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Adobe after effects cc 2014 manual pdf free download
Line wraps in a paragraph text box are treated as multiple lines. The array returns float values in the form of: line0. When this option is disabled, the Current Time stays at its previous position.
For more information, seePreviewing. Mute Audio button behavior changes The Mute Audio button at the top of the Preview panel now does not control whether audio is played when you start a preview with the current shortcut. This button mutes or unmutes an audio during playback. Note: If you change the state of the Mute Audio button during a preview, it will also enable or disable the Include Audio button for the shortcut you used to start that preview.
Page 14 8 What's new 1 Include Video: Enable to preview video. This option behaves similarly to the Play Around command in Premiere Pro. When you start a preview with Play Around Current Time enabled, the preroll value is subtracted from the current time, the postroll value is added to CC Vignette includes an option to preserve pin highlights for more realistic behavior.
It repeats a hexagonal pattern, with several options that include a "smear" control. It can be considered as an extension to the CC Kaleida effect to generate dynamic effects in backgrounds. For more information, see Plug-ins. Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse 3. Auto-save also now saves a version when the Render button in the Render Queue is pressed. Page 17 11 Chapter 2: Workspace and workflow Planning and setup Planning your work Correct project settings, preparation of footage, and initial composition settings can help you to avoid errors and unexpected results when rendering your final output movie.
The best way to ensure that your movie is suitable for a specific medium is to render a test movie and view it using the same type of equipment that your audience will use to view it. Page 18 12 Workspace and workflow If possible, use uncompressed footage or footage encoded with lossless compression.
Lossless compression means better results for many operations, such as keying and motion tracking. Certain kinds of compression—such as the compression used in DV encoding—are especially bad for color keying, because they discard the subtle differences in color that you depend on for good bluescreen or greenscreen keying.
See Keying introduction and resources. See Frame rate. For example, if you know that you want to an Planning for playback on computer monitors and mobile devices When you create a movie for playback on a personal computer—whether downloaded from the Web or played from a CD-ROM—specify composition settings, render settings, and output module settings that keep file size low.
Consider that a movie with a high data rate may not play well from an older CD-ROM drive that cannot read data from the disc fast enough. Similarly, a large movie may take a long time to download over a dial-up network connection. When rendering your final movie, choose a file type and encoder appropriate for the final media.
The corresponding decoder must be available on the system used by your intended audience; otherwise they will not be able to play the movie. Page 20 14 Workspace and workflow Cross-platform project considerations After Effects project files are compatible with Mac OS and Windows operating systems, but some factors—mostly regarding the locations and naming of footage files and support files—can affect the ease of working with the same project across platforms.
If the footage and the project are on different volumes, make sure that the appropriate volume is mounted before opening the project and that network volume names are th Installing the software Before installing Adobe After Effects software, review the complete system requirements. In addition to the full version of Adobe After Effects, you can also install additional copies on additional computers to use as After Effects render engines to assist with network rendering.
You install render engines in the same manner as the full version of the application. Limitations of the trial version The trial version of After Effects includes all of the codecs that are included with the full version of After Effects.
This means that you can import and export t Page 22 16 Workspace and workflow General user interface items Activate a tool The Tools panel can be displayed as a toolbar across the top of the application window or as a normal, dockable panel. Note: Controls related to some tools appear only when the tool is selected in the Tools panel. If the button has a small triangle at its lower-right corner, hold down the mouse button to view the hidden tools.
Then, click the tool you want to activate. Placing the pointer over a tool button displays a tool tip with the name and keyboard shortcut for the tool. For example, press the Q key repeatedly to cycle through the pen tools. This technique does not work Page 23 17 Workspace and workflow Note: In general, the search and filter functions in the Project and Timeline panels only operate on the content of columns that are shown.
Some columns cannot be resized. Click once more to sort them in reverse order. Page 24 18 Workspace and workflow See this video on the Video2Brain website to learn about the new features for searching and filtering in panels. This search works whether or not the File Path column is shown, which is an exception to the general rule that only shown columns are searched.
For example, type starch to show pins created by the Puppet Starch tool. Page 25 19 Workspace and workflow You can sequentially undo as many as 99 of the most recent changes made to the project.
To avoid wasting time undoing accidental modifications, lock a layer when you want to see it but do not want to modify it. All changes made and footage items imported since you last saved are lost. You cannot undo this action. ClearType makes the outlines of system text, such as menus and dialog boxes, easier to read.
See Windows Help for information on how to enable ClearType text anti-aliasing. Page 26 20 Workspace and workflow Overview of general workflow in After Effects Whether you use Adobe After Effects to animate a simple title, create complex motion graphics, or composite realistic visual effects, you generally follow the same basic workflow, though you may repeat or skip some steps. For example, you may repeat the cycle of modifying layer properties, animating, and previewing until everything looks right.
You may skip the step of importing footage if you intend to create graphical elements entirely in After Effects. Import and organize footage After you create a project, import your footage into the project in the Project panel. After Effects automatically interprets many common media formats, but you can also specify how you want After Effects to interpret attributes such as frame rate and pixel aspect ratio.
You can view each item in a Footage panel and set its start and end times to fit your composition. For more information, see Importing and interpreting Basic workflow tutorial: Create a simple movie This tutorial assumes that you have already started After Effects and have not modified the empty default project.
This example skips the step of importing footage and shows you instead how to create your own synthetic visual elements. After you have rendered a final movie, you can import it into After Effects to view it and use it as you would any other footage item. Some people prefer to use the mouse and menus to interact with After Effects, whereas others prefer to use keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. For several steps in this example, two alternative commands are shown that produce the same resul Press the spacebar again to stop the preview.
