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One of After Effects' strengths is that you don't have to pre-render anything: All of your sources, layers, and manipulations are “live” all the time, allowing you to make unlimited changes. However, calculating everything all the time can slow down both your work and your final render. Newer versions of After Effects have gotten much better about internally caching the results of comps and frames it calculates (especially if you enable Preferences > Memory & Cache > Enable Disk Cache), but you will still find yourself spending a lot of time waiting.

After Effects features a variety of settings that control importing files, opening multiple compositions, previewing audio, the appearance and interactivity of the program, plus numerous other details. In this chapter, we'll give an overview of what these settings mean and what they do, highlighting those settings that we find aid our efficiency.

Reality is fine, but it's not always what you want. Sometimes you need a captured movie to play back more quickly, more slowly, or backward, or to stop altogether. After Effects has options to Time Stretch a clip, which gives it a new constant speed, or Time Remap it, which allows the speed to change over time. Both often result in staggered motion compared with the original clip, so at the end of this chapter we will discuss Frame Blending which can help smooth out the result.

The Vector Paint effect has been largely made obsolete by the new Paint tools in After Effects, but it still has its fans for a couple of reasons: Vector Paint offers an onion skin mode plus the ability to wiggle the paint stroke paths, with no loss in quality.

After Effects can be thought of as a blank canvas - a canvas that comes with hundreds of brushes and tools to create images with. The problem with blank canvases and too many tools is that it can be hard to know where to start. Therefore, in this first chapter we want to give you an overview of the After Effects user interface, including ideas of how to rearrange it to better suit your needs from task to task. Just as important, we want to give you an idea of how After Effects “thinks” - how projects are structured, how to import sources, and how everything comes together. You won't learn to paint quite yet, but at least you'll know which end of the brush to hold before you move forward.

You may have heard the expression “painting with light”; it's an appropriate description of what After Effects lets you do. You can illuminate layers, add colored casts to them, overlight them to add intensity or blow them out, vignette them, have them cast shadows… even cause layers to project their own images onto other layers. All of this comes with a price, of course: Lights are one of the deepest subjects in After Effects. We'll start with some basic concepts, progress through adjusting illumination and shadows, and end with advanced techniques such as creating virtual gels and gobos.

One of the richest areas for exploration in After Effects is its “effects” side. The variety of effects supplied with After Effects ranges from the extremely utilitarian to the extremely wild, each with anywhere from one to 127 parameters that you can adjust. Fortunately, virtually all effects share the same basic methods of adjusting and animating those parameters.

Real 3D programs have several advantages over After Effects: For example, their objects have real depth, and the texturing and lighting options are far more advanced. However, this power often comes with a significant speed penalty, which can be a problem when accommodating client changes. After Effects is also the better tool in which to refine the final look of your 3D worlds. Offloading portions of the work from your 3D program to After Effects will save time while giving you more power and flexibility - but it requires some effort to set up.

After Effects has never made audio one of its strong points. If you need to seriously rework a soundtrack, do it in a dedicated audio program. But if you just need to edit, mix, and do some basic improvement or “sweetening” to your sound track, After Effects already has the tools you need.

The previous chapter was devoted to Track Mattes: having one layer create transparency for one other layer. Stencils, however, create transparency for all layers underneath. You can use a layer's luminance or alpha channel as a stencil, and invert it as well. This chapter also covers the Preserve Transparency switch, and an obscure but useful mode called Alpha Add.

Not all footage items look best full screen. And not all come with their own alpha channels to block out the parts you don't want to see. Therefore, we often use masks to “cut out” the alpha channels we require. You can create masks in a variety of ways: You can draw a path using the mask tools in either the Layer or Comp panel, specify the dimensions numerically, or paste a path created in Illustrator or Photoshop.

N o layer or composition is an island – at least, not in complex animations. In this lesson, you will learn how to group layers and build composition hierarchies, making it easier to create and manage complex animations. First up will be parenting, where one layer's animation can influence that of others. After that we'll work with nesting and precomposing compositions: ways to bundle together layers, keyframes, and effects into one comp and treat the result as a single layer in another comp.

I n the first two lessons, we focused on animating the properties of layers. However, your sources may have built-in animation of their own – namely, the frame-to-frame movement inside a video clip. Therefore, we're going to spend a good portion of this lesson showing how to move a clip in time, edit its in and out points, and work with its frame rate and ability to loop. From there, we'll move onto combining clips using Blending Modes – the “secret sauce” that creates rich, deeply layered looks. We'll end by showing alternate ways to work with effects, including using Adjustment Layers and taking advantage of Animation Presets.

F rom opening titles to closing credits, bullet points to lower thirds, and conveying information to creating abstract backgrounds, one of the most common elements in motion graphics is the use of text. Fortunately, After Effects has a very powerful text engine – but it's hardly the most intuitive tool in the world. In this lesson, we'll show you how to professionally typeset text, then animate it in interesting ways.

I n this lesson, you will become acquainted with two admittedly mind-bending areas of After Effects. First we will cover expressions, which can help you save time while animating. After you master those, we will show you how to make time literally stand still – as well as speed up, slow down, and go by more smoothly.

I n this lesson, you will work through a number of easy exercises to help build your animation skills. Along the way, you will become familiar with working in the After Effects Graph Editor, applying Keyframe Assistants, and taking maximum advantage of a layer's Anchor Point. We'll also show you advanced tricks such as using Motion Sketch to hand-draw your animation path, using Roving Keyframes to maintain smooth speed changes over complex paths, the best approach for “motion control” style movements, and the crucial component needed to create “slam down” animations.

L ife is easy when you can capture everything to tape or film exactly the way you want it. But reality often intervenes: Maybe the camera shook too much. Or maybe it wasn't possible to have the actors perform in front of the exact background required. Maybe you couldn't get a license to blow up that building in real life, or shoot arcs of electricity across a canyon.

A fter Effects CS3 Professional (also known as Version 8) introduces several new features aimed specifically at animators and motion graphics artists. You'll play with three of them here: Brainstorm, the Puppet tool, and Shape layers.

After Effects offers a set of paint tools for painting directly on layers. You can use vector-based paint tools accessed from a pair of dedicated panels to retouch footage and create animated graphical elements, plus use cloning to remove unwanted elements and replicate areas of a layer. The brush strokes are non-destructive. Individual brush, clone and eraser strokes can be edited and animated in the Timeline.

I n this lesson, we will be focusing on different ways to create transparency. One of the keys to creating an interesting composite of multiple images is to make portions of those images transparent, so that you can see other images behind or through them. This is one of the main techniques that set motion graphic design and visual effects compositing apart from video editing.

3 D Space is one of the most rewarding areas to explore in After Effects. A simple switch allows each layer to move in the Z dimension – closer to and farther away from the viewer – in addition to left and right. Layers may also be rotated in 3D, which gives the ability to view them from new angles. You can selectively add cameras and lights to a composition, allowing you to cast shadows and move around your imaginary 3D world.

T hroughout this book, you've been learning features in After Effects through a series of short exercises. In this final lesson, you will create a complex single project containing multiple elements and compositions: You will animate a character, and then set him in a 3D world.