After Effects in Production, 2nd Edition

Overview

After Effect Overview

If you are new to After Effects, these first few pages will give you a quick overview of the “lay of the land” inside the program – namely, what happens in what window.

Elements are organized in the Project window. This is where you keep your source material (footage), and well as your compositions (comps). When you import a footage item into a project, After Effects points to the file on your drives; it does not copy the footage into your project file – so you need to make sure that a project’s sources are always available to it.

The main work happens inside the Comp and Timeline windows, which act as a pair. When a footage item is added to a comp, it becomes a layer in these windows. The Comp window is your canvas, ...