Double-click the effect name. In the Output Movie To dialog box, choose a name and location for the output movie file, and then click Save. For the location, choose something easy to find, like your desktop. The Render Queue panel shows the progress of the rendering operation.
A sound is generated when rendering is complete. Page 29 23 Workspace and workflow Create a composition from clips in Adobe Premiere Pro You can replace selected clips in Adobe Premiere Pro with a dynamically linked After Effects composition based on those clips.
The new composition inherits the sequence settings from Adobe Premiere Pro. After Effects opens if it is not already open and a new linked composition is created. After Effects then creates a project and composition with the dimensions, pixel aspect ratio, frame rate, and audio sample rate of the originating project.
If After Effects is already running, it creates a composition in the current project. The new composition name is based on the Adobe Premiere Page 30 24 Workspace and workflow 2 Change the composition in After Effects. Then, switch back to Adobe Premiere Pro to view your changes. Adobe Premiere Pro stops using any preview files rendered for the clip before the changes.
Note: You can change the name of the composition in After Effects after creating a dynamic link to it from Adobe Premiere Pro. Adobe Premiere Pro does not update the linked composition name in the Project panel. Adobe Premiere Pro does retain the dynamic link, however. Delete a dynamically linked composition or clip You can delete a linked composition from an Adobe Premiere Pro project at any time, even if the composition is used in a project. You can delete linked clips from the timeline of an Adobe Premiere Pro sequence or timeline at any time.
In Adobe Premiere Pro, select the linked composition or clip and press the Delete key. Create a linked sequence in Adobe Premiere Pro w See Improve performance by optimizing memory, cache, and multiprocessing settings. For example, if a Timeline panel is active, this command closes all Timeline panels.
Press again to resize window so that contents fill the screen. Press again to resize window so that contents fill the Note: You can turn off this setting in the Preferences dialog box.
Views keyboard shortcuts Result Windows Mac If no layers are selected, split all layers. Showing properties and groups in the Timeline panel keyboard shortcuts Note: This table contains double-letter shortcuts for example, LL. To use these shortcuts, press the letters in quick succession. Adobe Bridge is part of the Creative Cloud suite of applications and can be downloaded and installed through Creative Cloud.
See the help documentation and the Adobe Bridge CC product page for more information. See this video to get an overview of Adobe Bridge CC. See Template projects and example projects.
Working with Photoshop and After Effects If you use Photoshop to create still images, you can use After Effects to bring those still images together and make them move and change. In After Effects, you can animate an entire When you open a movie in Photoshop, a video layer is created that refers to the source footage file. When you save a PSD file with a video layer, you save the edits that you made to the video layer, not edits to the source footage itself. You can also render a movie directly from Photoshop.
For example, you can create a QuickTime m For a Flash animation, you can optimize the video output for animation. For a Flash application, Flash renders video of the application as it runs, allowing the user to manipulate it. This lets you capture the branches or states of your applicat After Effects is designed to create motion graphics, apply visual effects, composite visual elements, perform color correction, and perform other post-production tasks for movies.
See Import an Adobe Premiere Pro project. See Render and Replace After Page 53 47 Workspace and workflow If you edit an audio-only file for example, a WAV file in Adobe Audition, you change the original file. If you edit a layer that contains both audio and video for example, an AVI file , you edit a copy of the source audio file.
The item must be of a type that is editable in Adobe Audition. After you save the file, import it into After Effects. Then, add it to the composition, and mute the Page 54 48 Workspace and workflow 3 The Install Directory is opened, with the Preferences file selected. Note: If you modify a keyboard shortcut to a combination that already exists, it results in a conflict.
Ensure that the new combination you enter has not been used already. Note: On Mac OS, some keyboard commands for interacting with the operating system conflict with keyboard commands for interacting with After Effects. After Effects keyboard shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to speed up your tasks and also work more efficiently. Here is a down Page 55 49 Workspace and workflow A Application window B Grouped panels C Individual panel To increase the available screen space, use multiple monitors.
When you work with multiple monitors, the application window appears on the main monitor, and you place floating windows on the second monitor.
Monitor configurations are stored in the workspace. Workspaces are stored in XML files in the preferences folder. With some caveats regarding monitor size and layout, these workspaces can be moved to another computer and used there. Customizing workspaces Choose a workspace You can access custom or default workspaces with a single click in the new workspace bar.
The workspace bar o Page 56 50 Workspace and workflow When you move the Tools panel from its position, the Workspace menu replaces the workspace bar. You can select a workspace and reorder workspaces. Save, reset, or delete workspaces Save a custom workspace As you customize a workspace, the application tracks your changes, storing the most recent layout. To store a specific layout more permanently, save a custom workspace.
Saved custom workspaces appear in the Workspace menu, where you can return to and reset them. Type a name for the workspace, and click OK. Note: After Effects, Premiere Pro If a project saved with a custom workspace is opened on another system, the application lo Page 58 52 Workspace and workflow 2 Choose the workspace you want to delete, and then click OK.
Note: You cannot delete the currently active workspace. Dock, group, or float panels You can dock panels together, move them into or out of groups, and undock them so they float above the application window. As you drag a panel, drop zones—areas onto which you can move the panel—become highlighted.
The drop zone you choose determines where the panel is inserted, and whether it docks or groups with other panels. Docking zones Docking zones exist along the edges of a panel, group, or window. Docking a panel places it adjacent to the existing group, resizing all groups to accommodate the new panel. Grouping zones Grouping zones exist in the middle of a panel or group, and along the tab area of panels.
Dropping a panel on a grouping zone stacks it with other panels. Page 59 53 Workspace and workflow Dock or group panels 1 If the panel you want to dock or group is not visible, choose it from the Window menu. The application docks or groups the panel, according to the type of drop zone. Undock a panel in a floating window When you undock a panel in a floating window, you can add panels to the window and modify it similarly to the application window.
