ACADEMY
SOHO EDITORS
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ABOVE The timeline controls the movement
“For animation you need to have at least two different keyframes with different values”
RIGHT The Effects & Presets panel is useful
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have two. This is because opacity is a one- dimensional transformation, while position and scale are two-dimensional, with X for horizontal movement and Y for vertical movement. If layers are switched to 3D, which is the last button on the layer, there are three dimensions: X,Y and Z. Z is depth, which is forward and backwardmovement. 10 Keyframe animation To the left of each transformvalue is a stop watch. This is themagic button of time. When you click it, you enable animation and a keyframe, which looks like a diamond, appears wherever the blue playhead is on the timeline. For animation, you need to have at least two keyframes with different values. For example, at the beginning of the timeline, the X scale can be set to 0%. Clicking on the stop watch will place a keyframe. Then moving the playhead down the timeline, the X scale can be changed to 100%, which automatically adds the second keyframe. Be careful to click the stop watch only once. If clicked again, the animation will turn off and reset all the keyframe settings. Play the composition by pressing the space bar on your keyboard, and watch the change in scale. It’s very basic, but this is the building blocks of motion.
The first button looks like an eye, and toggles the visibility of a layer on and off. The second button, a little speaker symbol, toggles the audio (if there is audio on the layer). The third button, a circle, solos a layer, or multiple layers if several have that button selected. The fourth button along, the padlock, locks the layer, preventing it frombeingmoved or altered in any way, including adding effects. The fifth button is the expansion arrow and this is themost important. Clicking this reveals the properties of the layer. Layers can have several different properties depending on the type of layer they are, but all visual layers (ie all layers except audio- only layers) have TransformProperties. Inside Transform, we have access to the mainmovement controls of a layer. These are shown as numbers and can be changed by clicking and dragging left and right, or single clicking and typing in a value. Of course, whenmoving a layer around, it’s oftenmore intuitive to select the layer in the timeline andmove it to the composition view. However, when you do that, you see the numbers in the timeline changing as the position of the layer is recorded in relation to the composition. 9 Some values, like opacity, only have one value. Other, like scale and position,
Later, we will look at the two essential methods tomake your keyframe animation lookmuch better, but for now it’s important to understand how keyframes aremade and what you can do with them. By clicking on a keyframe, it will turn blue, indicating it’s selected. Selected keyframes can bemoved left or right along the timeline; the further the keyframes are apart, the slower themovement and vice versa. Keyframes can also be copied, pasted and deleted. The trick with animation in After Effects is to create as few keyframes as possible, mainly to avoid a lot of work if you have hundreds of keyframes, and you need to tweak timings. 11 Text animation Anothermethod of creating animation is to use presets. These can be found in the Effects & Presets panel. When you expand the Animation Presets, you get a selection of different categories of different pre-created animations. To be honest, many of these are far too retro to be of use this side of the millennium, but the Text category contains hundreds of pre-made text animations you can customise and alter. If you’re looking to create some fast-motion text, this is the best place to start trying out the various presets. Move the playhead to themoment you want the text animation to start, then select the text preset and drag and drop it onto the text layer. If you dragWipe Into Centre and drop it onto text with the playhead, then the text disappears instantly. If you move through the timeline, or just play the composition back, you will see the text appear, wiping from the outside in. This preset contains special animation for each text character. How they are created is a lot more in-depth, but themain thing you need to know at this stage is how to change the timing. With the layer selected, the shortcut ‘U’ uncovers the keyframes. This reveals any keyframes on a layer, and you can now see the two or more keyframes the preset has applied. If themotion is too slow, move the keyframes closer to each other. If you have a lot of text, chances
LEFT The stop watch sets transform time
BELOW The keyframe animation panel
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WINTER 2019 PRO MOVIEMAKER
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