Learn how After Effects manages file types, color labels, and layer organization to streamline your workflow. This article walks through best practices for editing linked assets, customizing label colors, and efficiently isolating or grouping layers for animation.
Key Insights
- After Effects uses file icons to indicate the associated application, such as Illustrator or PDF, and allows direct editing of linked files via the "Edit Original" option, which reflects updates automatically—though resizing elements can shift their positions.
- Users can customize layer label colors through the preferences menu, either globally or locally on specific layers, to improve visibility and organization when handling multiple assets like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter components.
- Noble Desktop covers techniques such as isolating layers with the Solo switch, searching by layer name, and using pre-compositions (pre-comping) to manage complex timelines, similar to using Smart Objects in Photoshop or Symbols in Illustrator.
Okay, so the icon in front of it tells you what type of file it is. Or really, it tells you what program opens it. So I have illustrator, it's an illustrator icon.
If you don't have illustrator in your computer, it'll probably be a PDF icon. Or maybe a preview icon, basically, whatever, okay? Why does that matter? Because I have illustrator, edit, edit original is a choice. It would open that in illustrator and let me make changes and save them in updates.
It's cool, by the way. One note, if you do that, if you do anything that changes the physical size of the layer content, it will move here. Okay, so if I wouldn't have gotten rid of that drop shadow now, it would literally shift position.
So be careful about that. But you can edit the original in updates, which is great. It's a great part of our linking system, okay? So this is a still image.
So it's assigned that color, which is, I don't know, lilac, maybe? I don't know what that is. Why? Because in your preferences, settings on Mac, there is an entire section called labels. On Windows, it'd be edit preferences labels, okay? Okay.
Compositions, video, audio, stills are lavender. That's what that color is, lavender. It's signed lavender, okay? Now, these are the colors.
That is what they are assigned to by default. You can change the colors, okay? Or what they're assigned to. They don't have, like, they don't have, like, styles of it.
That'd be cool, by the way. They have styles of it, themes of it. But they don't, so.
But you can change it. So it's kind of cool. Like, for example, some of these colors I have a hard time seeing.
They're too close to each other. So, okay. Now they changed that color.
Great. So you can edit the colors. You can edit what they're assigned to by default if you want.
But you can also change them locally, which is what I'm doing now. Hello, Facebook. I'm grabbing all the Facebook layers.
That was shift. And the instructions want me to make the Facebook layers blue. Blue.
Okay, because their logo's blue. Okay. Instagram layers are make red.
Red. Okay. Notice, all it actually does is change the outline view and the layer duration.
That's all it does, okay? So that's all it does. X (formerly known as Twitter), because there was only one blue, by the way. And X was also blue at the time.
Now I guess it's black. Okay, I made purple in the instructions. Like that.
Okay. I made the headline yellow. So it basically tells you on page, like, 65.
Make them whatever color you want, okay? I just wanted to change it. Let's go with that. Then it asks me to do this.
Hello, X. Hello, background. Okay.
I want to animate X, but notice there are things in front of it. I want to see where the headline and the background is. When I animate X, I can basically, like, figure out how large things should go.
So I'm going to keep these that I now have highlighted. And I want to hide everything else. That column, the third column from the left, is solo.
When you click it on, only layers that have the solo switch enabled are visible. Any other layer is hidden, okay? By the way, when you select multiple layers, to deselect them, Command-Shift-A or Control-Shift-A. Selecting all layers is Command-A or Control-A, which is Illustrator's keyboard shortcut, I think, actually.
Okay. But then, you know, I actually only want to animate the logo and the big circle in the background first. So I'm going to turn off the solo for X wedge and the number.
And I'll go back to them later. So you can color code layers. You can name layers.
In this case, it was imported, but fine, okay? You have the ability to turn off visibility and solo a layer. There's one other thing that's over here called shy. You'll look at that in another lesson.
But outside of that, you really don't have that many controls. Okay. Now, notice X logo, X wedge, X circle.
I put the word X in them, okay? I deselect everything. I go to the search field, type in X. I can isolate.
There is, by the way, a lesson on that. Like, the actual last lesson has that. So, which is cool.
One note, however, if you have a layer selected, when you type in the search field, it starts searching for things on that layer only. So just be aware of that. Unfortunately, I did not actually name the number, X number, because that would have helped me, okay? And I don't know how to actually make it search for… I think I can, like, comma search more than one thing.
So I'm not going to use that. But those things are your handful of ways of isolating stuff. There's no layer folders and no sub layer concepts.
That's it. So usually the lots and lots of layers do become problematic to organize. We'll look at a way of handling that, which we're actually going to say at the end of this lesson, which is basically the idea of pre-comping, which is nesting.
It's basically the idea of taking layers, putting them into their own comps, and then using those comps. Kind of like Smart Objects with Photoshop or Symbols in Illustrator for those who use those things. So that's two lessons.
Now you do it. That's the opening of this. So setting up the workplace is just go to standard.
Creating a dummy comp and importing an Illustrator file and organizing the timeline. And like I said, if you want to use different colors, go ahead. It's no big deal.
So by the way, the dummy comp's only point is to set the default settings for the imported comp. So it literally only exists to set the default and then immediately gets deleted. It's literally, so step two makes it, step one and two make it, step three says delete it.