You can use floating windows to use a secondary monitor, or to create workspaces like the workspaces in earlier versions of Adobe applications. Press the key again to return the panel to its original size. When you drag the divider between panel groups, all groups that share the divider are resized. The pointer becomes.
The pointer becomes a four-way arrow 2 Hold down the mouse button, and drag to resize the panel groups. A Original group with resize pointer B Resized groups Open, close, and show panels and windows Even if a panel is open, it may be out of sight, beneath other panels.
Choosing a panel from the Window menu opens it an Page 61 55 Workspace and workflow Viewers A viewer is a panel that can contain multiple compositions, layers, or footage items, or multiple views of one such item. Locking a viewer prevents the currently displayed item from being replaced when you open or select a new item.
Instead, when a viewer is locked and a new item is opened or selected, After Effects creates a new viewer panel for that item. If you select the item from the viewer menu of a locked viewer, a new viewer isn't created; the existing viewer is used. Instead of housing multiple items in a single viewer and using the viewer menu to switch between them, you can choose to open a separate viewer for each open composition, layer, or footage item.
When you have multiple viewers open, you can arrange them by docking or grouping them, like any other panels. For example, you can create one Composition viewer each for different 3D views To Page 62 56 Workspace and workflow To prevent this behavior, unlock the Composition viewer or show the Composition viewer for the composition that you want to view or preview.
More Help topics Panels, viewers, workspaces, and windows keyboard shortcuts Choose a viewer to always preview Previews keyboard shortcuts Views keyboard shortcuts About precomposing and nesting Working with stacked panel groups Preferences The following sections describe the Preferences menu and and the various tasks that can be performed using this menu.
For information on modifying keyboard shortcuts, see Modify keyboard shortcuts. For information on managing workspaces, see Workspaces and Panels. You can see a list of projects on the screen. The OptiX version number is available, as well as the Copy button to copy the general information at the top of the dialog box to the system clipboard.
For det Page 67 61 Workspace and workflow The synchronization takes place via your Adobe Creative Cloud account. Settings are uploaded to your Creative Cloud account and then are downloaded and applied on the other computer. You can also synchronize settings from another Creative Cloud account. After Effects creates a user profile on your computer and uses it to synchronize settings to and from the associated Creative Cloud account.
You can initiate the synchronization manually; it does not happen automatically and it cannot be scheduled. You can also synchronize the settings on the Start screen. Page 68 62 Workspace and workflow Click Quit to clear the current preferences, and close After Effects. When the application is launched again, default preferences are set.
On next launch, preferences are fetched from the default Adobe ID used to license the product. Select the preferences to synchronize. Page 69 63 Workspace and workflow 4 Interpretation Rules 5 Render Settings Templates 6 Output Module Settings Templates Note: Synchronizable preferences refer to preferences that are not dependent on computer or hardware settings. Page 70 64 Chapter 3: Projects and compositions Projects About projects An After Effects project is a single file that stores compositions and references to all of the source files used by footage items in that project.
Compositions are collections of layers. Many layers use footage items such as movies or still images as a source, though some layers—such as shape layers and text layers—contain graphics that you create within After Effects.
A project file has the filename extension. A project file with the. The name of the current project appears at the top of the application window. A template project file has the filename extension. XML project files Text-based XML project files contain some project information as hexadecimal-encoded binary data, but much of the information is Page 71 65 Projects and compositions Project links embedded in QuickTime, Video for Windows files When you render a movie and export it to a container format, you can embed a link to the After Effects project in the container file.
To import the project, import the container file, and choose Project from the Import As menu in the Import File dialog box. If the container file contains a link to a project that has been moved, you can browse to locate the project. Create and open projects Only one project can be open at a time.
If you create or open another project file while a project is open, After Effects prompts you to save changes in the open project, and then closes it. After you create a project, you can import footage into the project. You can also create and open a project from the Start screen. The name of the copy is the name of the original followed by a number. If the name of the original ends with a number, that number is increased by 1.
The open project takes the new name and location; the original file remains unchanged. Page 73 67 Projects and compositions When you click a composition in the flowchart, it becomes active in the Project panel and the Timeline panel. When you click a layer, it becomes active in the Timeline panel. When you click a footage item, it becomes active in the Project panel. For tool tips identifying the buttons in the Flowchart panel, let your pointer hover over a button until the tool tip appears.
If the selected element is a footage item or composition, it is deleted from the project and no longer appears in the Timeline and Project panels. If the selected element is a layer, it is deleted from the composition in which it appears.
The icons Page 74 68 Projects and compositions A nested composition is sometimes called a precomposition, which is occasionally abbreviated in casual use to precomp or pre-comp. When a precomposition is used as the source footage item for a layer, the layer is called a precomposition layer. During rendering, the image data and other information can be said to flow from each nested composition into the composition that contains it. For this reason, nested compositions are sometimes referred to as being upstream of the compositions that contain them, and the containing compositions are said to be downstream of the nested compositions that they contain.
A set of compositions connected through nesting is called a composition network. You can navigate within a composition network using the Composition Navigator and Mini-Flowchart. See Opening and navigating nested compositions. Uses for precomposing and nestin Page 75 69 Projects and compositions Changing the current time in one panel updates the current time in other panels associated with that composition. By default, the current time is also updated for all compositions related to the current composition by nesting.
Online resources about precomposing and nesting Angie Taylor provides an extensive discussion and explanation of animation using nesting, parenting, expressions, and null object layers in a PDF excerpt from her book Creative After Effects 7: Workflow Techniques for Animation, Visual Effects, and Motion Graphics.
Alt-double-click Windows or Option-double-click Mac OS to open the precomposition layer as a layer in the Layer panel.
