How To Start Adobe After Effects CC for Beginners in 2020

After Effects is that Premiere Pro is more like a hub it's where you'rebuilding an entire story right and After Effects is used to create differentcompositions parts ofthe final video that you'll build in Premiere Pro so forexample if you want to create some cool 3d animating text you would create acomposition and After Effects and youwould pull that composition into PremierePro and it's one part of the entire video that you're building in PremierePro so I use After Effects all the time I'm the PremiereGal as a lot of youguys know me as but I also create lots of tutorial and After Effects AdobeAudition Photoshop and everything because the truth is you need touse allof these Adobe Creative Cloud apps to produce your video if you use theCreative Cloud video software so in this tutorial I'm basically just going togive you an overviewof all the tools in After Effects that you need to knowabout and I'm gonna do a little demo of how to create a cinemagraph in AfterEffects because I alwaysthink it's good to have something practical the you guyscan follow along and show you how to do something concrete and it'll help youunderstand how to use the tools betterso let's jump in After Effects and let'sget started.By default when you opened up Adobe After Effects you will get a startwindow just click on a new project and it will default to an untitled projectto saveit just go to file save as and then save as again and save it to yourproject folder I'll give it a name After Effects demo now you can seethat theproject has its new name up at the top now it's time to import any assets thatyou might use in your project such as videos music photos illustrator orevenPhotoshop files there are multiple ways that you can import your assets you cango to file and import or you can just hit command I or control I on aPC toopen up the import dialog box another way to import is just by dragging thefiles directly into your project panel from your folder it's really easy to dobut myfavorite way to import is just to double click in the project panel hereand it opens up the import file dialog boxso here you can import pretty much any typeof file and I'm going to import avideo file and a photo file these files I got from Envato elements where you candownload unlimited photo stock video video templates anddesign assets for aslow as $16.50 per month so once you have all of your files inside of the projectwindow here you can also organize them you can create foldersfor each categoryof asset if you like so let's go ahead and click on this folder icon and let'screate a new folder for video and let's also create another folderfor photosthen you can drag each type of file into the corresponding folder I'd alsorecommend creating a folder for compositions which brings us to the nexttopic how to set upyour first composition if you're a user of PremierePro a composition is like your sequence your timeline so just click on this iconhere and this will enable you to createyour first composition I'm going tochoose a composition dimension here in this dialog box of 1920 by 1080 which isHD and 30 frames per second you can also choose thedefault background color aswell another way to create a composition is simply by right-clicking on any assetfrom your project panel for example if you want to add a video italso gave the comp the name of the assetitself so if you select this comp and you hit enter you can rename it toanything that you want the same worksfor any asset you choose here in theproject panel just hit enter and you can rename it to anything that you want soI'm going to call this composition Comp 1 by doing it this way it'll also makethis composition the exact duration of the video clip itself so if you need tochange the duration of your composition just right-clickon the comp tab hereand select composition settings and here you can type in a new time code next toduration so if you want it to be 10 seconds wecan just replace this to be10 and so now I'm going to illustrate how to create a cinemagraph inthis demo to give you an introduction to adding assets to yourcomp how to movelayers how to create masks how to create stills from your video add effects andanimate layers and lastly I'll show you approaches to exporting your finaleffect sowhat is a cinemagraph well a cinemagraph is the type of gif it's alooping piece of movement but it only isolates a portion of movement in theimage so for examplewith this video clip here if I hit the spacebar you cansee it's a shot of tea being poured and what we can do is we can freeze thebackground andjust isolate the movement of the tea pouring out of the spout sohere is a composition with the final product in it and you can see that wewere able toachieve the effect where the teapot is frozen as well as thebackground and just the tea is moving so the first step is to isolate just theportion of the clipwe want to create the cinemagraph from so to do that weneed to scrub through and find a moment of the shot about a second or so wherethe tea spoutis moving at a minimum we don't want too much movement happeningor else it'll be too noticeable when we create the mask later on and you willsee so once youfind this moment here I think that this part is the stillest outof all portions what we can do is we can pull the layer back here to meet thisnewpoint and then we can move the entire layer to the beginning of thecomp so it starts at this new point then we can move this handle here to endatthe moment we want it to loop in this handle you will see that there's two ofthem here this is our work area and if we hit the spacebar toplay it back it'sonly looping that one second that we isolated in this work area and thereason for that is if you go to preview and you see this loopbutton here isturned on if you turn that off you will play it back and you'll only see it playonce so if we turn that back on it is loopingagain andwe want this to be looping on because gifts are looping in movement so it'seasier to see how it looks in the final product if that is turned onso we haveour background video in the shot but now we need to make a still image of theshot