Subtitles of the Movie

This is the workspace for After Effects CS4. As you can see there's quite a bit to look at and it can be daunting at first, but each of these tools can either be hidden so you don't have to worry about them, or you can even change the workspace you're dealing with so you can just focus on the task at hand. So once again, don't let this dissuade you and freak you out, because it is quite a busy looking workspace. Now what I'm going to do is show you that just by clicking on the borders here we can choose to focus on the tool that you want to deal with, for example, the Composition Window, or the Project Panel, or the Timeline, by simply clicking your mouse until you see this little divider line here and you can pull it up or down like so. And of course I miss every once in a while, but let me just go ahead and try again. There we go. That's how you can pretty much focus on what you want to see. At the top of the workspace we have our Standard Toolbar where you invoke common commands such as Create a New Composition, Editing, Layer Options, accessing your Special Effects, Animation Options, and more. You also have these tools here that allow you to manipulate things in your compositions. For example, if I want to select this particular footage I have my Selection Tool handy, also called the Move Tool because it's a black arrow and it's similar to the ones you'll find in other applications. So I can click on it and move this guy around with that tool. I'll undo that a couple times by pressing Command or Control Z. I also have this Hand Tool here. The Hand Tool is something I never actually click on because I can do the same thing by hitting the Spacebar. This allows you to move around inside of your document, just in case you're zoomed in pretty high like this, 200 percent, and want to just see a part of this image. So, once again, I will go to through this tool and instead hit my Spacebar to access that same exact tool, and when I let go of the mouse I'm returned to the last tool I had selected. So let me go back here and go to 100 percent. I can also choose to Fit. We also have many other tools that I'm going to cover in the course of the Tutorial from the Zoom Tool, which allows you to zoom in and out so you can click and drag to zoom into a particular location. You can hold the Alt or Option key to zoom back out when you click, and of course, you have your little options where you can choose to Fit, and move around inside your document at different magnification levels. We can rotate things with the Rotate Tool, very handy, just click on a part of the image and rotate. And, we have several tools for the camera that we will start to use when get to using the 3D space inside of After Effects. We can draw shapes, such as rectangles, ellipses and stars, we have our Pen Tool for the creation of Bezier curves like you can draw inside of Illustrator, and this is very useful for creating masks. We have our Type Tools, of course, for creating type. We have our Brush, our Clone Stamp, Eraser, which allow us to do things like paint and clone things in our document, and of course to erase. We have our Puppet Tool, which is a very fun tool, definitely check out the section on how to use this. It's going to make you very happy. And we also have our ability to choose a different workspace. So if you want to work with animation tools, choose that; if you want to work with special effects, chose that; and so on. So, that's the basic gist of the tools that we have available to us inside of After Effects. I'll talk more about how to work with Panels, and the other tools as we go along inside of this tutorial.