Adobe After Effects is a powerful app that is capable of some hugely impressive things when it comes to the world of visual effects, motion graphics, special effects, 3D, and animations.
However, if you are new to Adobe After Effects, don’t be put off by the sheer scope of what this program can do. It’s actually surprisingly comfortable to get started with some of the simpler aspects of using Adobe After Effects, all helped along by a friendly and familiar interface. Especially when you have this simple After Effects beginner guide to help you out.
Adobe After Effects vs. Premiere Pro
First things first – why would we use After Effects, and what is the difference between Adobe After Effects and Adobe’s Premiere Pro?
In its most basic terms, After Effects is a lot like the “Photoshop” of the video world, allowing you a lot more options and control to edit or manipulate footage and animations. Whereas Premiere Pro focuses more on piecing together footage, titles, and music to tell a story, After Effects provides all of the sparks and smoke for the action scenes.
Before we get into the list, it has to be said that Adobe does a surprisingly great job of explaining the very basics of After Effects with a fantastic series of videos on their own website where you’ll quickly start to understand how the interface works.
So, if at any time you find yourself lost with anything, it’s definitely worth at least glancing over the official After Effect beginner guide to find your feet.
For some additional help in the beginning, check out the video masterclass below, showcasing how to work with the following features:
- The Project Panel
- The Properties Panel
- Layers
- Keyframes
- Shapes
- Easy Ease
- Motion Blur
- Color Density
- Adaptive Resolution
If you’ve ever had the need or the urge to try your hand at some video effects, or motion graphics here’s a complete rundown of concise, easy-to-follow video After Effects tutorials for beginners, along with templates and resources to get you going with Adobe After Effects for the very first time, each collected into handy categories for quick reference on specific points of Adobe After Effects.
Interface, Windows & Panels: The Start of a New Composition
Most versions of After Effects operate with the same basic interface layout from the moment you launch the application. So, you should be able to follow this beginner’s guide, regardless if you have a newer or older version of the software program.
In very simple terms, you can break the main interface down into four key sections:
- You have your Project Files i.e., your media files, footage, and images etc. on the left.
- Your Composition Window sits in the very center, which is essentially a “live view” of what’s happening as you make edits.
- Over on the right side, you have your Effects.
- And at the very bottom of your screen, you’ll see your Timeline.
When you open Adobe After Effects, the first thing you’ll see is the home screen. After clicking on the “New Project” button, you’ll officially create a new project.
From there, you can import your files (double-click the “Project” tab) and explore the variety of panels at your disposal, containing all the tools you’ll need. The one you press will get highlighted in blue, signaling that it’s now active.
You can choose the following options:
- File, Edit, Composition in the Menu bar at the very top
- Tools for adding and editing elements in your composition in the Tools panel
- Options for importing, searching, and organizing your assets in the Project panel in the upper-left corner
- The currently loaded composition (containing one or more layers of video and graphic elements) in the Composition panel
In Adobe After Effects, “composition” refers to the actual sequences where you create your visual effects and animations. You can have multiple compositions within a single project window, and they can be nested within each other, allowing for more complex and dynamic animations.
To actually start working on your video – and not the overall project – you’ll need to hit the “New Composition” button.
Basic Introduction to the After Effects Interface
Beginner’s Guide to Adobe After Effects
30 Essential Keyboard Shortcuts in After Effects
The Timeline: Layers Galore
Those of you that are comfortable with graphics editing may be used to the idea of using layers to build up a piece of work, and thankfully, something similar exists in After Effects.
When working with all the tools for video or motion graphics inside Adobe After Effects, you still can stack one layer on top of another, just as you would expect. However, this all happens via a timeline where it is just as important to control the duration of your layers or effects, and then control what happens to them and for how long.
Changes made to your layers will be “recorded” via your timeline, and then you have to play with the timing of those parameters. This is where your battle with Adobe After Effects can be won or lost, so make sure you grow comfortable with your timeline window.
To start working with layers, you must drag and drop your files from the “Project” tab into the “Layer” tab. Then, you can start altering the order of these files or edit their appearance.
If you want to adjust the hierarchy of the layers, all you need to do is drag the file up or down the list. But beware – this move will also alter the appearance of your After Effects composition.
As for the appearance of the file, head to the sideways triangle next to the layer’s number. Clicking on this triangle will reveal a “Transform” menu, which you can use to edit the anchor point, position, scale, rotation, and the opacity of the layer.
You can also create 3D layers under the “Layer” tab. To activate this feature, you need to check the 3D Layer switch, which is represented by a cube icon in the timeline project panel. From there, you can transform these layers by activating the rotation tool.
Adjustment Layers
Adjustment layers are not unique to After Effects, so if you are familiar with the idea of adjustment layers then you’ll be happy to see them here in Adobe After Effects, too.
Adjustment Layers are a great way to apply effects or properties to multiple layers at once, so instead of having to go through and copy/paste settings individually, you would simply apply all of those properties to your adjustment layer, which would, in turn, apply those properties to the multiple layers below that you want it to affect.
This can save you a lot of time and effort when you are looking to apply global effects to your project and it’s particularly useful when color-correcting your footage.
Basic Demonstration of Adjustment Layers in After Effects
Visual Effects, Plugins & Presets: Beyond the Project Panel
Where Adobe After Effects starts to prove itself as the “Photoshop for Video” is with the various effects and plugins available in the program.