which will be placed in our background below this layer andthen Iwill show you how to create a mask so first let's scrub the playhead to thevery beginning of the video clip and if you toggle down you will findtransformtools so you can change the scale of the clip using this control you can alsochange the videos position if you move the x coordinate or the y coordinate youcanalso adjust the opacity if you want it to be more transparent or you canrotate the image if you like and there of course are keyboard shortcuts for allof thesefor example if you select the layer and you hit S it'll just show youthe scale so you can easily adjust the scale this way and you can also hitPand I'll show you the position controls if you hit T it'll show you transparencyand if you hit R it'll show you rotation so every asset that you use anAfterEffects has these transform tools and it's something that you should know thatit's always there so now that we have our clip in its new transform state thatwe want nowwe need to make our still image of the background so let's makesure that the playhead is at the beginning of the clip because that's thefirst frame that we wantto make is still from and now the layer selectedwe're going to go up to composition save frame as and then file and what thiswill do is it'll add itinto a JPG so I'mgoing to change mine to PNG file so let's save it here into our media folderso now what we can do is we can drag thisPNG file into our project panel andonce it's here we can drag the PNG beneath the video file in ourcomposition and you can see here that these layers work justlike Photoshopthe layer at the top we'll always be seen on the top in thecomposition window here and if I turn the video layer off you will just seethe stillimage of the video beneath it so what we need to do next is justisolate the movement of the tea pouring out of the video layer above so let'sturn onthe video layer again and now we can zoom in to the tea spout using the Zkey on our keyboard and zoom in to the tea. if you press H you can use the handtool to reposition it in the center of the frame now we will use the pen toolhere to begin drawing a maskaround the tea to start the mask just click to createyour first point and then you can click again to create your first line of themask and if the coloris too hard to see with the current video that you'reworking with you can change the color of the mask just toggle down from the layerand then from masks justclick on the color and choose a new color that's easyto see so I'll choose a red color now continue to draw your mask and a tipthat I have isthat if you click and you hold out a new point it'll make a curvedpath and this is something that you can practice and get better and better at soI'mjust going to continue to make points and draw around the liquid parthere and then to close off the mask to finish it just click on the first pointthat youmade so we now have our new mask but as we play it back you will seethat the background for the most part is still but we need to movethe mask pathto fit the movement of the liquid so we need to animate it then from underneathmask on this layer we need to hit the stopwatch button to beginanimating themask path okay and this will create our first keyframe and now we can move ourplayhead and to see where we need to modify the mask so if westart to seethat the liquid moves a little bit what we can do is we can click on mask andthen we can use the pen tool to adjust the maskpath to move with the movementof the liquid and then let's keep doing that so let'sscrub ahead and let's move the mask path again until we don't see the backgroundphotoin the shot and the path moves nicely with the liquid so once you'redone doing that what we can do is add a little bit of feathering here so themaskis less noticeable so now when we play it back it's just a looping shot ofliquid being poured from the tea so if you want to add some color correctionon tophere or create some cool effects what we can do is right click in the comp tocreate an adjustment layer so this created an adjustment layer just makesure tomove this adjustment layer on top of both eclipses in our currentcomposition so that way any effects we apply to it will affect all the clipsbeneath it so next let'sgo up to the effects panel here and you can searchfor any effects to put onto this adjustment layer and if you do not seeyour effects panel be sure togo up to window and open it up so for exampleAfter Effects has a ton of free cool creative image presets so from the imagecreative folder I'm going to pullin any of these looks on the adjustment layeruntil I find one that I like the most so I'm going to try this look here and Ireally like it andit's applying the filter to both the still the still imageas well as the video in my composition so everything looks great and if youwant to export this as agif this is how you do it go to file > export and add toAdobe Media encoder queue you can also add to render queue but it's easier togo toAdobe Media encoder queue because you can open up more settings to playaround with and just as a reminder this will only export the render comp workarea that we haveselected now this export will appear in AdobeMedia encoder and from format you want to click on this and what this will dois it will open up a new exportdialog box and if you've used Premiere Probefore this will be familiar to you because it's the exact same one and thisis where you can select a new format suchas the animated gif in our case andwe can also give it a new output name and save it in the correct locationand if you need to change the sizeof your final export let's say you exportit and it's too big of a file and you want it to be a smaller file size youcan reduce the dimensions ofour gif here from the video tab so to do that ifyou want to cut it in half in this area here next to 1920 you just hit slash totodivide it in half and then this will export now at half resolution so thenhit OK and then be sure to hit the green play button from encoder to startexportingand now we have our awesome cinemagraph so that is my introductionto Adobe After Effects if you have any other Adobe After Effects.