From the course: After Effects Weekly

Magic switcher - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Weekly

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Magic switcher

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- [Instructor] Hello and welcome to After Effects Weekly. Today, I want to share and name your own price script by Igloo Creative House from Tel-Aviv, that can help you to work faster in After Effects, by turning on and off layer styles effect and adjustment layers with a single click. Now you can find this script at the address you see on screen. And as I mentioned, it is, "Name your own price script." So you can donate the suggested $5 or more, or even get it for free. Now after downloading the script, you will need to copy it to the script UI panels folder in your After Effect installation. I already did it on my end. So I'll switch back to After Effects, and I'm going to use this motion graphics project made by Don Home to demonstrate it. This project is a promo for a high-tech company, that among other things, offers a unique livestream platform to help online trading. All right, I'm going to pause the playback over here, and I'm going to go to this composition, the blue one, I'll double click to open it. And as you can see, After Effects it's going to take its time to render it. So every time I'm going to move my current time indicator, it needs to work on all the layers to refresh them. And the reason is because we have some adjustment layers, some effect, and obviously we also have some layer styles. So to make After Effects a bit more responsive and faster when you interact and design and animate those compositions, I'll go to the Window menu and then scroll over here until I'll see Magic Switcher. This is going to show three big buttons which are going to allow you to disable and enable layer styles, layer effects and adjustment layers. So let's start by switching off the adjustment layers, and then also let's turn off the layer effects as well as the layer styles. Now, obviously, the appearance looks a little bit different, but if I'll scrub the timeline here, everything is much more faster, snappier, and I can actually work on the design and the animation. I can concentrate on the main things, which is moving those layers. When I'm ready, I can switch on back the adjustment layers, and of course all the other stuff, and I will get my final look. Now, if you click on the info button over here, you'll have some more options. So you can ignore locked layers, ignore shy layers, or you can even take this one, which will allow you to apply the script only to selected layers when they are selected. Also, you can read the instructions here and see more tools from the same developer. So this is it. A simple tool that will help you to fine tune your styling to the max without thinking of how it's going to affect the animation process. Once you're done with the animation, you can turn all the effects and layer styles back on, and your beautiful compositions are ready for render.

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