- Well hello everybody,
I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com, welcome to this Adobe After Effects tutorial where today we're gonna
take a look at five very basic, simple animations that are perfect if you're
just getting started in Adobe After Effects. You're gonna learn a whole
lot about animation here. If you do enjoy this tutorial, well make sure you subscribe to my channel so you never miss any
future video editing, After Effects, Adobe Premiere
Pro, you name it, tutorials, and without furth
er ado, let's jump in and get this thing started. Alrighty, here in After Effects, I'm working with a new composition that I've sized to 2560 by 1440, and I'm at 60 frames per second as well. If you're creating a new
composition to follow along, go ahead and use these settings. You can also go to composition,
composition settings, and change the settings of an already existing
composition in there. I also have my background color
set to the hex code 333333. Just a pretty dark gray. I also added
this little
image to the background, I set its opacity to 5%,
locked the background down so it doesn't move or I
don't accidentally adjust it. It's not really part of this tutorial, just if you're looking at
it and you see it there, that's what's going on. Here's where the good stuff begins. Alright, let's grab the text tool, and type out the words, or
the number and the word, "5 easy", and over in the character panel, I'm going to choose Bebas Bold as my font. I'm gonna set it to 350 pixels in
size. And then I'm gonna use my align panel to center this text to
my current composition. Now I'm gonna add some more text by using the type tool again. I'm gonna type out the word "animations". One again I'm gonna use Bebas Bold, this is a separate
piece of text of course, but this time, the text is
gonna be a size of 195 pixels. And again, I'm gonna
align this to the middle of my composition. And I'm gonna drag it below
my first piece of text to give a little spacing, just as much spacing
as
you think is right, I'm gonna add a little
bit here as I see fit. Now once again, I'm
gonna add even more text by typing in, this time,
"in After Effects", and, I'm going to again use Bebas Bold, I'm gonna change the
size here to 113 pixels. Again, I'll align this to
the center of my composition and adjust the vertical positioning just to give a little space here as well, so just make sure all this
text is spaced out nicely. After that I can grab the ellipse tool, and drag out a perfect circle.
I can do that by holding
down the shift key. And here up in the top
bar, I'm gonna chose to give it a white stroke, I don't want it to have a fill, so I can click on the word fill and just make sure I
hit the slash in there. I'm gonna add a 25 pixel
white stroke to this shape, so you can select stroke,
make sure it's filled with solid white, then choose
to make sure it's 25 pixels. Here again we'll use the align panel, and we'll get the horizontal
and vertical centers aligned to this composition
, and you can adjust it just a little bit or adjust your text to make sure your text is perfectly in the
middle of this ellipse. Now, grab all three pieces of text. In order to align this text, you may need to first
lock the ellipse layer so you don't select
it, because technically it is on top of all this stuff. And then just shift click
the three pieces of text, and you can nudge them
up or down like I said, just to make sure they
get really into the center of this circle. So let's get animati
ng here. I'm gonna select the
largest piece of text, the "5 easy", but I'm gonna select it down in the layers area. And I'm gonna hit the letter S. That's gonna bring up my scaling options. Then I'll click on that little
stopwatch icon right there, and that's gonna drop a key frame and allow me to start animating. Key frames are essential. They're the little stopping
points in our animation. I'm gonna set the scaling here to 0%, it's gonna make the text
disappear, don't worry. And then we're gon
na
move out a little bit, and when I say move out, I'm
just dragging my playhead down the timeline a little bit, I had my playhead all the
way at the first frame, I'm gonna drag my
playhead down the timeline just a little bit, it
doesn't have to be too far, but you could stretch it
out as much as you like. This part is kind of up to you. Wherever you see fit, and then
I'm gonna change the scaling back to 100%. And After Effects will
auto-add a new key frame and fill in the animation
between thos
e key frames. But, you can see here,
when we play through this zooming animation, it looks bad, because it begins at
the bottom left corner and zooms in from there, I want it to look like a natural zoom up from the middle. What is going on here? Well, see this little
node thing right here? That's the anchor point,
and the scaling is done, really, based upon where this point is. If this point were in
the middle of the text, we'd scale right from the center and get a proper zooming
effect like we
want. Good news is, we can change this. It's a little weird, but we can change it. All we need to do is hold down
the command and option keys, or on the Windows, the
control and alt keys, and double click this tool
up here in the top toolbar, it's called the pan behind tool. It's up here in the toolbar
at the top of our screen. And you can watch the point
move, boom, right to the middle, or right to the center of our text. And now when we play
through the animation, we don't even need to reanima
te anything, it works exactly like we want, except that it's still pretty mechanical and maybe a little blocky looking. That's because we need to
add something called easing. So let's add some easing to make it look a little smoother and more natural. I'm gonna select both key
frames by shift clicking them, and then I will right click
on one of the key frames and choose key frame
assistant, and then easy ease. This is gonna make the
whole animation much nicer, smoother, and just more professiona
l. Let's move along to another
type of animation here, a fade animation. I'll leave the "5 easy" layer open so I can see the key frames down there, I'm talking about leaving it open down here in the layers panel. And then I'll open the animations layer. And I'm gonna move the playhead to where the "5 easy" animation stops, and I'm gonna hit the letter T to bring up the opacity option. And I'm gonna drop a key frame here by once again clicking on
