After Effects, oh After Effects, how I love thee: Let me count the ways.

While I love After Effects now, before I started the love affair we had a very love/hate relationship.  We've got something to try to bump everyone up to speed.  For the beginners, we've got the intro to the whole dern thing.  And if you've already mastered that, tomarrow, we'll have a list of some plugins for everyone to try.  More, After the jump Effect (sorry, the lame pun won't happen again. Promise.)We're going to be covering a lot about After Effects over the next little bit, so if you feel like this is below your speed, don't fret, your section will come.  This section?  The interface.  Next time?  Plugins to drool over.

So, lets start off with the basics.  Looking at the interface, it's pretty self explanitory, so lets take a look more specifically at the timeline, and the switches you'll use most frequently.


From left to right, the eyeball (visibility) and the speaker (sound) are fairly obvious, but the next switch over controls solo.  Solo turns off all the layers except those which are soloed.  Pretty useful to see how some layers work together.

In the effects dropdown, it'll show you all the effects you've got applied.  In this case, we're using Cycore's Ball Action.  The F towards the left enables the effect.

Looking inside the effect, see the stopwatch?

This enables and disables keyframing.  If you're not familiar with keyframing, the breakdown is you pick some points where you'd like a value to move.  In this case, I'd like the scatter value to move from 0 to 756.  With keyframing enabled, the value will gradually move from 0 to 756 over the course of time between keyframes.

To the left of that, you'll see the keyframe selection controls. 


The left and right arrows move the playhead to each individual keyframe, while the center box creates a new keyframe.  You can also create keyframes by moving the playhead to the time you'd like, then adjusting the value.

So you've got those basics down, lets look at the switches and modes section, one of the most important parts ot the interface.  First, the switches.

Shy tracks, on the left, are an easy way to unclutter your timeline window.  By clicking those switches on, tracks will hide when you click the shy icon on the right.

Over from that is the collapse transformations button.  This disables any sort of transform element (positioning, sizing, etc.)  Useful if you're precomping (we'll get in to that tomarrow,) elements that move, and don't want to create a bunch of different comps to de-apply the effects you're using.

From there, you'll head to the quality switch:

The quality switch handles specifically aliasing.  When you anti-alias, your images look clear, but it slows down your computer.  While composing graphic elements in After Effects, it's a good idea to leave the quality switch on aliased, until you want to see what your images really look like, especially if you're working on either a complex project or a lower-end computer.

Over from there is the Effect control, enabling and disabling effects.  The next one over is important if you're using time-remapping (slowing down or speeding up video) it's frameblending.  From there, you've got motion blur, which for a full explanation, hit up the last episode of the Vodcast, Adjustment Layer, which applies all effects to layers beneath, and 3d layer, which lets a layer move in three-dimensional space.

Now, on the other side of this menu, if you click at the bottom where it says switches and modes, it brings up a new menu, the 'modes' menu.



Each blending mode operates differently, for example in this pic, we're using "Soft Light."  That allows part of the black level to be taken out, and marked transparent.  Play with the blending modes to get an idea of what each one does.  They're really useful, and help your compositions look sweeter.

Those are the interface basics for After Effects.  Next time, we'll have an indepth look at some pretty sweet plugins, and on the next episode of the Vodcast, we'll be looking at one of the perennial interface favs, 3d Invigorator from Zaxweks.

Till then, play with our sample file of our abstract background.  Have fun!