two seconds now these
timelines here the first set of numbers
before the : that's frames and where it
says base 24 here that means we're doing
24 frames per second so every 24 right
here it'll equal a second so these are
your seconds and then it goes to your
minutes and then this is an hours same
thing with the out I mean self
explainatory pretty much so there you go
in and out as you can see when I moved
it the duration is supposed to be 15
seconds so when I put the out down to 10
and move the whole layer back so if you
wanted to go in there start in at 2
seconds and end at 10 seconds that's 8
so you have to change your duration to 8
first before you did it
so there's eight and then we'll put this
at two and this is a ten see if I did
this did this right 923 that's pretty
much ten so we'll just give that of that
and there you go and another way to edit
is using this stretch right here
so I'm gonna move it back there we go
and I'm gonna click and drag on this
stretch and you can watch the end of the
layer move and it just stretches it out
I hit control Z just bring it back I
don't know I did you can also right
click and it brings up your your options
up here so okay and it's basically the
same thing if you go up to your columns
up here and you can see that they're
pretty long maybe you never want to use
stretch right click on it and you can
click on hide this and now it's gone if
you right-click again and come down to
columns you can click on it here and
it'll show up and then there's other
ones on here that like keys and things
like that I mean I don't have any right
now but you can see you can add
different panels and stuff like that and
then just click back on this to take
those take those panels off one more
method for now of trimming layers is to
trim in the in the layer panel so I'm
gonna make this bush go all the way out
to the end and then double click down
here in the timeline panel on the name
and it will bring up the layer panel now
you can set your ins and outs down here
using this these little brackets here so
you move your current time indicator to
maybe to two seconds here hit this
current bracket for the end point and
it'll cut it
now and then you hit your other come
down to the end and set the the out
point and there you go it cut it so
that's another way this X out here
instead of for everything back to where
it was
I undoing the hotkeys for trimming the
lair is all and the left bracket or the
right bracket so I'll type that in real
quick for you so you know what I'm
talking about alt or on a Mac is option
key and then
Plus and then it's these brackets right
here and those are how that's the
hotkeys so I'll just do it real quick
down here I'm sure you're on your make
sure you're on your click on your layer
I'm gonna hit all left rec it that does
the end
all right bracket will do the out and
most of the time I mean you would really
want to use your hotkeys because it's
way faster and one tip is that if you if
you drag your layers out past the comp
so this one's going past and maybe I can
do it on the end to those layers will
are though that time on those layers
will be ignored and won't be in the
render any the only thing that will be
in the red or render is between the time
where the comp thing so the work area is
what I was trying to say that's what
that's what it will be in so if your
work areas here and this is all past it
then yeah so that's it for trimming and
editing layers so that's pretty
important you probably use it a decent
amount you can edit video kind of this
way you can set crossfades
like make these go over top of each
other and then you set the opacity for
this layer to fade out to the end and
then this layer to fade in so that's how
you you could do that or with
transitions or anything like that so
editing layers is important make sure
you know remember the hotkeys and hope
you guys learned something today thank
you for watching this one and I'll see
you in the next tutorial