Chapter 1. Getting Started with After Effects
Welcome to this exciting journey into After Effects! In this chapter, I will give you a grand tour of this powerful program.
You will learn to navigate using After Effects and to locate your tools and effects. You will be introduced to the layer panel, the timeline, and key frames, and you will learn to import files. You will also learn to create, animate, and mask your layers.
We'll begin the chapter with the program's interface, to help you understand how to navigate. By the end of this chapter, you will know how to create a simple animated slideshow. The concepts we'll learn in this chapter are simple; however, the tools that we'll learn to use will be crucial to future projects (Illustration, photography, and all artistic content by David Dodds).
This chapter will cover the following topics:
The After Effects interface
Masking layers
Creating a project
Introducing layer properties
Basic animation
Creating an animation slideshow