Note: Double-clicking a precomposition layer when a paint tool or the Roto Brush tool is active opens the layer in the Layer panel. The Composition Navigator The Composition Navigator is a bar along the top edge of the Composition panel that shows the composition active in that viewer in relation to other compositions in the same composition network. The compositions shown are the most recently active compositions in Note: Do not hold the Shift key down; press it briefly.
As with the Composition Navigator, you can choose whether to show the flow direction from left to right or Page 78 72 Projects and compositions 3 In the Render Queue panel, adjust settings as necessary, and click the Render button to render the composition.
See this video tutorial on the Video2Brain website about how to save time with pre-rendering and proxies in After Effects. Note: An alternative to replacing the composition with the movie is to use the rendered movie as a proxy for the nested composition. Render order and collapsing transformations A composition consists of layers stacked on top of one another in the Timeline panel.
When the composition is rendered—either for previewing or for final output—the bottom layer is rendered first. Within each raster non-vector layer, elements are applied in the following order: masks, effects, transformations, and layer styles. For continuously rasterized vector layers, the default rendering order is masks, followed by transformations, and then effects. Transformations are changes to those properties grouped under the Transform cat Page 79 73 Projects and compositions If transformations are collapsed, the 3D properties of the layers in the nested composition are exposed to the containing composition.
Thus, the nested composition can intersect with 3D layers, cast shadows on 3D layers, and receive shadows from 3D layers in the containing composition. The containing composition's camera and lights can also control the nested composition. Essentially, collapsing transformations for a nested composition tells After Effects to not flatten and crop the layers in the precomposition. Because an adjustment layer operates on the composite of all of the layers beneath it within the same composition, an adjustment layer within a nested composition with collapsed transformations will force the flattening and cropping that collapsing transformations would normally prevent.
When a closed mask with mask mode other than None , a layer style, or an effect is applied to a nested composition with collapsed transformations, the Page 80 74 Projects and compositions You render a composition to create the frames of a final output movie, which is encoded and exported to any number of formats.
See Basics of rendering and exporting. Simple projects may include only one composition; complex projects may include hundreds of compositions to organize large amounts of footage or many effects. In some places in the After Effects user interface, composition is abbreviated as comp. Each composition has an entry in the Project panel. Double-click a composition entry in the Project panel to open the composition in its own Timeline panel.
Use the Composition panel to preview a composition and modify its contents manually. The Composition panel contains the composition frame and a pasteboard area outsid Page 81 75 Projects and compositions Note: You can override some composition settings when rendering to final output. For example, you can use different frame sizes for the same movie.
For more information see Render settingsand Output modules and output module settings. When you create a composition without changing settings in the Composition Settings dialog box, the new composition uses the settings from the previous time that composition settings were set. Jeff Almasol provides a script on his redefinery website that creates and saves a new project for each selected composition in the current project.
If a folder is selected in the Project panel when you create a new composition, the new composition is placed in the selected folder. Create a composition and manually set composition settings? Page 82 76 Projects and compositions Create compositions for playback on mobile devices Screen dimensions and video frame rates vary from one mobile device to another. For information on acquiring footage for playback on mobile devices, see Planning for playback on computer monitors and mobile devices.
Timeline panel Each composition has its own Timeline panel. You use the Timeline panel to perform many tasks, such as animating layer properties, arranging layers in time, and setting blending modes. The layers at the bottom of the layer stacking order in the Timeline panel are rendered first and—in the case of 2D image layers— appear farthest back in the Composition panel and in the final composite.
Mac OS. The current time for a composition is indicated by t Note: You cannot move custom composition settings presets from one system to another, as they are embedded into the preferences file. Note: Ensure all layers are unlocked in the selected composit Increasing the Ray-tracing Quality value will not increase the sharpness.
Instead it decreases the noise inherent in point sampling. You should use the lowest value that produces an acceptable amount of noise or no noise. None fires all rays within the bounds of a p Page 85 79 Projects and compositions More Help topics Creating layers Preview video and audio Flowchart panel Basics of rendering and exporting About precomposing and nesting Show and hide layers in the Timeline panel The Graph Editor Columns Keyboard shortcuts Timecode and time display units Many quantities in After Effects are either points in time or spans of time, including the current time, layer In and Out points, and durations of layers, footage items, and compositions.
You can change to another system of time display, such as frames, or feet and frames of 16mm or 35mm film. The format you choose Page 86 80 Projects and compositions Options for time-display units Timecode Displays time as timecode in the time rulers of the Timeline, Layer, and Footage panels, using either Use Media Source source timecode or starting at Select the Timecode option to use timecode instead of Frames.
Note: You may have both drop-frame and non-drop-frame timecode in any composition within a project. Frames Displays frame number instead of time. Use this setting for convenience when doing work that you are integrating with a frame-based application or format, like Flash or SWF. Frame Count Determines the starting number f Page 87 81 Chapter 4: Importing footage Importing and interpreting footage items About imported files and footage items You import source files into a project as the basis for footage items and use them as sources for layers.
The same file can be the source for multiple footage items, each with its own interpretation settings. Each footage item can be used as the source for one or more layers. You work with collections of layers in a composition. You primarily work with footage items in the Project panel. You can use the Footage panel to evaluate footage and perform simple editing tasks, such as trimming the duration of a footage item. You can import many different kinds of files, collections of files, or components of files as sources for individual footage items, including moving image files, still-image files, still-image sequences, and audio files.
You can even create footage items yourself within After Effects, such as solids and precompositions. You can import footage item Page 88 82 Importing footage To replace all uses of selected footage items with another footage item, select footage items in the Project panel, and then Alt-drag Windows or Option-drag Mac OS the new footage item onto a selected footage item in the Project panel. When After Effects imports video and audio in some formats, it processes and caches versions of these items that it can readily access when generating previews.
