Subtitles of the Movie

This movie will explain in detail the uses of the various tools in the After Effects CS3 toolbox. First we have the black arrow tool. It can be summoned by hitting the letter V for Victor on the keyboard. You can use the black arrow tool to select a layer, to change its position or to change its scale by dragging a corner. Just as in Photoshop, if you start dragging on a corner and then hold shift, it scales proportionately. The hand tool, hot key H, is for user navigation around the timeline or the comp view. You can bring it up at will by just holding down the space bar and then releasing it. The zoom tool, hot key Z, is to view the image larger or smaller. You can zoom out by holding option while clicking. Now, this doesn't change the scale of your image, just how closely you're viewing it. The next tool is the rotate tool. It can be summoned by hitting the letter W, for wotate. Its use is limited to selecting and rotating a layer. So I select this layer and I can rotate it. With the wotate tool. After this, we have the camera orbit tool. Now, notice how there is a small triangle to the lower right of this tool. By clicking on it, I can get other tools from it, just like in Photoshop. This tool, the camera orbit tool, is only useful when working in After Effects 3-D, meaning that the 3-D switch has been turned on on your layers and you must have a camera in your composition created by going to new, camera, under the layer menu and that camera must be brought up here in the composition view. The camera orbit tool turns the camera in relation to what it's looking at. The only thing that's being changed here, the only property that's being key framed or adjusted is the position, but when you're using one of the other options, such as the track XY or the track Z, both position and point of interest are changed. Next up is the pan behind, or anchor point tool. This can be used in two ways. The first is to change the anchor, or pivot point, from which the layer will rotate or scale. So I set the anchor point for this layer here and now when I rotate it, it rotates from that corner. If I use it in its other capacity, it must be on a layer with a mask. You would need to key frame both the mask shape and the position and by using the pan behind tool, you can move the position of a picture in relation to its mask. In other words, the mask shape appears to stay put while the picture moves within it. The next tool is the shape tool. When you're working with a layer that already exists, this creates a mask in a rectangular shape. But if you work with it on its own, it creates a shape layer. Again, we see this lower right-hand corner triangle, which shows us that we can make a rectangle, a rounded rectangle, an ellipse, a polygon or a star. I'm a big fan of the star. You can change the fill color and the stroke color and create a good, old star. Next up we have the pen tool. You can use it to draw free-form masks or to add points to an existing mask. So if I wanted to, I could create a mask on the shape layer and use it to create an additional shape on the shape layer or I can use it on one of these pictures to isolate or remove part of the picture. Here I isolated my brother-in-law's head. Let's delete out our crazy-shape layers. The text tool creates text layers and summons up the text editor pallets. By typing with the text tool, I create text layers, which can be adjusted simply by selecting the text and then changing the values in the character and paragraph pallets. You can change the color by clicking the chip and violas, I have red text. The next three tools are for use in the layer window only. To use them, double click a layer. This opens it in a layer editor window. The first tool allows you to paint on a layer. The second tool allows you to clone stamp to remove unwanted areas of an image, such as perhaps these houses or maybe the design on the plate. And the third is the eraser. So if I wanted to erase myself out of this background and just show my niece, I could just use the eraser tool. All three of these tools have similar options. These include brush size and hardness, as well as painting on an image's color or transparency, also known as alpha, and painting on all frames, a single frame or writing on. The last tool here is brand new to Adobe After Effects CS3. It's known as the puppet tool. It allows us to pin and stretch different areas of a layer to get it to move in a bendy way. I can simply pin part of this letter with the puppet tool and then pull and push to get some really unique animation effects. In the QuickStart!! movies, we'll primarily be working with the black arrow, pan, zoom, wotate and pan behind tools. And we'll get to know them well when animating the layered logo. The tools we're using are the basis for most animations made with After Effects. Consider the rest to be the icing on the cake. The good news is that once you get familiar with the basic tools, the icing tools will be much easier to understand.