Chapter 2. Importing Footage into a Project

Think of an After Effects project as a musical score. Just as a score refers to instruments and indicates how they should be played, your project lists the files you want to use and how you want to use them. When you’ve finished creating your project, you can output an animation as a movie file or an image sequence. The important thing to remember is that the project contains only references to the source files, not the files themselves. The project contains neither the sources nor the end result, any more than a sheet of music contains a tuba or a recording of the concert. For this reason, a project file takes up little drive space.

Source files, on the other hand, consume considerably more storage. ...

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