Begin with compositions - After Effects Tutorial

- The composition is where everything happens in After Effects. But what does that even mean? It can be anything you want to make with still and moving visuals and sound, but it happens in a frame with specific dimensions over a specific period of time in a specific number of frames per second. I emphasize and repeat that word specific because compositions are incredibly flexible in terms of what you can actually do in them, but they have a few basic rules that we'll explore here in the context of playing with what's possible. First, let's look at an existing project to get you an idea of a few things you can do with compositions. Believe it or not, this example is one I will show you how to create by the end of this course. (upbeat music) So that was the composition. We were watching it in the composition viewer, which was full-screen. It is also down here in my timeline. This is the composition timeline with a layer stack and a time indicator. It lets you scrub through it. And the composition is also up here in the project panel. You see a little icon that looks like a filmstrip. Notice there are other filmstrip icons up here. So, if we didn't need multiple compositions at times, then we wouldn't have them at all. We would just work in a timeline and in a frame. And what they do is allow you to mostly solve workflow problems and keep things organized. We'll be getting into the specific uses of compositions later in the course. For now, I just want to give you an idea of a couple of the basics and where you can get into trouble if you're not aware of these fundamentals. So here's the footage that was used to create this first shot. And if I look at the top of the project panel, it has the dimensions 1920 by 1080, and the frame rate 23.976. If I look at this composition, it also has those same dimensions and frame rate, and that's good, and that's basically what you want. Let me show you what happens if you mess with that. And to do that, I will work with this pre-comp. This is the one with the cyclist and the text. Now, to open the pre-comp, I don't twirl it down. This is not Photoshop. And so the pre-comp is actually going to open up in a separate tab, which you see here. I'll zoom in and just go frame by frame through here using the page-down key, and you can see that the time indicator and the key frames are perfectly lined up right now. So now I'm going to change the frame rate, which is something you probably never want to do after you've started working with a comp. I'm going to change it to something weird. Here are all the standard frame rates, and I'm going to change it to 3.3. And now, as I go frame by frame through here, the time indicator no longer lines up, but if I play it, the timing is still the same. It's just more stair-steppy in the playback. So After Effects lets seconds rule, and frames per second are relative. If I go back to the main comp, all of the original frames are still visible. There's an extra step I would need to take to tell After Effects that I actually meant to make it a different frame rate. But meanwhile, if I set more key frames over here, they're going to be kind of messed up because they're now going to be off in time. So you really don't want to get into that. Now, let's also just take a look at what happens if instead I change the height of the comp. So I'm going to shorten it to 800 pixels high. Now, if I go to the main comp, it is actually cropped, and I can look at the checkerboard here to see that. So in this case, After Effects assumed that I actually meant to do that. And again, if I didn't mean to, then that would be a problem. So I think you get the basic idea there. Let's now look at these controls in the comp viewer before we go. I'll just undo that again. So there are a lot of controls here, and many of them don't get used very often. For example, over here is a whole menu of controls just for VR. The thing to know about all of these controls is that they're all for previewing. They don't directly influence what you see on output. So I can change the resolution here, and I might do that to get faster playback. So I'm going to quarter resolution, and that's going to render faster. And I zoomed in with my scroll wheel on my mouse, but I can also use this control to, say, fit the frame, and I can even tie the two together by saying Auto here. So if I zoom out at one third, it's showing half res. If I go to 25%, it's at quarter res, et cetera. So resolution and size are two things you'll probably be adjusting the most here, and a lot of the other controls will come into play as you need them and as you learn more. So in summary, compositions are where the action happens. They're made up of at least one layer and typically many, and those are found in the timeline. So that's where we'll focus next.