these are tips that when I learned them I thought how did I not know this already existed if you've been using After Effects for a while you'll probably already know a few but I'm sure there'll be some gems in there that will save you a lot of time and trouble in your projects let's get started You've got some layers one has some cool effects on it that you'd like to apply to the others we can copy these effects up here in the effects control panel and paste them onto another layer but you can also select
those effects go to edit and select copy with property links paste them onto another layer and if you change those effects in the original layer they will change on every layer they were copied to wherever they are in the project alright we've got this texture set to multiply and we want to apply it to this Pentagon but we don't to deal with any maps or masks we can simply select preserve underlying transparency down here and it'll only apply to already visible layers in your composition you can apply the blending mode stencil alpha to make visible
only layers that appear underneath that layer you can also use the blending mode silhouette alpha to get a reverse which makes everything underneath that layer transparent say you've got a logo or a vector element when you scale it up it goes all blurry or pixelated if you tick continuously rasterize down here it turns nice and crisp we've got two layers doing some animation with their position to move them to the left with that pre-comping might be tricky but we can create a new null object parent those two layers to that null move the null over
to the left where we want them and then delete the null removing all evidence that we were ever here if you've got a timeline full of layers and you need to see more of it if you've got your cursor over it and press the tilde key which is the curly one next to the one on the top left of your keyboard press it over that panel and it will make it full screen and if you press tilde again it will minimize it back to your previous view it works on any panel if you want to
navigate through your project quickly use the mini flow chart if you go into this text comp and press tab on our keyboard it'll bring up this flow chart wherever your cursor is it shows the comp that we're in and on the left it shows all the comps that this is nested in and on the right it shows all the comps that are inside this comp the stars and the balls the blue line indicates which comp you came from in that case it was comp 7 if you want to change something in your pre-comp and see
what it looks like in the above comps you can split your view by looking at comp in your view here opening another comp and dragging that out now you can go inside and make any edits in this comp on the right and they will update in the main comp on the left here and you can easily see how it will affect the comps above it if you want to alliance of objects together you can do that with guides just simply drag out some guides select view snap to guides and whenever you move an object it
will snap into position if the duration in your comp is too long you can drag over your work area in your timeline view and then simply right click trim comp to work area if you want to reduce the size of your comp perhaps to fit a layer click on the region of interest down here and drag out the area that you would like it to crop to and then select a composition crop comp to region of interest if you want to parent one layer to another but you don't want it to inherit all other properties
you can alt or option click on the property you want to parent and then pick whip that to the specific property on the other layer now our Pentagon is inheriting our square's rotation but not its position we want to create a mask on this Pentagon that our pen tool just keeps drawing shapes if we select tool create mask and draw over the top now it creates a mask the different blur effects and After Effects work slightly differently box blur and camera lens blur get a more natural blurring but it does take longer to render and
gashing blur tends to be the fastest so choose wisely if you blur an image it will automatically assume the edges of the image are transparent so you'll get this halo effect on the edges we see the layer underneath tick repeat edge pixels to stop that happening but don't feel too bad the walking-dead titles didn't realize this until season 3 to cycle through the film or stroke modes hold alt and click on the square next to the mode and it will cycle through all of the options you can also hold alt and click through to cycle
all the different tool modes if you want to duplicate a layer press control D to get another version and if you want to split that layer press ctrl shift d and it will split it at your playhead to move the start of your layer to your player press the left square bracket on your keyboard and press the right square bracket on your keyboard to move the end to your playhead to a trim your layer press alt and hold the left square bracket to trim it at the beginning and alt and the right square bracket to
trim it at the end if you've animated some transform properties like scale position rotation on your layer and you'd like to add more while keeping the existing animation without adding a null or pre comping you can add the effect transform and this will give you more options to keyframe if suddenly you're bounding box disappears and you don't have the outlines of your shape layers visible you might have accidentally turned them off I did this all the time to turn the back on click this bounding box button here or go up to view show layer controls
if your project panel suddenly disappears to get it back press ctrl and 0 I do this all the time as well because that is the fit to view shortcut in Photoshop and I do it without thinking if you want to line up elements from one comp to another or quickly reference another comp you can take a snapshot of it by clicking this camera icon here and then from whatever other come you're in you can click the view snapshot button and it will make that snapshot visible for you to use as a reference we've got the
square moving with its position property to get the rotation to follow along we can select layer transform Auto Orient and select orient along path and now the rotation follows along to create a quick sine wave select your line go to add select zigzag toggle that down adjust the size and the amount of ridges and then change the points from corner to smooth if you're tired of flat vector shapes use the roughen edges effect and tweak some of the settings to add a bit of grit to your animation if you want to slightly expand or reduce
