Design Practice: After Effects Session Two

Spacial and temporal awareness - After effects you can arrange frames spacial in the composition window. and in the timeline you can arrange things temporal.

The dimensions that we work in within After Effects.

Our animations are going to be 5 seconds so we change the duration to 5 seconds.

Importing Photoshop artwork into After Effects-

Resolution should be 72, RGB colour and work in pixels.

The guides specify zones, the outside guide is the action safe zone, it means anything within that will be visible.
The inside guide is the title safe zone, keep text within this guide.

You can also turn these guides on in After Effects.

The text you want to work with in on a transparent background because we want transparency in After Effects.

Importing is the same as placing.

Importing as footage means the file will take up one layer of the project, its the simplest form of import.
Keep files from photoshop in the same file as your After Effects Work.

If you drag your file down to the time line it will automatically centre in your frame.

We can work with layers in Photoshop which we can work with separately in After Effects.
When you import it, import it as composition. To open it double click on it.

Any After Effects project can have many compositions within them.

If you select all layers at the same time you can set start points for all of them at once.

Each layer has its own centre point, they don't retain character spacing as it does on the composition selection. As you can see here-

Importing Illustrator artwork unti After Effects-

You set up your Illustrator file like on Photoshop.

Illustrator artwork is vectored artwork so it can be scaled and won't pixilate, however when it is imported into After Effects it rasterises and becomes pixilated.