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

Creating a master composition

Before we import the required lesson files and start working with them, let’s create one empty composition as a master composition, which we will use at the end of the lesson to combine any two compositions. Create the master composition as follows:

  1. Go to composition in the main menu | New Composition….
  2. In the Composition Settings pop-up window, change the composition name to Master_Comp.
  3. Change the Preset setting to Social Media Square • 1080x1080 • 30 fps.
  4. Change the duration to 15 seconds, and click OK.

Figure 5.1 shows these steps:

Figure 5.1: The new composition settings

Figure 5.1: The new composition settings

We create this composition to establish it as the default setting for the compositions that After Effects will automatically generate when we import an Illustrator file as a composition. Now, we are ready to import the required files for this project.