Book Image

Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects

By : Vishu Aggarwal
Book Image

Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects

By: Vishu Aggarwal

Overview of this book

Visual effects and motion graphics are everywhere, shaping the film, TV, games, websites, and application landscape. Navigating a field this complex and ever-expanding demands more than mere familiarity with tools; you need to stand out to get ahead. Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects is the definitive guide that not only equips you with the essential skills to distinguish yourself, but also takes you through real projects that you can add to your portfolio. Guided by a hands-on learning approach, you'll master the UI, workflow, and diverse projects such as text animation, shape layers, and rotoscoping. With this newfound knowledge, you’ll take your graphic design and post-production skills to the next level using chroma keying, particle simulations, and 2D and 3D tracking. You’ll progress faster than someone taking a formal course in Adobe After Effects! And it’s not all about creating; you’ll import graphics from Illustrator and Photoshop and apply post-production effects to give them a new life. Finally, you’ll discover how seamlessly you can export and manage your projects, ensuring end-to-end coverage of all you need. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of Adobe After Effects, equipped with the skills and practice you need to propel your career in graphic design.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Working with Motion Graphics
8
Part 2: Post-Production and Visual Effects
13
Part 3: 2D and 3D Tracking, and Rendering

Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at how to customize the user interface, import media files, set preferences for After Effects, add the first keyframes in the composition timeline, and output files from After Effects.

By customizing the user interface, you can adjust After Effects to your liking and convenience so that you can get the most out of it. Now you should be confident about importing media files into After Effects and creating compositions using media files in the Project panel.

Learning about layer properties and adding keyframes in the timeline should have given you an understanding of animating layers in the Timeline panel, how to use the stopwatch with the playhead option to achieve the motion needed for the project, and how to output the final project into a video format using Render Queue. Don’t forget to customize your After Effects preferences for optimal performance.

In the next chapter, we will talk about how to use effects and built-in presets to quickly create animated motion graphics.