After Effects CS6 Essential Training

Introduces After Effects CS6 and the world of animation, effects, and compositing.

In this course, author Ian Robinson introduces Adobe After Effects CS6 and the world of animation, effects, and compositing. Chapter 1 introduces the six foundations of After Effects, which include concepts like layers, keyframes, rendering, and moving in 3D space. The rest of the course expands on these ideas, and shows how to build compositions with layers, perform rotoscoping, animate your composition with keyframes, add effects and transitions, and render and export the finished piece. Two real-world example projects demonstrate keying green screen footage and creating an advanced 3D composition with the expanded 3D toolset, an important addition to CS6.

Adobe After Effects

• What is After Effects?

Introduction

• Welcome
• Using the exercise files

1. Getting Started

• The six foundations of AE
• Introducing the interface and the workspace
• Understanding compositions
• Getting comfortable with layers
• Getting started with animation and keyframes
• Understanding effects
• Moving in 3D space
• Rendering your first animation
• Specifying preferences and cache settings
• Staying organized

2. Understanding Compositions

• Creating compositions
• Importing footage and compositions
• Preparing compositions for animation
• Introducing renderers
• Understanding precomposing
• Relinking missing footage

3. Building and Designing with Layers

• Defining layers
• Creating type
• Creating layer solids and shapes with masks
• Building shape layers
• Understanding switches and blend modes
• Crafting custom shapes and masks
• Creating variable-width feathered masks
• Rotoscoping with the Roto Brush
• Refining with the Roto Brush

4. Animation 101

• Understanding keyframes
• Adding and adjusting keyframes
• Interpolating keyframes
• Adjusting keyframes in the Graph Editor
• Understanding positional keyframes
• Controlling animation with parenting and the pick whip
• Understanding animation paths
• Timing to audio
• Trimming and sliding edits
• Swapping images

5. Using Effects to Modify Layers

• Layering multiple effects
• Generating graphic effects with adjustment layers
• Building backgrounds with effects
• Creating animated strokes

6. Jumping into 3D

• Introducing cameras
• Working with 3D layers
• Positioning layers
• Adding lights and working with Material Options
• Using 3D precompositions
• Adjusting depth of field

7. Exporting and Rendering

• Caching and prerendering
• Understanding the alpha channels
• Using the Render Queue
• Rendering with Adobe Media Encoder
• Archiving finished projects

8. Going in Depth with Type and Shapes

• Creating type animators
• Animating type in 3D space
• Composing 3D type
• Adding and animating type on a path
• Animating shape layers

9. Video in Depth

• Creating stylized video
• Retiming video footage
• Retouching with the Rubber Stamp tool
• Smoothing shaky camera footage

10. Project: Keying Green Screen Footage

• Understanding keying
• Creating a garbage mask
• Getting started with Keylight

11. Integrating External Projects

• Importing Photoshop documents
• Importing Illustrator files
• Working With Premiere Pro projects

12. Project: Tracking and Advanced 3D

• Adjusting ray-tracing quality
• Tracking footage
• Extruding shapes
• Bending layers
• Adjusting ray-traced lighting and materials
• Adding environment maps
• Beginning compositing
• Creating render passes
• Building a final composite

13. Conclusion

• What's next