Subtitles of the Movie

Once you get really going with an After Effects composition you're going to take a peek every once in a while at your ever growing Project Panel and realize that something has to be done. Folders are going to help you stay organized so you can quickly find the assets that you need to work with instead of scrolling through a long list and then trying to figure out what's what. And fortunately, After Effects does help us out by giving us different Icons, but sometimes it's not good enough. Now at the bottom of the Project Panel you'll see that we have this little Folder Icon. I'm going to click on it and right away it's highlighted so we could enter some text. I'm going to call this Audio and hit Enter or Return to accept, then I'm going to just drag the audio files right on into that particular folder, and now I never have to worry about which of these files is audio. I can find the Audio file and click on this little arrow to twirl it open and see the audio that I need. I can click on each one of these guys and look up here to get information about it, so I could see the duration and I could see the kilohertz as far as quality. I'm going to create another Folder and call this one Movies, and I highly recommend that you do this right after you import your assets so that you don't have to go later go through thousands of files and fix them later, just get it out of the way so you can have peace of mind and have a nice clean Project Panel. I'm going to call this one Stills. Of course I could have called it Images, but you can also import Stills and Image Sequences into After Effects. So, Stills tells me that these don't move and these have no other images associated with them. These are just regular pictures. So now I have these three folders, but what if I'm working on a project that has maybe two characters and these are associated for one character, let's say Bob, and let's say Steven has a whole different set of audio movies and stills, so I want to make a new Folder and call it Bob Assets. What I could do at this point is I could drag these other folders into that folder. This is called Nesting. So I twirl this down and I can see the nested assets for Bob, so when I'm working on doing special effects for his part of the film I know where to look and I can create another Folder for Steve's Assets. Now you can even go further than that. Let's say that you want to create another Folder Ð let me go ahead and just take this out of here, and I can just delete this Folder Ð I can create a brand new Folder and I can create something called whatever the film's called, so let's say you're doing a commercial for something or you're doing an opening for something, or the credits for something, you can create another Folder for the entire project, so I'll just call it Show Open. So these assets are going to be used for a commercial and they're going to show Steve and Bob. So now I have nested assets inside a Show Open and then I could have one for other elements, like the Show Closing with the credits. Now, typically when I work in After Effects I like to do everything in separate projects period, so I would do a Show Open and save this as Show Open, and then I would make another project called Show Closing, or Credits, or that kind of thing. I like to have different files just in case one gets corrupted and I don't lose the entire project. Also, make sure you Save As every once in a while and give it a different name so if you do lose one file to a hard disk error or anything you can always go to Show Open B, Show Open C, and still have access to your work.