After Effects Tutorial - 2 - Creating a Composition Video Lecture | How to Make/Edit Movies & Animation with Adobe After Effects - Software Development

what's up everybody welcome to your
second After Effects tutorial and in
this tutorial we're going to be creating
a basic composition so before I even get
started in case you mess anything up or
I got something different from last time
go up to window workspace and go to
reset standard and what this is going to
do is reset your workspace to the basics
just go ahead and discard changes and I
just did this to make sure that me and
you were on the same track and your
panels weren't laid out different than
mine or anything
and another thing before you start make
sure you're watching this tutorial in
hi-def there's a link in my description
box on the right hand side of screen now
that we got the same looking workspace
and everything like that let's go ahead
and create a new composition and what a
composition is is pretty much like arm
the thing you're going to edit it's
pretty much the main thing we're working
if I didn't make it clear last time so
go up to composition and type new
composition and for 99% of time you're
just going to want to leave these at the
fault if you know what you're doing then
you can change those around but if not
then just leave them how they are and um
one thing I want to go over here before
we get started well let me first tell
you guys how to add footage to your
composition to add footage to your
composition open your composition panel
so you got this black screen just the
background with nothing on it go over to
whatever footage or video clip you have
hold it down and bring it over and let
it go that's the easiest way to add
footage to your composition
just grab the footage drag it over and
let it go now once we have some footage
now I can tell you guys what I was going
to tell you before there whenever I'm
talking guys about footage in time there
are two different ways that you can edit
the time one is by dragging this thing
called a CTI or current time indicator
and you can just drag it and as you can
see it moves simultaneously on the
timeline and in your composition panel
another thing that you can do if you
want to go to the exact
point is double-click this and you can
edit time right there edit the spot you
want to go to so let me just move this
to beginning and it will go the to the
beginning of the clip now once you do
that we're ready to move on to the next
thing and if I didn't tell you guys
already which I don't think I did
anytime you add a source to your
composition it becomes known as a layer
and it will show up down here and down
here are all the layers of your
composition so now that we learn how to
add sources to our composition let me
teach you guys how to use the
composition panel so it's like a hundred
times more effective to zoom in on the
composition panel you can either use
this which is zooming in or you can use
a very effective shortcut which is
pressing the comma on your keyboard
which zooms out or the period on your
keyboard
what zooms in um another thing you can
do is scroll if you have a mouse wheel
on your thing you can scroll in and out
and that's a that's another very handy
thing now whenever you're working as I
said this is one way to go and adjust
the time on your timeline and also here
but if you want to adjust the frame by
frame like you're making a very very I
don't know careful graphic and you're
going to want to add it to every frame
you can use the page up which moves the
frame back one frame or the page down
which moves it frame by frame forward in
time and if you hold it down it Scrolls
back and if you hold it forward Scrolls
forward and again those two things are
page up and page down now uh actually
I'm going to stop my tutorial right here
since I think we learned enough for
right here in my file is getting kind of
big but in the next tutorial I'm going
to be going over the next thing couple
things you can do that will help you out
on the composition window so make sure
to watch that and thanks for watching