The language of After Effects - After Effects Tutorial

- There are a few terms common to After Effects, Motion Graphics and video, you may hear me use in this course. Here's an overview before we get into specifics throughout the rest of the course. First up, the timeline. The timeline is not only the heart of After Effects it is truly the applications killer app. It's where you build up a composition, what you might think of as a shot or a sequence by creating layers and determining timing. Like a Photoshop file, an after effects comp can have a nearly unlimited number of layers and like Premiere Pro, their settings correspond to specific timing. Properties. Layers in the timeline have what are called properties. These are specific values of one type or another often numbers but also text, color, something as simple as an on off button or more rarely something that can't be quantified by any of those such as a value selected from a list. Keyframes have a long history in animation. In the early days of Disney, keyframes were first drawn by the lead animator to show the most significant moment. The top of a leap, the depth of a crouch, the point of impact and junior artists would add the in-between frames. In After Effects, keyframes give the software specific settings at specific moments in time and it computes any needed in between information for any keyframeable property. Timecode is more or less what you probably think it is. The timing of a specific frame of video. It represents one fraction of one second as hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. Typical frame rates are 24, 25 or 30 frames per second, but to adhere with old television standards for sinking with sound in the United States, you'll often see 29.97 frames per second, instead of 30 and 23.976 instead of 24. Render. As you probably know, applications that create moving images typically require you to render footage. This is simply writing a copy say quick time or H264 that doesn't depend on the application to play it back. Codec and format. Like still images, digital video files exist in multiple formats. And most of those formats also allow you to determine the amount of compression applied to the moving image. Some formats such as QuickTime can include lossless compression, which makes for big files that are difficult for the system to play back in real time. Popular compression formats such as H.264, compress videos so that it can be easily transferred and played back on any device that supports video, even your phone. Alpha channel. Also comment to still images the alpha channel is a fourth channel besides red, green, and blue, that determines the opacity of a pixel. It is used to create transparency and hold selections. You may not think about this channel much in Photoshop or Illustrator, but After Effects relies on this channel as the selection for each layer. There are more terms common to After Effects, but rather than overwhelm you, I just want to familiarize you a little bit with the most common ones. Once you see them in action and you'll have a better idea of what they actually do.