ACADEMY SOHO EDITORS
EDITING TIPS
Top editing house Soho Editors explains how to get to grips with the world’s most popular motion graphics software
WORDS JOHN WILLIAMS IMAGES SOHO EDITORS
W hen Adobe After Effects hit the market back in the late nineties, it was like opening the wardrobe to Narnia. It opened up a whole new world of creative possibilities. At that time, I was creating a short stop-motion animated film, and I needed to fix a few issues that occurred during the filming. After a hands-on tutorial on the basics and a lot of playing around, I discovered the new Adobe programme had more power than I could imagine. Eventually, I ended up using After Effects for several other scenes to enhance shots and began to get deeper into this wonderful new world. Today, After Effects is the single most popular tool for creating motion graphics and visual effects, and it has come a long way in the past 30 years. But it can appear complicated. So, here is how to get started with the latest Adobe After Effects. How to get started in After Effects Understanding either Adobe Photoshop or Premiere Pro is not essential, but it will definitely help. And if you have used both, you are off to a flying start. After Effects is basically Photoshop meets Premiere Pro, on steroids! That’s all the power of layers, masks and effects from Photoshop, plus the tools and timeline controls from Premiere Pro, with a whole lot more.
1 The After Effects interface On the left-hand side, we have the Project Panel. This is where we load in our files. After Effects accepts nearly all popular file formats: TIFs, PNG, JPGs, PDFs, PSDs, MOVs, MP4s and nearly all native and Raw camera formats. When you import files into the Project Panel, you are creating a link to the original file, not actually copying the files into your project, so the After Effects project files are usually very small; only a fewmegabytes. 2 Organising your files As with editing software, when you’ve loaded in your images, footage andmusic, you can organise it into folders. The same is true for After Effects and it helps you keep track of what content you have at a glance.
BELOW The interface and file structure are reasonably familiar to users of any Adobe software
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PRO MOVIEMAKER WINTER 2019
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