This caching greatly improves performance for previews, because the video and audio items do not need to be reprocessed for each preview. See Media cache. This means that you do not need to install additional codecs to use and create such files. Supported import formats Som See Importing and using 3D files from other applications. See Preparing and importing still images. In this video by Todd Kopriva and video2brain, learn how t Audio is not retained.
Interactive content and scripted animation are not retained. Animation defined by keyframes in the main, top-level movie is retained. Import footage items You can import media files into your project either by using the Import dialog box or by dragging. The imported footage items appear in the Project panel. If the Interpret Footage dialog box appears after you import a footage item, it cont Note: If you drag an output module from the Render Queue panel into the Project panel before rendering, After Effects creates a placeholder footage item.
Clone source overlay B. Current stroke point C. Current sample point Important: To specify settings for a paint stroke before you apply it, use the Paint and Brushes panels. You can reset them to zero with the Reset button. In contrast, using the Eraser tool in Last Stroke Only mode only affects the last paint stroke drawn and does not create an Eraser stroke. Overview of shape layers, paths, and vector graphics About vector graphics and raster images Vector graphics are made up of lines and curves defined by mathematical objects called vectors, which describe an image according to its geometric characteristics.
Page About Paths A path consists of segments and vertices. Segments are the lines or curves that connect vertices. Vertices define where each segment of a path starts and ends. Some Adobe applications use the terms anchor point and path point to refer to a vertex. For shape paths, you can use the Merge Paths path operation similar to the Pathfinder effects in Adobe Illustrator to combine multiple paths into one path.
Page Online resources for shape layers For a video tutorial introducing shape layers, visit the Adobe website at www. You can drag groups and attributes to reorder them in the Timeline panel.
By reordering and grouping shapes and shape attributes, you can affect their rendering order with respect to other shapes and shape attributes. Then use parenting to make the solid layer a child of the primary layer, so that the mask moves with the primary layer as if it were applied directly. Drag to modify the length and direction of both direction lines for a vertex, and then release the mouse button.
Drawing the first vertex in a curved path A. When you create mask paths or shape paths from motion paths, make sure that you copy keyframes from a single Position property only—do not copy the keyframes of any other property.
This selects all keyframes. To select only some of the keyframes of a motion path, Shift-click them. For this reason, the results may be different from what you expect. Display the layer containing the paths that you want to transform in the Composition or Layer panel. For example, the Delete Vertex tool becomes active when you place the Pen tool pointer over an existing vertex, and the Add Vertex tool becomes active when you place the Pen tool pointer over a path segment.
Change a mask path numerically Select the mask. In the Timeline panel, expand the Mask properties. Next to the Mask Path property, click the underlined word, and specify the changes in the Mask Shape dialog box.
Note: To interrupt the interpolation process, press Esc. The Info panel indicates that the process has been interrupted and reports the number of keyframes created.
Curve applies the algorithm for mask paths that have curved segments. Polyline applies the algorithm for mask paths that have only straight segments. Note: The mask path keyframes added by Smart Mask Interpolation are polylines when Polyline Matching Method is selected, regardless of whether the input mask paths contained curved segments. In the Layer panel, the mask is moved in relation to its layer top , and in the Composition panel, the layer is moved in relation to the composition bottom.
Move a mask Select the mask or masks you want to move. You can also modify the fill colors, stroke colors, fill type, and stroke type for selected shapes using these controls.
You can adjust these points after you finish drawing. The end is squared off. Line Join options for strokes The Line Join property for a stroke determines the appearance of the stroke where the path suddenly changes direction turns a corner. The original path is not modified.
Because path operations are live, you can modify or remove them at any time. The Wiggle Transform operation is especially useful following a Repeater operation, because it allows you to randomize the transformations of each repeated shape separately. This option is the default used for shapes created from Merge text characters made up of multiple paths, like the letter e, when using the Create Shapes From Text command.
For example, if the Copies value is 10 and the Offset value is 3, then the original shape is transformed by 3 times the amount specified in the Transform property group, and the last copy is transformed by 12 times the amount specified in the Transform property group. Page Chapter Text Vertical and horizontal point text left , and paragraph text in a bounding box right You can copy text from other applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, or any text editor, and paste it into a text layer in After Effects.
Because After Effects also supports Unicode characters, you can copy and paste these characters between After Effects and any other application that also supports Unicode which includes all Adobe applications.
Page You can either create one text layer from all of the text, or you can create one layer for each line in the text file. The script also provides options for leading and other spacing. Todd Kopriva provides an example script on the Adobe website that demonstrates the text formatting features available through the scripting interface.
The script goes through your spreadsheet line by line, making a new version of your composition with text layers in the composition receiving text from the spreadsheet automatically. You can enter multiple paragraphs and apply paragraph formatting. You can resize the bounding box at any time, which causes the text to reflow within the adjusted rectangle. When you enter paragraph text, it has the properties set in the Character and Paragraph panels.
To select a line, triple-click it. To select a paragraph, quadruple-click it. To select all text in a layer, quintuple-click anywhere in the text. Vertical text flows from top to bottom; multiple lines of text lie from right to left.
If the formatting for a character specifies a font that is unavailable on your computer system, another font will be substituted, and the missing font name will appear in brackets. Continue typing until the desired font family name appears. Select text to change its color after the text has already been entered. You can adjust scale to compress or expand selected characters in both width and height.
Baseline shift controls the distance that text appears from its baseline, either raising or lowering the selected text to create superscripts or subscripts. A check mark indicates which option is selected. Use tate-chuu-yoko Tate-chuu-yoko also called kumimoji and renmoji is a block of horizontal text laid out within a vertical text line.
