let's talk about our layer properties to do that. I'm going to delete this red circle but I'm also going to just leave this blue circle on and our photo, I'm just going to extend this one to the left and extend this one to the right. You'll see that when we created the shape layer that we automatically have some of these options already opened the contents and the ellipse option and the transform menu. Every layer has the transform menu. So if I go into our kangaroo layer and I click this drop down button, you see this transform menu that pops up to open up this menu. All we have to do is click this little drop down and you'll see all of the transform properties, anchor point, position, scale rotation and opacity. These are transform properties for every single after effects layer. We already looked at scale. This is how you scale up or down a layer, anchor point. We already kind of saw that with the pan behind tool. This is just the representation of it in pixels based off of where it...

is on your composition here. So if I take my pan behind tool and then I click on the anchor point and I move it around. You can see that it actually moves the anchor point numbers down in the timeline back with my selection tool. If I move this photo around my composition now you can see that the position is also changing. We can also change these things just by clicking and dragging these numbers here in our timeline or by clicking the number and actually putting in the exact number that we want. So if we want this to be at 100% scale we can put in 100%. If we wanted to be at 25%, You'll see 2%ages for the scale and that's the width and the height percentage. And these are typically locked which you can see with this little link icon which is the constrained proportions option. If I want to be able to edit the scale of the width and height individually, I can click on that to unlock it and now I can stretch this photo with the different scale for width and height. So you can see this is also scaling from the anchor point. So it's scaling from this point. And you'll also notice that I can go negative and so when I go negative it actually flips the image if you wanted to flip exactly from the center. An easy way to put the anchor point in the exact center is to hold the command and shift buttons down. And you can see now as I drag the pan behind tool around, you see these crosshairs pop open and this helps you and it kind of locks the anchor point to the center horizontal and the vertical center lines if we want it to be in the center we can drag it and it snaps to the center. Now you can see if we flip the scale. It flips exactly from the center of the image which makes it a little bit easier, we have rotation which we also saw before with the rotation tool. If we rotate that changes that. And then the other thing we didn't see is opacity. So this is the transparency of this layer also known as opacity 100% opaque means that it's fully there. None of it is transparent. If we put it down to say 50% and then we toggle on the transparency of this composition, you'll see that there is some transparency. I say we move this kangaroo above are blue circle and then we turn on our blue circle again. Now we can see the blue circle behind our kangaroo. That's because we're at 50% opacity for this photo layer. I can turn off the toggle transparency grid and you can still see that this circle is behind this photo layer. So let's bring that back up to 100%. All of these transformed properties have their own keyboard shortcut and by the end of this course you will be well aware and fluent in using them. So for anchor point it's a for position, it's P for scale, it's s for rotation, it's our and for opacity, can you guess what it is? It's actually not? Oh which would make so much sense but it's actually t which you can think of as transparency. So with any of these layers selected, you can bring up those different properties and if you want to quickly close down this layer instead of just clicking this triangle button which is relatively fast. But I think keyboard shortcuts make everything faster. You can use any of those buttons for example s to bring up scale. And then when you press s again it closes down the scale property so none of them are open T t again closes it down. You can also select multiple layers in your timeline by shift clicking them or by control clicking them or command clicking on a Mac. And then you can bring up any of the properties together. So scale T. For opacity A for anchor point and so on and so forth. So if I drop this down and open it up again for the kangaroo image, we've gone through all of the transform properties in the shape layer. You'll see that you have your transform properties but you also have this contents dropdown. This is different for shape layers And you'll see this with shape layers, you won't see the contents for layers like photos. And here is actually the ellipse. And let me turn off our kangaroo so we can see the lips. This is the lips shape that we created in this layer. The confusing part is that we can create multiple shaped within this one layer, we're gonna be going over shapes in much more depth in the future. But let me just quickly take the lips tool with this layer selected if I click and drag you can see that I'm creating another circle. It doesn't create a separate layer, it creates another ellipse within the contents of this one shape layer. So if I turn this on and off it's both of those shapes in one and underneath this ellipse layer we have more options. We have the ellipse path, the stroke, the fill and transform properties. So there's individual transform properties for each shape layer within this shape layer, confusing. Right? And within these transform properties there's more options for shape layers such as skew which skews a shape or skew access which changes where it skews from confused. I know it is confusing and you're going to learn these things as we go and as we use them. But just note that while all layers have the basic transform properties. Some layers have different properties. For example the mask layer. So let me delete the blue circle which deletes both of those circles we created. Actually let me undo that and show you that you can drop down our contents folder and then if you want to just delete one of these ellipses we can select that. Ellipse and then delete it if you want to delete the whole layer entirely. Just select the layer itself and not the content layer down below and delete. So if I turn on the kangaroo then we create a mask. Do you remember how we did that? We went up and used the shape tool, such as the rounded rectangle tool or the pen tool. Let me show you the polygon tool because that's a good one to know too. With this layer selected now I click and I drag and I have this polygon. It starts out as a pentagon with five points. Now we have this mask which is another option underneath this layer. So if I open up the mask tool we have mask properties, feathers, opacity expansion. All these things you can adjust the same way by clicking and dragging to the right or left or by clicking and inputting a specific number. I think that's a lot to grasp right now. Go ahead and play around with your layers. Play around with your timeline. Play around with all these properties for your different layers. And in the next section we're going to jump right into animating in after effects. It might sound confusing, but once you know the basics of it, it actually is relatively simple. So get comfortable with everything that we've learned in this section so far and I'll see you in the next one

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Layer Properties

Layer Properties

Lesson Info

9. Layer Properties

Lessons

Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates

Understand the After Effects Workspace

Starting a New Composition

CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage

Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline

Using the Basic After Effects Tools

Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors

Working in the Timeline

Layer Properties

Quiz: After Effects Basics

Animating in After Effects

Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations

Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral

Using the Graph Editor

Challenge - Bouncing Ball

Solution - Bouncing Ball

Quiz: Animating with Keyframes

Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects

Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths

Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients

Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag

Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers

Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear

Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers

Easily Reverse Complicated Animations

Playing with Time

Blend Modes

Stabilize Shaky Footage

CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts

CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time

CC 2019 Content Aware Fill

CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates

Quiz: Important After Effects Skills

Intro to Motion Graphics Projects

Clean Lower Third

Logo Reveal Animation Bumper

Colorful Transition

Text with Mask Path Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Weather App 1

Weather App 2

Weather App 3

Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects

Flat Animation Challenge

Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene

Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect

Removing Green Screen Background

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect

Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge

Intro to 3D

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Build Out Your 3D Composition

Animating Our 3D Scene

Create Stars in After Effects

Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)

Using the Rotoscope Tool

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation

Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool

Easy Screen Replacement with Masks

Replacing a Screen Version 2

Screen Replacement with Mocha

CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin

Quiz: Rotoscoping

Using the Puppet Pin Tool

Animating Your Puppet Pins

Animated Blinking Eyes

Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds

CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool

Quiz: Screen Replacements

Applying Text Animation Presets

Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn