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

Importing footage

For this exercise, let us import a sample video that we will perform our operations on, for ease of learning in this chapter:

  1. Open After Effects, and from the welcome screen, select the New Project option. Save the project to your preferred location by going to the menu bar and navigating through File | Save As | Save as…, as explained in Chapter 1 in the Saving the After Effects project section.
  2. Go to File | Import | Lesson 2 | Sunset.mp4.
  3. Now drag the Sunset.mp4 file from the project panel to the composition icon in the project window to create a composition based on the properties of the media and duration.
Figure 2.1: Creating a composition from sunset footage

Figure 2.1: Creating a composition from sunset footage

Here is the final composition created:

Figure 2.2: Composition created from sunset footage

Figure 2.2: Composition created from sunset footage

Now let us begin with exploring the Effects & Presets panel on the right side of the After Effects interface.