Lots of fantastically powerful effects are included from scratch when you install Adobe After Effects, ranging from basic controls, such as Brightness & Contrast, all the way up to advanced smoke and particle effects. Note that some effects will only be available with the paid version of Adobe After Effects (the official Adobe After Effects CC software license) and not the trial version.
Best of all? There is a fantastic community of creators that support the app with a wealth of third party plugins, tools, and presets, too. So, there’s an ever-evolving ecosystem to help push your work to the next level, or make things easier for you.
There’s no real starting point or introduction with effects as there are an incredible number of possibilities, so in order to become comfortable with effects, you need to really need to find some time explore and experiment, or take a glance at some of the videos we’ve collected below to give yourself a head start.
Presets can come in handy if you want to use “ready-made” styles, effects, or transitions that you can just apply to your footage in an instant, with the values or controls already defined by the preset maker. These work almost like the idea of using “filters” on Instagram, for example. Or you can, of course, make your own presets to create a reusable style or effect of your own.
Templates are complete projects or compositions that you can open in Adobe After Effects and use as the base of your project. With templates, you have a custom, high-quality end result by simply dropping in your own footage or editing a text layer or two and without having to put hours of work in.
Here are some useful explainer videos and resources to give you an insight into how visual effects and presets are applied, and what plugins can be installed to step up your VFX.
10 Best Built-in Effects in After Effects
Text Effects in After Effects
Motion Tracking in After Effects
Recommended After Effects Templates for Beginners
11-LOOPER Animated Gradients
LOOPER is a pack of stylish animated gradients to add a modern ambiance to any project. Perfectly looped and compatible with Adobe After Effects, there is also a flat collection of PNG files included for graphic designers, too.
Energy Opener for After Effects
Energy Opener is a quick and energetically animated Adobe After Effects template with dynamic text animations and creative transitioning effects. It’s so easy to use, simply edit the text, drag and drop in your media and hit render.
Orange and Teal LUT Pack
Orange & Teal LUT Pack by Navpreet Singh gives you cinematic style footage using LUT’s (look up tables) – which essentially takes the hard work out of color grading your project using the magic of maths. Quick and easy beautiful looking footage.
Lines – Video Brush Pack
Lines is essentially a pack of video files that can be dropped into your project to provide easy, fun brush animations without having to get too involved in the controls. This pack contains 13 unique brush stroke animations, each having two different line styles; a clean and a rough version to allow you to set the tone of your animation.
Cinematic Slideshow
Cinematic Slideshow is a fantastic way to show off a collection of images in a slideshow, or you can use it as a dynamic intro for your video. It includes a beautiful parallax effect and it boasts quick render times due to the fact that no plugins are used or required.
Hand Gestures
These fun animated Hand Gestures allow you to add real hands to your touch-screen app demonstrations. The pack includes 13 gestures and can be used in either Photoshop or Adobe After Effects.
Masking
When it comes to masking, what you are in essence doing is using shapes to “cut out” part of a layer allowing the layers below to be seen through the shape you make. Of course, it’s a whole lot more advanced than that once you dive into all of the things that masks can do, but for those that are new to masking you basically use shapes to hide and reveal parts of a layer or piece of footage.
These are great for transitions and reveals and anyone using After Effects extensively will likely use masks on almost every project.
Basic Masking in After Effects
Masking Using Shapes
Animations & Keyframes
One of the most important things in Adobe After Effects is understanding animations and keyframes. Once you realize what these little guys do, everything starts to click into place when it comes to motion and time.
Keyframes mark a set of values at a specific point in time. They essentially serve as the main trigger points for your animation, defining how something looks at that point in time, allowing Adobe After Effects to do its magic to smoothly fill in the gaps between your main keyframes, creating an animation.
You can control anything with Keyframes, so you could decide an object’s position, its opacity, or even various effects all at once – basically anything you can apply to a layer can also be controlled with keyframes, allowing you to alter the values over time in order to animate a specific parameter. Once you have your main keyframes in place you can even alter the velocity that those actions take place by editing the easing, making your animations softer and more realistic.
5 Simple Animations in After-Effects You Need to Learn
Previewing and Rendering: Bringing Your Art to Life
Once you’re done creating your video, you can preview it before finalizing to ensure everything looks as intended. You can do so by selecting “Windows” and clicking on “Time Controls.” This will launch a preview pane. A simple press of the “Play” button on this pane will show you the rough draft of your project. For a more refined version, press “Ram Render Play.”
Happy with the results? Perfect! Then, it’s time for rendering.
If your composition needs to be of particularly high quality, you should first export your project to the Render Queue. If you’re making the video for a specific web platform, then you should export your composition to the Adobe Media Encoder. You can find both options by navigating to the “File” tab at the top of your screen and selecting the “Export” option.
Taking After Effects a Step Further
So there we have it, a quick rundown of some of the main basic starting points in After Effects that will guide you when getting started. Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to everything that you can achieve with Adobe After Effects. But if you get these foundations right with this After Effects beginner guide and learn to combine these skills and carry them on to more cutting-edge Adobe After Effects features, you’ll be well on your way to success.
If you’re feeling brave or you feel like you’ve already got a good handle on these Adobe After Effects basics, here are some excellent tutorial makers on YouTube to serve as your After Effects guide, as they are really worth a follow if you are interested in learning Adobe After Effects at a higher level:
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