SOHO EDITORS
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ABOVE Text and shapes are two of the most common elements to use
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3 Composition Once you’ve loaded and organised
your media, you can then create a new composition and choose preset settings, like 1920x1080, and your choice of frame rate and duration. You can also customise presents tomake your own unique setting, such as 1080x1080 for social media, like Instagram, or something insane, like 8000x1200 for projecting onto a building or during live events that don’t have to fit to a particular format. All these setting can be changed later if needed, but the best practice is to always start the composition at the size, duration and frame rate you intend to deliver at. When you’ve created a composition, the timeline will become active and the CompositionWindowwill be blank, waiting for you to get started. Layers You can start by working with just about any image file in the composition, or you can create an image fromnothing using some of the After Effects layers including: 4 Text. As you’d imagine, this allows you to create text you can stylise and animate. 5 Solid. Which is the simplest of layers, creating a layer of filled colour. 6 Shape. Amore complex layer that can contain shapes of different types and colour.
RIGHT Solid is a simple layer, and you can choose colours easily
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“There are loads of effects that can be added fromvariousmenus, but the easiest way is to start by using the Effects &Presets window”
layer, you simply select the heading of the effect in the Effects Controls and copy, then select the layer you wish to apply it to in the timeline and paste. While After Effects handles working in 3D, a lot of the time the trick is cheating the effect using 2D effects, as that usually gives quicker and simpler result. You can add a Drop Shadow to create distance, Bevel Alpha to give the edges of layers the appearance of being raised, Blur to add depth, and lighting effects, like CC Vignette, to create a subtle hot spot on layers. When you have several effects added to a single layer, they get stacked up in the Effects Controls with the top one added first, and the subsequent effects are added after. However, you can change the ordering of these at any time, as some effects will give better results before or after other effects. The FX button to the top left of the name of the effect allows you to toggle the individual layer on and off. For Photoshop and Illustrator designers, you oftenmake elements like these in those applications, and then import them into After Effects. But for everyone else, simplified tools from Illustrator and Photoshop are built in, so you can accomplish simple effects in one application. Of course, what we really want to do in After Effects is to get stuffmoving. 8 Timeline The timeline is the place wheremost of the movement is going to be controlled. Each layer has a series of buttons and switches, somemore useful than others.
7 Effects There are loads of effects that can be added fromvarious menus, but the easiest way to start is by using the Effects & Presets window on the right-hand side, where they are broken down into categories and can be searched for. Familiar effects for other Adobe app users, like Gaussian Blur, Levels, Curves, Lumetri Color, can all be found here. As soon as you select an effect, drag and drop it onto the chosen layer, which will then prompt the settings for that effect to pop-up in the Effects Controls panel, above the Project Panel. The individual parameters can now be changed and tweaked. If you like the results and want to apply the same effect with the same settings to another
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WINTER 2019 PRO MOVIEMAKER
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