the edges of your layer simply add the effect a simple choker and adjust the choke map this is also great for adding rounded corners if you want to quickly offset or stagger your layers select them all trim their lengths to the amount you want to offset right click select keyframe assistant sequence layers click OK and then drag out the ends of all of them to convert text to a shape layer with the text tool selected right-click and select create shapes from text now got your text editable as paths if you want to morph a square
into a circle keyframe its roundness at zero move ahead and drag it up to its maximum roundness where it will be circle and there you are you can do basic math operations in any number fields if the number is inconvenient to calculate yourself let After Effects do it this square is 400 pixels wide and I wanted to move that far to the right so with its position property I'm gonna select its current position and add + 400 and press Enter and there we go you can use multiply and divide in here two if you need
some free space on your hard drive your disk cache might be using up more than it needs to you can clear your disk cache by going to edit purge all memory and disk cache and click OK to clear out some memory from projects you might not have opened in years if your project is getting bloated with a bunch of assets and comps that you no longer need you can go to file and then down to dependencies and remove unused footage you can also reduce the project only the files needed in the comps you have selected
and you can also collect all of your files and every linked asset into a folder which is very useful if you need to have the project on to someone else on another machine or using another server if you want to know what comp an asset was used in you can right click over in the project panel and select reveal in composition which will take you to it you can also do it in Reverse - you can right-click select reveal reveal layer source and project and you can also right-click and select reveal reveal in Explorer to
find the exact source of that file if you need to replace a file or composition you can select it down in your timeline find the layer of comp you'd like to replace it with in the project panel hold alt and simply drag it into your composition or timeline window and it will replace it keeping all the original animated properties select your comp in the project window and drag it onto the new composition window and that will create a new comp with the exact same sized duration of that original comp with that comp nested inside if
you want an image or comp to be the exact height or width of a comp without doing it by hand and eyeballing it with a scale property select layer transform fit to comp height or width depending on your needs use the search bar down in your timeline to easily access properties like path or stroke width without toggling down a whole bunch of layers we've got this pre comped animation of a snowman shape bouncing and we want to add a quick shadow to it we can duplicate it with command D add a fill effect select our
shadow color then add the CC slant effect adjust the slant and the height send that layer behind and now we've got an animated shadow if you've got an animation in the pre comp you can change the speed by right-clicking and select a time time stretch 50% makes it twice as fast 200 makes it twice as slow to reverse it right click and select time time reverse layer if you have nothing selected in your timeline to add markers to the comp press * on your keyboard and it'll create a marker here if you do with the
layer selected it will create one on the layer you can double click to add a comment to that marker or if you hold alt and click the asterisks it will open up that dialog box as you create the marker you can also hold alt on your keyboard and drag a marker to extend it to encompass a duration rather than a single point if you want to reverse some properties of an animation you can select the key frames you want reversed right click select keyframe resistant and time reverse keyframes and that will swap the values of
those keyframes if you want to an extended animation they keep the same timing you can select all the keyframes and while holding alt select the first or last keyframe and drag it out to keep those proportions exactly the same you can also press J and K on your keyboard to jump your playhead to the nearest keyframe J goes to the nearest previous keyframe and K to the nearest upcoming keyframe if you've got a whole bunch of layers taking up your timeline and you don't need to see them all for now select all of the ones
you want to hide click the shy icon lock the layer over here completely shy icon over here now they're hidden and there's no chance you accidentally gonna move them now you've got a lovely clean timeline and if you just need to view one or a couple of layers in your composition window you can click the solo button here on as many of layers as you need so you're not distracted by the other layers and so After Effects doesn't need to render those layers as well very useful if you're using a lot of effect or a
render heavy comp if you want to apply an effect to the whole scene and know just one element instead of pre comping you can use an adjustment layer create a new adjustment layer by going up to layer new just Millea and whatever effects you applied to that layer will affect everything beneath it change the color of your layers in your timeline to keep it organized click the colored square down here and choose any color you want if you choose select label group I'll select all layers with that color very handy when you're working with a
lot of layers if you've pasted something and after effects has pasted them in the wrong order here our bottom text should be underneath this rectangle to get it to paste in the right order you need to select your top layer first then the others copy or cut and then paste them and the layers that you've selected first or right on top in the layer stack if you want to quickly test a bunch of fonts select your text click in the font drop-down area and scroll through with your arrow keys till you find the font you
like you can also click this star over here on the left and they will put them in this favorite folder so you can access the fonts you always use if you're annoyed that when you create a new shape layer the anchor point goes to the middle of the comp rather than the middle of the shape layer you can fix that by going to edit preferences general and select Center Anchor Point in new shape layers isn't that nicer I made a short playlist of some related videos that'll think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far
I'll see you in the next video and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week Subtitle: Zoe J Marriott
