next. Let's look at the timeline. So I have that perfect circle that we created in the last lesson. I'm actually going to turn off the stroke just by changing the pixels to zero and I'm also going to add my kangaroo photo back onto the timeline just dragging it beneath my circle. Cool, so we already learned how to zoom in and out of our timeline just by dragging this top bar or by zooming in down here, you'll also notice that there's this other work area bar. If I press the space button, It's going to play through all five seconds of this composition and you'll see that after effects is automatically set up to just repeat to loop the play. So it's going to continuously keep playing and that's because in after effects often we're creating these little animations and we just want to see it over and over to see how it looks. Instead of having to press the play button over and over. What if we were creating some sort of animation at the very beginning of this and say this is just a basic a...

nimation where our circle pops on Well how do we do that? We can just drag this shape layer over to the right and you'll see that now it's off at this time. And then if we drag through it's on now, that's not really an animation, we're going to be covering how to actually animate things in the next section. So coming right up. But now if I play through this, it's going to Pop on right there, let's make it a little later at 10 frames for example, go back to the start. Okay, play there now, it takes a while for it to go through the five seconds and then go back to the start again. Say we want to zoom in on this timeframe for example, the 1st 2nd more easily take your work area bar and now we can drag this in to one second for example, and you can see that it's highlighted. Now if I take my time indicator and I move it into this work area, then I press the space bar. You can see that it loops the play just for this area of the workspace, which is super beneficial as you create your more intricate graphics. one other use for this. Let me bring back our video clip. So let me bring in this video sample and then a quick way to create a composition based off the size and settings of your actual media asset is just to drag your media asset into the composition button right here, You'll see that it created this video sample composition and then down here it's the right size. So it's the same aspect, it's also the right length, so it's all two minutes and 20 seconds of this video which was a video for another class of mine. Say you have a video clip, but you only want to add graphics to a certain part of it. Say I want to add a title graphic right here between five seconds and 15 seconds. Well I can take my work area bar and I can move this to around five seconds And then I can take the end of it and move it to 15 seconds. And now if I zoom in just with this bar right here and now I have this set up so that my work area is going from six seconds to about 15 seconds and you can see that if I click in the middle of this work space bar, it moves the whole work area to move the end in or out. You have to click on the end of the work area and then drag so that's how you can sort of zoom in and work on a specific part of the clip. What if we want to actually just trim this whole composition to this specific part of the clip because as you're working on this project, you might not even need everything that's to the right of this sort of work area. If you go up to composition then choose trim comp to work area. What happens is is it trims it to that work area that we had set up so now it's just that six seconds to 15. Now we can't go ahead and zoom back out from this. You see that now our zoom bar, if we use this, it just allows us to zoom in and out from that six frame, six seconds to 15 seconds. So that's one thing to note. We can't of course undo this or we can go back to composition and our composition settings and now you'll see that the duration is nine seconds. Say we want this to go for 10 seconds If I put in 10 seconds and then click OK then I zoom out. Okay, here's another thing with your timeline, look what happened at the end of this video clip, you'll see that. Oh, this video clip actually disappears. You can see that there's this little cut point right here and that's because in the previous part we went to composition trimmed to comp to work area. It actually trimmed this media clip or the video clip to the camp area as well. So to extend this, what we can do is just hover over with our mouse over this end of the layer and drag to the right now. If we go through and scrub through this video plays through till the end of our work area. One keyboard shortcut that I like and it's really helpful is the command left or right bracket shortcut for Windows users, it would be control left or right bracket. So if I press command and then I press right bracket with the kangaroo layer selected it actually moves this layer up. I can choose the command left bracket to move it back down. So this is how you can reorder layers just on your keyboard. Alright. That's a lot with the timeline over here on the right, but there's all of these buttons over here on the left and we'll be going over all of these things in future lessons as they become more applicable. But the things I want you to know our first on the very far left is this little eyeball icon and you have these different columns with these buttons where if you check on or off, it includes that little icon. So turn off this layer, which is what the eyeball icon is for. You can just press that eyeball for the layer and it makes it basically disappear. It turns it on or off. We don't have any audio in these clips but we do in the video sample. And that's what this next column is. The audio. And so if you want to turn on or off audio for a specific layer, just turn that audio audio on or off with that column back to our other composition. I'm going to move my time indicator to this point where we have both layers. This next column is to solo layers and this might be more beneficial or easier to understand if we have more layers. So let me duplicate this shape layer. one to quickly duplicate it a layer instead of going up to our shape to one creating another layer, we can select it in our timeline and press command D or control D for you. Windows users or you can also copy and paste by selecting it, pressing command C. And then command V. That's control for Pc users. So from now on, if I ever say command, it's typically going to be controlled for pc users. Sometimes it's different and so you might be confused and you'll have to go up to the help keyboard shortcuts menu, just find out what it is. Or you can always ask me in the Q and a tab. And I'm just going to move this layer over to the right. So now we have three layers and this solo option allows us to basically make only one of those layers appear. So if I click solo shape layer one, only this layer appears same if for the kangaroo, it makes all the other layers disappear automatically. And this is beneficial if you have projects where you have dozens or hundreds of layers in a single composition, which actually has happened to me in in the past. And you want to really just see one layer, you can use that solo button. The lock button right here, locks this layer. So now I can't move it around. You'll see that it does this little highlight when I try to click it and I can't do anything to this layer. And that's beneficial if you're done with the layer and you don't want to do anything mess it up, move it around. Just click the lock button to the right, you have this dropdown arrow. And so you see that if I click this it drops down, drops down more options. We're gonna be covering these things which are more properties for each layer in the next lesson. So I'll just skip over that for now. The next is this color option and this is the color of your layers. So you see that the photo layer was automatically this purple color or this violet. And then the shape layer was this blue. If you want to customize the color of your layers, you can click that color block and then change the color and this is helpful for organizing your compositions. Say you have again, a bunch of layers, you want to make sure that you can easily find the right layer. And if you know that hey all my red layers are text layers for example which this isn't then it's easier to find that the source name is the name of your layer. If you click that source layer text up here, it changes to the layer name and this is how you can actually rename your layers in your timeline to be more organized. So instead of shape layer one and shape layer to which can get confusing in the long run. What I would do is I would select shape layer one and then press the return key on your keyboard that highlights this title and now I can call this Circle one or a Blue Circle. Then if I go to this second layer and I changed the color by going up to the fill, changing it to read, clicking on the title, pressing return and then call it red circle. This is just an easier way to again navigate, making you more efficient and that's pretty much as far as I want to go today in this lesson. I know that this lesson in the past lessons, it's more of that, hey Phil we're just going to go around and go through all the menu options. This is boring, but don't worry, the next few lessons are going to get a little bit more interesting. We're going to start animating very soon. We just have to cover the basics right now. So I hope you're learning. I hope your understanding, if I'm going too fast, please let me know if I'm going too slow. Please let me know but also be a little patient because there's other learners who are starting from scratch and need a little bit more information. Thanks so much for watching. And in the next lesson we'll go over more of the layer options that are within each of these layers

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Philip Ebiner

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Working in the Timeline

Working in the Timeline

Lesson Info

8. Working in the Timeline

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