Align and justify text You can align text to one edge of a paragraph left, center, or right for horizontal text; top, center, or bottom for vertical text and justify text to both edges of a paragraph. Page Animating Text After Effects offers two composition methods, which you choose from the Paragraph panel menu: Offers a traditional approach to composing text one line at a time. This option is useful Adobe Single-line Composer if you prefer to have manual control over how lines break. If spacing must be adjusted, the Single-line Composer first tries to compress, rather than expand text.
Page Browse and apply text animation presets as you would any other animation presets. Use expression selectors to use expressions to dynamically specify how much you want characters to be affected by an animator property.
Random Seed When Random Seed is zero, the seed is based on its animator group. If you want to duplicate an animator group and retain the same randomized order as in the original animator group, set Random Seed to a value other than zero. Text anchor point properties Text animators animate character position, rotation, and size-related properties relative to an anchor point. You can use the text property, Anchor Point Grouping, to specify whether the anchor point used for transformations is that of each character, each word, each line, or the entire text block.
Page After Effects Exchange on the Adobe website. Examples and resources for text animation For a video tutorial on animating text, go to the Adobe website at www. Steve Holmes provides a tutorial on the Layers Magazine website that uses three text animators and per-character 3D text animation to create a text animation. Colin Braley provides a tutorial and example project on his website that show how to use an expression on the Source Text property to animate text to overcome some of the limitations of the Numbers effect.
Preview the composition. Example: Offset characters This example illustrates how you can easily animate random characters so that they gradually form a legible word or phrase by specifying a Character Offset value and animating the range selector.
It also shows how the Wiggly selector can create a dramatic change to the animation simply by adding it to the layer. Animating the color and position of the characters in the word Galaxy Create a new composition. Using the Tracking and Line Anchor animator properties, you can easily move all but one or a few characters. Animating the tracking values for the characters left and center so that only the 7 in the middle remains right Create a new composition.
Animating the skew values in the characters in the word Speeding Create a new composition. Move the current-time indicator to 5 seconds and drag the start selector in the Composition panel to the right edge of the text the value will be 5. Page Chapter Transparency, Opacity, And Compositing Adobe Photoshop is an excellent application for performing many compositing tasks, including defining areas of transparency using its superior selection and painting tools.
You can use Adobe Photoshop together with After Effects for optimum efficiency and best results when doing compositing work.
For Adobe Note: The term alpha channel technically refers to the fourth A channel in an RGBA image file, regardless of whether that channel is used for communicating transparency information.
You can drag a mask to different positions within the Masks property group in the Timeline panel. The Mask Opacity property for a mask determines the influence that a closed mask has on the alpha channel of the layer inside the mask area.
Select the mask or keyframes. Copy the mask or keyframes, and paste the mask or keyframes to the layer to which you want to apply the mask. The masks in this illustration have different Mask Opacity values. Original masks B. None C. Add D. Subtract E. Intersect F. Lighten G. Darken H. Difference The mask has no direct influence on the alpha channel of the layer. Page In the Timeline panel, expand the Mask properties of the layer you want to adjust. Drag the underlined value for Mask Expansion.
Todd Kopriva provides a visual aid and further explanation regarding mask expansion—and why it creates rounded corners—on his blog on the Adobe website.
Track matte layer: a solid with a rectangular mask, set to Luma Matte. The mask is animated to travel across the screen. Fill layer: a solid with a pattern effect. Page This option is useful for creating results such as glints or light reflecting off a polished surface.
The behavior of a layer with the Preserve Underlying Transparency option selected is similar to the behavior of a clipping mask in Adobe Photoshop.
Page Keying Keylight before attempting to use these built-in keying effects. Some keying effects—such as the Color Key effect and the Luma Key effect—have been superseded by more modern effects like Keylight.
For a video tutorial on keying with Keylight, go to the Adobe website at www. Page Keying footage that was not acquired correctly is much more difficult than is keying footage that was acquired with keying in mind.
Choose the most intricate frame of the scene, one involving fine detail such as hair and transparent or semitransparent objects, such as smoke or glass. If the lighting is constant, the same settings you apply to the first frame are applied to all subsequent frames. Original bluescreen image.
The background for the number is also blue. After keying, the background for the number is also transparent. Page Chapter Effects And Animation Presets After Effects includes hundreds of animation presets that you can apply to your layers and modify to suit your needs. Page After Effects 7 is available on the Adobe website. This set of animation presets is similar to the set included with After Effects CS4.
Page Adobe provides many third-party effect plug-ins with After Effects. These plug-ins are not included with the trial version of Adobe After Effects software. The installers for some plug-ins install their documentation in the same directory as the plug-ins themselves. Using an 8-bpc effect in a bpc or bpc project can result in a loss of color detail. If an effect supports only 8 bpc, and your project is set to 16 bpc or 32 bpc, the Effect Controls panel displays a warning icon next to the effect name.
Page You can create control layers by drawing or painting in an image-editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop. By default, when you apply an effect to a layer, the effect is active for the duration of the layer. However, you can make an effect start and stop at specific times or make the effect more or less intense over time by using keyframes or expressions or by applying the effect to an adjustment layer.
The Effect switch in the Effect Controls panel turns a specific effect on or off. The Effect switch for an effect in the Timeline panel also turns a specific effect on or off. Page This section provides a list of animation presets included with the full version of After Effects CS4. Lutz Albrecht provides a two-part document on the Adobe website about integrating 3D applications with After Effects.
Page Much of the following information is based on information provided by Lutz Albrecht, who also provides a two- part document on the Adobe website about integrating 3D applications with After Effects: The value that is mapped to white or black. For information, see the RE:Vision Effects website. The amount of feather along the edges of the matte. Feather Select to matte out everything with a depth greater than the Depth value.
