Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, we will learn how to add effects to our log animation and how to pre-compose. There are several ways to add effects to an animation. For one, you can add different effects to each layer of your animation by going to the effect menu and choosing an effect or by going to the effects and presets window and choosing an effect there. The nice thing about the effects and presets window is that in the contains box you can type in just some of the letters of the effect you intend to use and it will give you all of the effects that include that word or those letters that you've typed in. Now, if you apply effects to each individual letter, you can get some very interesting results and you can animate properties that have this little stopwatch. So you would just click the stopwatch here and then go later in time and change the value. And in this case the value was for color, so I can change the value to pink and we see that the letter G, the small G is changing from green to pink over time. Green and then it's changing to pink. Now, adding individual effects to each layer can lead to some very interesting results; however it can take a very long time to animate and to render. The second way to add effects is by using an adjustment layer. Adjustment layers can be found under layer, new, adjustment layer. Now, without any effects applied to an adjustment layer, the effect is of just your normal animation. Let me just change my background color back to white. So this is the adjustment layer with all of the effects turned off. Another way to turn off all of your effects is to just unclick this Effects on the layer in the timeline. If you apply an effect to an adjustment layer, and just watch, there's one effect. And turn it on for the layer. There's another effect. And here's another. All the layers below the adjustment layer end up with the effect applied to it. And if I drag this down below the word design, the word design is the way that we had originally animated it and logo now has this effect because logo lives under the adjustment layer. I would think of the adjustment layer like sunglasses with customizable lenses. The third way to add effects is by pre-composing. Pre-composing or nesting means that one composition has been placed within another composition. It's treated like one layer, which sometimes speeds up render time. It also allows the use of animation presets or combinations of effects. Animation presets are found here under apply animation preset in the animation menu or here in the effects and presets box. Just by clearing the contains box, dragging all the way up and here we have our animation presets. First I make a new composition by clicking the new composition icon in the project window or by going to composition, new composition. I set it to NTSCDV and I'm going to call this Logo with NM Preset. I take my original logo composition and I drag it into my new timeline and see this? We have the logo composition as one layer right here. We can edit this layer by double clicking on the logo comp here in the project window or by alt or option clicking on the logo comp here. Now, back to logo with animation preset. In this comp I can go to the effects and presets box, open the animation presets and choose one of these animation presets. The one that I would like to use is under transitions movement and I'm going to use card wipe pixel storm. Now, if for some reason you don't see your animation presets listed, click on the small triangle right here. It looks like a little play button. And make sure that show animation presets is selected. Animation preset is kind of a confusing term. When I double click on card wipe pixel storm, I see that my animation preset is actually made up of different effects. An animation preset is really a combination of effects that animates with key frames or expressions, which are math functions. The presets work best with After Effects CS3 Professional, with the Sitecore suite of effects installed. Not to worry, After Effects CS3 Pro ships with Sitecore as an added bonus. I've applied the card wipe pixel storm animation preset and we see, Oooh. That it actually animates backwards. Now, if I wanted this to animate forwards, like we did with our logo, what I would want to do is reverse the animation. There's a pretty easy solution to reversing the animation. Most animation presets rely on key frames for the beginning and the end of a transition. To show all the key frames on a layer, select the layer and hit letter U for show you all the key frames. Select the key frames that you see for transition completion. Then go to the animation menu, key frame assistant, time reverse key frames. Now your logo starts together and then bursts apart with the effect. So here we see that the animation is going in the proper direction, but it seems to be going a little too fast for my taste. Not to worry. I can select these key frames and slide them so that once my logo starts to burst apart in the animation, it will also start to burst apart with the effect. Not bad. To make it slower I would just move the key frames further apart. To make it faster, I would move the key frames closer together. I encourage you to experiment with the animation presets. Also you're not limited to using animation presets with animated logos or this same type of thing. You can also use it just with a single video track or a single image. Please view the upcoming movies to learn how to output your animations to show them to friends, family and colleagues.