Start with the composition, where everything happens - After Effects Tutorial

This brief first section is in many ways the most essential. You don't need to follow along yet, just watch me as I demonstrate the six foundations of After Effects as simply as possible. Our first foundation is the Composition. So how do we start in After Effects? If I click on the Composition Viewer and move my cursor around, these turn out to be buttons and they are effectively my two starting points. New Composition is like starting with nothing and New Composition Footage is the same thing except you're starting with something. So I'll click on that one. I'll choose a clip and open it and now I have a composition and it's represented in a few different ways. There's a composition icon up here in the project panel along with that footage that we imported. There's that same footage down in the timeline of the composition and then there is the Composition Viewer that shows me the image. So now let's play it back. For that, I can go to the Preview panel and press play. However, during this course, you won't see me do it that way. Instead, I will be using the spacebar, which can start and stop the footage the same way as that play button. In addition to all the ways we've seen it represented, Composition is also a container for images and settings. I can see those up here at the top of the project panel. They're just briefly summarized. But to really see them and control them, I go to Composition, Composition Settings. Now, this is not the most intuitive or friendly looking interface to begin with, but remember that these settings were created for me automatically. The most important ones to get correct are Width and Height, Frame Rate, I'm tabbing through, and Duration. If you change any of those, your result will change. I can give this a name. We're creating a logo animation. And I'll click OK. Before I leave, though, one thing I can freely change is the start time code. So if you ever see this come in with some odd number like 4 hours and 18 frames, as it is here. You're always free to change that to 0. I'll click OK. And now, if I go back to the beginning of the timeline, you can see that my footage does indeed start at 0 seconds in frames. At any time, I can change that to frames by holding down the Command key or Control on Windows and just clicking here. However, in this course, we will be using time. Now let's make a somewhat more destructive change back Composition Settings. I'm going to change the preset. So these contain frames per second and size and I'm going to change this one to be HD. That is half the size of what we had. When I click OK I still see the image but it appears to be cropped. If I want to see better what's going on I could go grab the zoom tool and hold down option to zoom out and I can see in the pasteboard that there is is my full image, which is now, yes, effectively cropped. No change like a crop is ever made to the source footage, but it is now cropped in this composition. Incidentally, throughout the rest of the course, I will not be using the zoom tool, and I only recommend it if you don't have a scroll wheel on your mouse. Otherwise, I can just scroll back to zoom out and scroll forward to zoom in. I can also hold down the space bar, which I was clicking start and stop footage. This gives me the hand tool and lets me move my footage around. So with that there's one thing left to do before we move on and that is to save. If you don't save the project you don't get auto saves and all your work can disappear. I'll use the file save command but it's the same save command as in every application. I'll give this a name, we'll call it first. I'll press enter to save and we're ready to move on. Everything you create in After Effects happens in compositions and they are always made-up of the same specific elements that we'll discuss next.