After Effects Workflows

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.

1. 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 footage items.

2. Create, arrange, and composite layers in a composition

Create one or more compositions. Any footage item can be the source for one or more layers in a composition. You can arrange the layers spatially in the Composition panel or arrange them in time using the Timeline panel. You can stack layers in two dimensions or arrange them in three dimensions. You can use masks, blending modes, and keying tools to composite (combine) images of multiple layers. You can even use shape layers, text layers, and paint tools to create your visual elements.

For more information, see:

3. Modify and animate layer properties

You can modify any property of a layer, such as size, position, and opacity. You can make any combination of layer properties change over time using keyframes and expressions. Use motion tracking to stabilize motion or to animate one layer so that it follows the motion in another layer.

For more information, see:

4. Add effects and modify effect properties

You can add any combination of effects to alter the look and feel or sound of a layer, and even generate visual elements from scratch. You can apply any of the hundreds of effects, animation presets, and layer styles. You can even create and save your own animation presets. You can animate effect properties, too, which are simply layer properties within an effect property group. For more information, see Effects and animation presets overview.

5. Preview

Previewing compositions on your computer monitor or an external video monitor is fast and convenient, even for complex projects. You can change the speed and quality of previews by specifying their resolution and frame rate and by limiting the area and duration of the composition that you preview. You can use color management features to preview how your movie will look on another output device.

For more information, see:

6. Render and export

Add one or more compositions to the render queue to render them at the quality settings you choose and to create movies in the formats that you specify. You can use File > Export or Composition > Add to Render Queue.

For more information, see Basics of rendering and exporting section in Adobe Media Encoder.

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 result—the first demonstrating the discoverability of menu commands and the second demonstrating the speed and convenience of keyboard shortcuts. You’ll likely find that you use some combination of keyboard shortcuts and menu commands in your work.

  1. Choose Composition > New Composition to create a composition.

    You can also use Ctrl+N (Windows) or Command+N (macOS) keyboard shortcuts to create a composition.

  2. Change the Duration value in the Composition Settings dialog box by entering 5.00 (5 seconds), choose desired preset from the Preset menu, and select OK.

  3. Choose Layer > New > Text to create a text layer.

    You can also use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T (Windows) or Command+Option+Shift+T (macOS) to create a text layer.

  4. Type your name. Press Enter on the numeric keypad or press Ctrl+Enter (Windows) or Command+Return (macOS) on the main keyboard to exit text-editing mode.

  5. To set an initial keyframe for the Position property, select the triangle to the left of the layer name in the Timeline panel.

  6. Select the triangle to the left of the Transform group name, and then select the stopwatch button  to the left of the Position property name.

    You can also use Alt+Shift+P (Windows) or Option+Shift+P (macOS) to open the Position property for a layer.

  7. Select the Selection Tool button in the Tools panel.

    You can also press V to activate the Selection tool.

  8. Using the Selection tool, drag your text to the lower-left corner of the frame in the Composition panel.

  9. Move the current-time indicator to the last frame of the composition by dragging the current-time indicator in the Timeline panel to the far right of the timeline.

    You can also press End to move the current-time indicator to the last frame of the composition.

  10. Using the Selection tool, drag your text to the upper-right corner of the frame in the Composition panel.

    A new keyframe is created at this time for the Position property. Motion is interpolated between keyframe values.

  11. Select the Play button  in the Preview panel to preview your animation using preview. Select Play again to stop the preview.

    You can also use the Spacebar to start and stop the preview.

  12. Choose Effect > Stylize > Glow to apply the Glow effect.

    You can also type glow in the search field of the Effects & Presets panel to find the Glow effect. Double-click the effect name.

  13. Choose File > Export > Add to Render Queue to add the composition to the Render Queue.

  14. In the Render Queue panel, select the underlined text to the right of Output To. In the Output Movie To dialog box, choose a name and location for the output movie file, and then select Save. For the location, choose something easy to find, like your desktop.

  15. Select the Render button to process all items in the render queue. The Render Queue panel shows the progress of the rendering operation. A sound is generated when rendering is complete.

You’ve created, rendered, and exported a movie.

You can import the movie that you’ve created and preview it in After Effects, or you can navigate to the movie and play it using a movie player such as QuickTime Player or Windows Media Player.

Using gestures in touch-enabled devices

You can use multi-touch gestures (for example, zoom and pan) in the following panels:

  • Composition
  • Layer
  • Footage
  • Timeline

Use the gestures in any touch-enabled device (for example, Microsoft Surface or Wacom Cintiq Touch) or multi-touch trackpad.

Use two fingers, pinch your fingers closer together to zoom out or move your fingers farther apart to zoom in.

Use two fingers and move them in unison to pan in all four directions in a panel's current view.
 

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