Experience how After Effects fits into a typical creative workflow by examining how to import, organize, and animate external media assets. Understand the importance of structured file management and the basic animation process within a composition.
Key Insights
- After Effects is primarily an animation tool used to animate pre-existing media such as images, videos, and audio—it does not create content like photos or complex graphics from scratch.
- The project structure follows a clear folder system, including dedicated folders for exports, finished projects, media (with images, audio, and video subfolders), and preview files, which helps maintain organization and simplifies importing assets.
- Noble Desktop’s training emphasizes industry-standard workflows, such as importing layered Photoshop and Illustrator files into After Effects compositions, which are equivalent to sequences in video editing software.
So, this is basically what we're going to start with, is the one called GuitarPix. That's what I'm going to start with. Okay.
Now, the organization of my folders is fairly straightforward. There is a exports folder, which is empty. When we export a file, it goes there.
Okay. There is a finished projects folder. This is the one that contains the starter files for the lessons after the intro.
Okay. So, like in section 1C, it will say, hey, if you didn't finish everything from before, go open XYZ file, whatever the name is, one of these. That's what it does.
Okay. There is a media folder. The media folder contains the actual files we're working with.
So, After Effects doesn't make graphics. After Effects animates things made someplace else. So, After Effects does not make photos.
A camera makes photos. And then, After Effects doesn't crop photos. A program like Photoshop or something crops photos.
After Effects animates those things. Okay. It is the program at the end of the workflow.
So, it assumes things have been made. It can make text. It can make basic, like, shapes.
And it can make, like, some other stuff, like it has effects that generate graphics, like rain and smoke and that sort of thing. Okay. But it doesn't make photos.
Okay. It doesn't, like, that sort of thing. So, there's usually things that are brought into the program to animate.
And in our class files, those are all in the media folder. There's an audio file. There's many images in the images folder.
And there's a video in the video folder. Okay. Now, for the record, I keep things organized like this because that's how I was trained.
I could have just tossed everything into one folder. The program wouldn't have cared. Okay.
But if you have nice folders, when you import, they'll import as nice folders. I like folders. They're good for organization.
Okay. So, that's a standard WAV file. That's all that is, honestly, by the way.
The images are mostly JPEGs like that. Okay. The one thing that they had is they've been cropped into squares mostly because it's the design of this uses squares.
There's a background image that is just really, really long. So, the graphics are basically prepared and, like, set up that we're going to work with. Okay.
Now, one note on this. This first lesson starts off with just regular JPEGs and stuff. There's a PNG there.
After the first lesson, everything else is importing Photoshop Illustrator files. Okay. It's a very common workflow to start with files made in Photoshop and Illustrator and just import in After Effects, depending on where you're starting from.
Okay. So, it varies. So, the PNG, for example, is transparent background.
That's all it is. That's just a video file. Now, the start of the book also has something that says, hey, go take a look at what you're going to make.
That's in the preview movie folder. So, the structure of our folders is fairly the same every time. Okay.
So, let me play that. So, basically, starts off on black screen. By the way, I'm going to turn off the audio because it annoys me.
There's some audio. It fades in. Then there's, like, this weird little smoke stuff that blows across the screen.
The text is made in After Effects. First photo falls down. Second photo falls down.
Then everything slides over. Then the white logo fades in. So, there's a black logo there.
The white logo fades in. Okay. And then everything fades out to black.
That's the structure. Okay. So, the background image, that's four pics.
It's an image. Text is made in After Effects. This blowing smoke is that video file, by the way, which is actually flour being blown past the camera.
That's what it looks like. Okay. Can I play that without? No, I can't, actually.
Okay. So, in the original photo, there's no outline around this. There's no drop shadow on that.
That was added in After Effects. Okay. So, the original photos are there.
There's effects we add under that. Okay. No problem at all.
Second one falls down. Okay. By the way, they cover the text because that's how the art director wanted it.
But they're just layers. So, you can change that, honestly. Now, there are actually four layers here.
The background, the text, the two photos. They all slide left at the same time. And as they do that, that one slides in from the right.
So, they're kind of like shifting, like everything slides. Okay. It's kind of cool.
And then, again, the white one fades in, and then it ends, if I do it. Okay. So, because these are individual files, we got to make an After Effects project.
We have to make what After Effects calls a composition. Okay. We have to then import those files and then add them to the composition as layers.
Okay. So, first of all, composition is the equivalent in video editing programs of a sequence, and it is the equivalent in every other program of their stage or their document.