The ID Matte effect uses this information to create a matte that excludes everything in the scene except the element you want. The frames remain in their original order in the Timeline panel. Select Swap Channels to swap left and right channels.
Voices The rate in Hz at which the modulation cycles. Modulation Rate The amount of modulation. Modulation Depth The modulation phase difference in degrees between each subsequent voice. Divide by the Voice Phase Change number of voices to find the optimum value. The type of waveform to use. Sine produces smoother modulation. Triangle produces more abrupt Modulation Type modulation. High brightness simulates a room with Brightness live highly reflective acoustics.
The amounts of the original dry sound and delayed wet sound in the final output. The result is a softer, dreamier look than that achieved by the Smart Blur effect with equivalent settings. Eran Stern provides a demonstration of the Bilateral Blur effect on the Motionworks website.
The result is a color image. Maximum Blur Stretches the control layer to the dimensions of the layer to which it is applied; otherwise, the Stretch Map To Fit control layer is centered on the effect layer.
Depth Map Layer The channel of the control layer to use as the depth map. Pixels with low values correspond to low Depth Map Channel depth near the camera ; Type Zoom blurs radially outward from the center point; Amount specifies the length of the blur. How far the filter searches for dissimilar pixels to blur. Radius How different the values of pixels should be before they are eliminated. Threshold What parts of the image receive the blur. This effect—which was written with Pixel Bender—offsets, scales, and rotates each color channel of an image separately.
Alpha Levels effect If you are working on a project that was created in an older version of After Effects and the Alpha Levels effect is applied to one or more layers, you can continue to use the Alpha Levels effect; The layer to blend with the secondary or control layer.
Blend With Layer Note: To use a layer as a control layer for the Blend effect but not show the layer in the rest of the composition, deselect the control Video switch for the control layer. Note: You can use this effect to view any channel as a grayscale image by choosing the channel from the From menu and choosing Lightness Only from the To menu. Values below 0 are mapped to 0. Page Remove Color Matting effect. Todd Kopriva provides a post on the Adobe website that describes the use of the Remove Color Matting and Shift Channels effects to remove black backgrounds from images.
Page This effect works with 8-bpc, bpc, and bpc color. The channel to use as a source. Take Channel From Todd Kopriva provides a post on the Adobe website that describes the use of the Remove Color Matting and Shift Channels effects to remove black backgrounds from images. This effect works with 8-bpc, bpc, and bpc color. The opacity of the source layer. The result of the effect is blended with the original image, with the Blend With Original effect result composited on top.
The higher you set this value, the less the effect affects the layer. Note: A more reliable way to keep colors within the broadcast-safe range for your output type is to use color management features to set the output color profile accordingly, such as to SDTV Rec.
You can convert a movie to grayscale by setting the Saturation to — This effect is useful for quickly finding a color that matches the color of a background layer. This effect works with 8-bpc color. Page Guy Chen provides an example on the After Effects Exchange on the Adobe website that uses the Fractal Noise effect to generate the base noise in this case for the turbulent surface of the Sun and then colorizes the noise with the Colorama effect.
The top palettes are designed for quick color correction and Use Preset Palette adjustment tasks. The bottom choices offer a variety of built-in color palettes for creative results. Customize the output color palette by altering the colors and locations of the triangles on the Output Output Cycle Cycle wheel.
When Matching Tolerance is 1, all colors are matched; Page The Equalize effect alters the pixel values of an image to produce a more consistent brightness or color component distribution. The effect works similarly to the Equalize command in Adobe Photoshop. Offset The amount of gamma correction to use for adding an additional power-curve adjustment to the Gamma Correction image.
After Effects displays only the sliders for the Channel Control menu choice. High values smooth the transition from color to gray. Page You can choose a color preset to apply a hue adjustment to an image, or you can specify a custom color using the Adobe Color Picker or the eyedropper. Specifying a value that is too large for a given image may introduce halos around strong dark to light edges. The default settings attempt to reduce these artifacts.
These halos may occur if the Shadow or Highlight Amount value is too large; The Tritone effect is like the Tint effect, except with midtone control. Dragging these points reshapes the curves that form the edge, thus distorting the image. For example, you can use Bezier Warp to reshape one image to fit another, as in wrapping a label around a jar.
The color values range from 0 to Each value is converted into a scale ranging from -1 to 1. The displacement amount is calculated by multiplying the converted value by the maximum displacement amount you specify.
Freeze Area Mask Areas outside the mask are distorted; areas within the mask are distorted according to Mask Opacity and Mask Feather settings. You can Displace use Displace to move all or part of the preview image to a different location. Reconstructs unfrozen areas to match the displacement, rotation, and overall scaling that exist at the Amplitwist starting point. Soft works well at large magnification amounts.
Scatter The blending mode used to combine the magnified area with the original layer. The position of the line about which the reflection occurs.
Reflection Center The angle of the line about which the reflection occurs. Unlimited resizes the layer as far as it is stretched. This option may require a large amount of memory. For example, an x,y Rect To Polar coordinate of 2,3 becomes a polar coordinate with a radius of 2 and a degree of 3. In the Composition and Layer panels, a blue outline defines the boundary mask. Areas within the boundary mask are distorted; areas outside the mask remain unaltered.
Keep the boundary mask as far as possible from the source and destination masks to avoid foldovers. Page To use Smear, first create or import two masks: the source mask and the boundary mask. You can create masks on the layer in After Effects or use masks created in Adobe Illustrator. To use a mask created in Illustrator, copy the mask and paste it into a layer in After Effects.
Stiff distorts the least, while Super Elasticity Fluid distorts the most. Specifies a method for the interpolation that Smear performs between keyframes. For example, use it to create flowing water, funhouse mirrors, and waving flags. Page A value of 50, for example, produces a twirl that extends to the edges of the layer.
Warp effect Use Warp to distort or deform layers. You can produce a variety of different wave shapes, including square, circular, and sine waves.
The Wave Warp effect is automatically animated at a constant speed across the time range without keyframes or expressions. Animate the Conductivity State or other properties to animate the lightning. The Advanced Lighting effect includes the Alpha Obstacle feature, with which you can make the lightning go around designated objects. At lower values, the path terminates more easily when encountering resistance or alpha obstacles.
Use Polar Path The lowest and highest frequencies, in hertz, to display. Start Frequency, End Frequency The number of frequency bands into which to divide displayed frequencies. Audio Layer The position at which the waveform starts and ends, if Path is set to None. Original left , and with a simulated beam right The Length control specifies the length of the beam based on a percentage of the Time specified. With this setting, Contrast values above increase complexity and detail. Opacity The blending mode to use to composite the checkerboard pattern on top of the original layer.
These Blending Mode blending modes work identically to the ones in the Timeline panel, except for the default None mode, which renders the checkerboard pattern only.
The transparency of the effect. Magnification specifies the magnification of the effect. Escape Limit specifies how many times the calculation looks for a color for a given pixel before it assigns the color black.
Press Shift as you press an arrow key to adjust the point by 10 pixels. Page The Paint Bucket effect formerly Basic Fill effect is a nondestructive paint effect that fills an area with a solid color. It works much like the Paint Bucket tool in Adobe Photoshop. Use the Paint Bucket effect for colorizing cartoon-type outlined drawings or replacing areas of color in an image.
The Spread Radius value indicates the number of pixels the fill color Choke shrinks from the edge of the fill area. Oversampling provides high-quality results but results in long render times. This option works only with Best quality mode.
What to base the wave shape on. By default, particles are emitted from the Direction producer point in an expanding radial pattern. Specifies the speed at which the wave moves in the specified direction. Velocity Controls the continued rotation of a shape after it is born. It fills a mask with a single zigzagging line that crisscrosses the path. Some paths, because of their geometry, cannot be filled with a single line. You can outline just about anything, surround it with lights or longer pulses, and then animate it to create the appearance of lights chasing around the object.
For example, if Length Segments is set to 1, the maximum length of a stroke is one complete trip around the object outline. For example, you can animate text by using the type tools and text animators, and you can animate a paint stroke applied with a paint tool.
Paint strokes can have a Write-on Duration setting, which you can use to create similar results as with the Write-on effect. You can adjust the same levels using the Black eyedropper.
Higher values create a softer edge but take longer to render. Color Range effect Note: Though the color keying effects built into After Effects can be useful for some purposes, you should try keying with Keylight before attempting to use these built-in keying effects. Drag the Fuzziness slider to soften the edges between transparent and opaque regions.
Use the sliders in the Min and Max controls to fine-tune the color range you selected with the plus and minus eyedroppers. Page Note: The controls for this effect are similar to the controls of the Extract effect in Adobe Premiere Pro, but the purpose and results of the effect are different. The histogram displays a representation of the brightness levels in the layer, showing the relative number of pixels at each level. This color decontamination process determines the contribution of the background to the color in each border pixel, and then removes that contribution—thus removing the halo that can appear if a soft-edged object is matted against a new background.
The Plus eyedropper adds the specified color to the key color range, increasing the matching tolerance and the level of transparency. Spill Suppressor removes glow lower-right. Select Invert Match if you want to invert the matte so that the white areas become black and the black areas become white. To change the dimensions of the preview region, change the Width and Height values in the Effect Controls panel to the desired size, in pixels. Larger preview regions can result in slower rendering.
Select Show Box if you want to outline the preview region in color. For example, you may want to reposition samples if the automatic sampling selected a uniform area that is underexposed or overexposed and that lacks information about grain structure.
The Match Grain effect also creates new grain in an image but by matching the grain in a different image. With a dark background, the noise tends to add to the image visually, so a red tint or more noise in the red channel gives a reddish hue to the image. To achieve a balance between sharpness of the image and hiding defects, try various combinations of Radius and Threshold settings.
To return the Evolution setting to its original state for example, to create a seamless loop , use the Cycle Evolution option. You can specify how much the noise evolves over a period of time by animating Evolution. The evolution completes the number of revolutions you specify for Cycle in the amount of time determined by the distance between Evolution keyframes. Determine the Cycle value by considering how much of this cycle you need to render before it repeats.
Select the destination layer to which you want to add grain. You can then view the noise samples in the destination layer by choosing Compensation Samples in the Viewing Mode menu. You can also reposition the samples in the destination image by setting Sampling Mode to Manual, which makes the Compensation Sample Points available for manual repositioning.
Amount Of Noise Use Color Noise adds random values to the red, green, and blue channels individually. Otherwise, the Noise Type same random value is added to all channels for each pixel. Alter the timing of the Noise Phase keyframes to adjust the speed of the Noise Phase cycles. To save time animating the Noise Phase value, use the Cycle Noise option to create a seamless noise loop. The results of the automatic sampling depend on the image content and noise type. You can also change the number, size, and position of the samples to get the best results for a particular image.
If the noise is colorful, Chroma Suppression increasing this control can help remove it. This option reveals Wrap Back subtle detail when Contrast is set above When used as a luma matte, the layer reveals more detailed textured areas of transparency. The Saturation and Lightness of the original layer are maintained. If the original layer is grayscale, nothing happens. You can adjust the playback speed to fit the timing you want. You can also create new strokes by blending existing strokes, both in space and in time.
The Eraser Eraser tool pointer appears as a circle with an X through it. If you use an installed tablet with stylus eraser support, Vector Paint automatically switches to eraser mode when you use the stylus eraser. FilterGrade is a digital marketplace for creators.
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