let's start a new composition. There's multiple ways to do everything in after effects. Usually there's a button in the interface, there's often a keyboard shortcut, which you can get to if you go to help and then click on keyboard shortcuts. This will take you to the adobe website which has shortcuts for both Mac and pc users, which is really helpful. And then lastly there might be a menu option up here in the top. So if you go to composition, for example, you'll see the new composition button which will also show you the keyboard shortcut. I'm using a Mac so it's going to be command n or just click this button down here in the project panel. This brings up your composition settings window. Remember think of this as an individual video or maybe an individual clip that you're working on. You can always rename this later. But for example, I would just call this after effects one. You can name it whatever you want. Then you have all of your sequence settings under the basic settings, you...

have different presets. So if you're using a particular type of camera or footage, you would just select this one of these presets. For example, a lot of videos that I create. I'm shooting at 1920 by 1080 pixels. This is what you your standard HD footage is And I shoot at 29.97 frames per second. So I could find one of those presets that matches those settings such as this one. HD tv 10 18 29. that changes the width and height to match that. It also changes the frame rate down here and you can customize this stuff for yourself. For example, if you want to create a square graphic for example if you're putting on social media like facebook or instagram which like square graphics, you can just click in the width or the height and type in the pixels that you want. So if we want a square we can do 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels and that would work fine. Typically your pixel aspect ratio should just be left at square. If you run into an issue or if someone wants you to do it differently, you would select these but for most of the projects you're using just leave it at square next. You have your basically your timeline window options. The duration is an important one. This can also be changed later but this is where you set the duration of your composition which is different than again referring to premiere pro where if you start a new sequence, it can basically be as long as the video you add, you can keep adding clips. It can start out as a minute. But then as you add more clips It turns into two minutes, 10 minutes an hour. With After effects you set the duration in the beginning. So if you want a clip Or an animation to be five seconds long then you would set it as five seconds long. Like it shows here If you need it to be 10 seconds you would change this to 10 seconds. For example, this can also be changed later but it's good to start out with something shorter like so background color. This is the background of the composition. This just depends on how you want it to look. While you're editing. This doesn't actually change the background of the video itself. We'll be showing you how to add a background color in a future lesson. This is just think of it as the transparent background so that you can work in your project. Some people like a white background just to see what that looks like. Typically I'm just going to leave it as black when you're happy. Just click OK. And now you can see two things happen. One in our project tab. Over here we have this composition and then down here our timeline has sort of opened up and you can adjust your timeline to zoom in and out. You can see now that our timeline goes from zero seconds, 25 seconds. And then you have the frames in between 10 frames 20 frames then one second to zoom in. You can take this top bar the time Navigator and zoom in by dragging to the left or right. There's also this little slider at the very bottom for you to drag in and out and that allows you to zoom in and out. You can also use the plus or minus keys on your keyboard. Just a few more things about your composition panel down here at the bottom. You have different ways to adjust the view on the left, you have this percentage. This will depend on the resolution of your screen, you can zoom in According to a percentage and this will zoom into your composition at that percentage. So if you just want to set it at a smaller percentage, you can choose like 25%. So this is Moving your 100% resolution composition and shrinking it to 25%. If you want it to just match the size of this panel, You can choose fit up to 100 and now you can adjust the panel size by clicking on the edge and dragging upward down. And this is helpful because oftentimes I'll find myself adjusting the size of these panels so that I have more room in the timeline for example, and that way the video or the composition adjust while I change that panel. The other thing I want to mention right now is this resolution right now I have it set for full and this is the playback resolution, not necessarily the export resolution of your video and this helps if your computer is a little bit slower. Oftentimes my after effects students asked my computer is running slow. It's it's lagging the video, it plays back choppy, How do I make it play back smoothly? Usually the issue is that you don't have enough memory or RAM processing power in your computer. I recommend at least 16 gigabytes of RAM on a Mac. You can see that information by clicking the apple button and clicking about this Mac and you can probably find a similar setting on your pc as well in your computer settings. So here you can see that my memory is GB right here. Even still when I'm using with using high resolution footage like 4K footage, I do get a little bit of playback lag and so to fix that, we can actually decrease the resolution of our playback. This will play back at a lower resolution. So you're seeing a little bit lack of quality but that's better than having a choppy playback. In my opinion, the last thing I want to talk about right now with this composition panel is this button right here, which is the toggle transparency grid button. So see if I click that you get this checkerboard view when you see the checkerboard think transparent. So if you actually wanted to export this video right now with transparency, what you would get is just a blank video with nothing. It wouldn't even be a black background even though the background of our video is set to black. Remember what I talked about in the composition settings which you can get back to if you go to composition composition settings or command K on your keyboard. See the background color is black. If I set this at white, for example, click OK. And then click OK. If I click the transparency grid button again, it still shows that it's a transparent background. We're going to see how this comes to play when we create graphics like titles and we want to put them on to other videos in the future. But just know that you can click this button to see what in your composition is transparent. That's the basics of starting new compositions. In the next lesson, we're going to be importing graphics into our project panel and then we're going to be moving on and actually working with our composition and adding new layers.

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Philip Ebiner

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Starting a New Composition

Starting a New Composition

Lesson Info

3. Starting a New Composition

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