Subtitles of the Movie

Chances are good that you'll be working on your After Effects projects with other people, so it's a good idea to leave some kind of indicator or a marker that someone can find in your comp and then have instructions or just use it to set cues for where the audio would go or a special effect would go. So there's two kinds of markers that we can create in After Effects; one is a composition marker and one is a layer marker and we'll do both of them in a second. First of all, you see this little symbol here? What we're going to do is grab this comp marker to any location by clicking and dragging on it and when we let go, we have a marker and we have a number. So if I drag another one, it will go up to the next number, which is one, and so on. The beautiful thing about a comp marker is that you can double click on it and then you can add notes. So you can say this is where the spider enters the scene and then you can do all kinds of other things to it as, for example, you can add a chapter marker or a URL, which is a new form resource locator, pretty much a link to a website. And other cues that you can add later on. I'll go ahead and just put something, for example, spider and I'll hit OK. You'll note that the word spider is in my comp now, right here. So I could say to somebody, insert the spider sound where you see the spider marker. And if I don't want it anymore, I could simply right click on it and delete this marker, or I can delete all the markers. So what I'm going to do is I'll delete number two and then we have three and one left over. And we can move them at any time. Once again, simply double click on it to add a marker. That is a comp marker. We can also add individual markers to layers, so let's say right about here I want to add another marker. So what I can do at this point is put my mouse, or rather the current time indicator where I want it to go on that layer as long as I have that layer selected and we go ahead and just click on this layer down here, the third layer and I'll go to layer menu and choose add marker. But there's a faster way to do that and I'll tell you that in a moment. Now we have a layer marker and once again, we can move that around, double click on it and add notes as well. To access a faster way to add a layer marker, just hit the asterisk key on the keypad and you can add markers. You can even add markers where your audio is playing to make cues. For example, you can watch the steps of the spider and hit the asterisk every time it stomps down so you know a certain sound effect goes there. So that is pretty much how you add markers, which are visual indicators that you can use to place audio and other comments in your files.