Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects, 5th Edition

6 The Layer Essentials

Tips for managing multiple layers efficiently, including hot keying, markers, and the layer switches

By now, you should know how to build a comp and how to animate layers, so let’s step up to working with multiple layers efficiently. This chapter covers shortcuts and tips for managing and replacing layers, creating markers and snapshots, and editing images in their original application.

A large portion of using After Effects efficiently is to master some of the keyboard shortcuts. They may seem like brain twisters initially, but learning the most common shortcuts will mean you’ll work faster – and therefore, finish work earlier. After Effects usually presents more than one way to do any given task; as before, we’ll concentrate ...