Subtitles of the Movie

You can use After Effects to help you sequence or order your layers so that they play in a nice, neat sequence; so they go from one layer neatly into another. The cool thing about this is we can also automatically have it insert a transition so it fades in and out of one scene or layer. Now, let's talk about this right now. First of all, when you want to sequence layers, you have to make sure that you have room so that all the layers can actually go from one to the other and I'm going to show you what I'm talking about. We're going to have After Effects do this for us. I'm going to just manually show you. I'm going to move these layers and I'm going to put them in a sequential order so that when they play, they go from one to the other. So let me undo that, just make it all messed-up again. Then what we're going to do is select all of our layers. Just click on any layer in the timeline. Of course, the layer you want to start with and then press command or control A to select them all. Then go to the animation menu and choose key frame assistant and then move on over to sequence layers. We have a couple of options here. I'm going to turn overlap off for now and show you that the dissolve transition goes off when we take this option off. What we can also do is effect the duration, if we so desire. But I'm going to leave it as it is. So take a look at the timeline now and then take a look when I click OK. Nice and neat. So I can go ahead and hit the home key and I can press my space bar and I can watch one shot go neatly into another one. Now, I'm going to undo that, get them all sloppy again and I'll select them all again and I'm going to go animation, keyframe assistant, sequence layers and this time I'll turn on overlap. So what's going to happen this time is After Effects is going to put them very close to each other and overlap them and I can change this number if I want to frames or seconds or I could do whatever I want to, but once again I'll leave it as it is just to show you how you can fix things when they go a little wonky. But we can also transition things in different ways too. So we can dissolve the front layer or we can have no transition or we can cross-dissolve the front and back layers, which simply means that it's going to give you a nice dissolve in the beginning or in the beginning and the end, depending upon what you have selected. So I'm going to leave dissolve front layer on and click OK. And when I hit the space bar, you see that they're really close and we get a slide-show kind of effect. But what I want to do is select one at a time, let me grab this guy here and I'll move it just a little bit so we have a little manual overlap like so, just so I can get it to play the way I want it to play. And of course, I could leave more space in the time line or I could have just selected a different time for the transition to occur. But as you can see, I get this really cool, you know, story board animatic kind of thing just by using the key frame assistant, sequence layers.