that little stop watch icon, and I will choose to
reduce the opacity to 0%. This is gonna make our text disappear. Then I'll move the playhead
down the timeline a little bit. However far we want. And I'll change the opacity back to 100. Select both of these new key frames, we're gonna do that same easy ease trick, it all looks pretty good. Now that we've got our
first two animations down, let's do a pop-out animation with sort of an added bounce effect at the end of the animation. We're gonna take things a
little step further here now that we'v
e gotten two
basic animations down. Select the with After Effects layer, down in the layers area, and hit S to once again open up scaling. And once more, I will hold
down the command option or control alt key, and
I'm gonna double click that pan behind tool. Again, that's just to
reset my anchor point to the center of this piece of text. And then I'm gonna drop a key frame by clicking on the stop watch icon, where on the timeline the
fade in animation completes. Then I'm gonna go and I'm gonna d
eselect that little chain link icon here between my scaling, this is
between the X and the Y axis, this is gonna allow us
to change the scaling of just one axis of our text, while not messing around with the other. I want to reduce the X axis scale to 0%, and move the playhead down
the timeline a little bit and reset the X scale to 100%. This will give us this effect where the text is just sort
of shooting out side to side, from the center of this piece of text. It's a really neat little animati
on. Now what I want to do is select
both of those key frames, again by shift clicking them, add that easy ease by right clicking and go down to the key frame assistant and choose to apply that same easy ease to these key frames as well. But with these key frames still selected, we're gonna click on this
little graph editor icon, to bring up this kind of
complicated looking graph. This is where the magic happens. I'll drag this little
handle and pull the red line up past the dashed line. This wil
l tell After Effects kind of to overextend the animation before letting it slide or snap back to the proper 100% size. We can tweak this graph line here to perfect the easing as well, if we want. Now, let's click on the graph editor icon to get back to the original timeline. I'll preview the effect
and see how it's looking. Pretty, pretty cool. There are so many great
applications for this effect. Definitely something you want to remember. Now let's animate our circle
to draw around this text as
soon as it finishes appearing. That is, as soon as the
text finishes appearing. I'm gonna unlock the shape layer and twirl down the little
arrow and find contents, and twirl that down, and
get down into ellipse one. I'm gonna hit the little
arrow next to add, right there on sort of the
top right corner if you will of that layer, and I'm gonna choose to add a trim paths here. Move the playhead to where
the text animation finishes on your timeline, and reduce
the end parameter to 0%. This is goin
g to sort of zip up and hide the entire ellipse stroke. Then just move the
playhead a little further down the timeline, set
the end parameter to 100%, and let After Effects
do the auto-key framing and animation magic for you. Let's go ahead and preview
this effect at this point, and it's looking pretty good. I think I'm gonna select
both of my key frames here, and move this animation back, so it takes place kind of
as the final piece of text is animating in, to help
this whole animation to feel
just a little bit tighter and more well put together. We can also select both these key frames and add an easy ease to really
complete the animation here. Now there are also a ton of
great animation possibilities within some of the pretty amazing effects offered in After Effects. So let's do something cool here. Right click within the layers area, and choose to create a new, and within the new menu choose solid. And let's name this solid waves. Now, we're gonna open up the
effects and presets pa
nel by going window, effects and presets. And I'm gonna run a search for
an effect called radio waves. Then I'm gonna drag that out and just drop it onto our solid. Then we're gonna look for
our effect controls panel, again if it's not open,
window, effect controls. I've got mine over here on the left. And I'm gonna make some changes in here. First of all, I'm gonna
change the frequency to four. I'm gonna change the expansion to 25. Lifespan, we'll shift that to 1.2. I want the color to be white
. And I'm gonna set the opacity
to 0.25, which is 25%, this runs from a zero to
one scale here on opacity. I'm gonna change the start width to 20, and the end width, I'm
gonna set it to one. Now what I'll do is I'll drag
the solid on the timeline, I'll drag the edge, so this
whole radio wave nonsense begins right where all the
other animation completes. There might be some
better ways to do this, but this is kind of just
a quick and dirty way to make this work for the time being. So I'll go ahea
d and I'll preview this. And I can watch the entire
series of animations that we covered here today, all take effect and
play out before my eyes. And I think it looks pretty good, for a series of beginner level animations. We talked about a simple zoom animation, a fade in animation, a
one-axis scale animation, adding that cool little
easing bump effect, and of course, this really
cool repeating wave animation from the radio waves effect. So that, my friends, I
believe will wrap this one up, for
learning about key
frames and stop watch icons, and easing, and bumping
and all the little things we covered in this video
tutorial, guys, that's it. Get it, got it good. Daniel Dodson, tutvid.com,
I'll catch you in the next one. And before you go, make sure
you subscribe to my channel for more great tutorials every day. Also, buy my course. It helps us do what we do,
and this channel is supported by viewers just like you. You can also just click the thumbnail and watch another video from this
channel. See you next time, guys. (downbeat music)
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