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In this course, Alan Demafiles covers the core aspects of After Effects commonly used in editing and post production: masks, shapes, type, logos, stills, animating, rendering, and exporting. To begin, Alan compares After Effects to Premiere Pro so you can see the similarities and differences. Then he dives into hands-on demonstrations of how to limit effects with masks, create elements with shape layers, use text templates, animate a logo, and create a 3D type extrusion. Next he shows you how to work with imported pictures, create a Z-space camera montage, change the speed of animations, and more. He wraps up by walking through outputting steps and then kicks off a challenge exercise where you can put your skills into practice.

After Effects can do many things, but if you're a motion designer, you're into After Effects for its motion graphics capabilities. This course concentrates on the tools and techniques you need to make amazing motion designs in Adobe After Effects CC 2018. First, explore shape layers and paths, the foundations of effective vector-based compositions. Then learn different methods of animation, including manually animating with keyframes, leveraging the Graph Editor, changing speed with time remapping, motion sketching, and looping with expressions. Next is compositing, which allows you combine visual elements from separate sources, as well as mask out areas of an effect. Then learn how to set and animate type, and get an introduction to 3D. The last step is rendering your project for your final destination. Instructor Alan Demafiles—a leading After Effects trainer—closes with some tips on building an effective workflow that maximizes your creative freedom and efficiency.

If you need to learn Adobe After Effects for the first time, it helps to break the program down to the basics. This course is designed to help absolute beginners understand the fundamental concepts and techniques that make After Effects such a powerful motion graphics and compositing application. It's a big-picture type of training course, designed to inform and inspire. In chapter one, instructor Mark Christiansen covers the six foundations of After Effects: building compositions, working with layers, animating with the Timeline, adding effects, designing in 3D, and rendering. The second chapter presents a short motion project that shows how all the tools come together in a real-world workflow.

Adobe After Effects CC 2018 offers new features that can enhance your VFX and motion graphics workflow. In this course, explore the major new additions to After Effects—including the latest version, 15.1, introduced in April 2018—and discover how to leverage them in your post-production process. Mark Christiansen provides a hands-on look at this update, showing how to edit keyboard shortcuts visually, create nulls from paths, automate motion with data-driven animation, use master properties to animate nested compositions, build smoother deformations with the Advanced Puppet tool, and more. In addition, he explains how to work with immersive video and customize your VR pipeline.

To keep you up-to-date on the latest additions to After Effects CC 2018, Mark will update the course when new features are released.

Learn how to create stunning visual effects with one of the most widely-used and highly-regarded compositing applications on the market—Adobe After Effects CC. In this course, Alan Demafiles dives into the fundamentals you need to start creating visual effects (VFX) with After Effects. Discover how to build accurate masks and keys, use rotoscoping to separate foreground from background, perform motion and camera tracking, and add your own 3D elements to a scene. Learn how to use effects such as particles and noise to create fire, replace the sky, and more. Then dive into the world of virtual reality as Alan explores the immersive VR and 360-degree video features introduced in After Effects CC 2018. In the final project-based chapter, you can reinforce your new skills by putting techniques into practice with a real-world challenge.

Visual effects have gone from a secret craft to a well-known career path, and with today's software, and the right tutorials, anyone can make high-quality VFX. The After Effects Compositing Essentials series is designed to help mograph artists of any level master techniques such as matching, tracking, keying, and rotoscoping. This course is your introduction to the series: part tutorial and part inspiration. Mark Christiansen introduces the seven essential compositing techniques and some bonus tips to help enhance drama, correct color, and create transparency. He also explains the art of storytelling with VFX, and how the pros use After Effects to create convincing movie magic.

Creating a moving shot that is made up of disparate elements and looks as though it was taken all at once, with a single camera, is the very core of visual effects compositing. To make the effect look natural, compositors also need a deep understanding of how to match color, light, and phenomena specific to the camera, including grain and depth of field. Matching requires no special knack; for example, you can learn to effectively match color even if you have trouble seeing color accurately. So join Mark Christiansen, as he teaches you how to composite 2D or 3D foreground objects to a background scene with After Effects and seamlessly match light, color, depth of field, and noise, so that every element looks natural.

This course was created by Mark Christiansen. We're honored to host this training in our library.

Compositing is all about matching, and in this course we go beyond the fundamentals of matching foreground and background, into the realm of the truly cinematic. Learn how to use the Curves control to surpass what is possible with any other color-adjustment tool in After Effects. Discover how to match the full conditions of the shot as the camera sees it, including back lighting, lens distortion, and other lens and frame-rate artifacts. To make a shot or sequence that belongs in your movie, you need to know how to flatten the shot so that you can use tools such as Magic Bullet Mojo or Looks to make it look truly cinematic. But even beyond making it flat, it's best for it to have the full depth and response of color as we see it in the natural world, and that requires the use of 32-bit-per-channel HDR. And for maximum drama, you want to be able to play with time itself, and motion blur as well. In this course, Mark Christiansen takes you through all these scenarios and the next step in After Effects compositing: matching a shot and making it look not only realistic, but cinematic.

Color keying, also known as chroma keying, lets you shoot a foreground scene and insert it into virtually any background; this can save you money and allow you to create shots that are impossible or highly dangerous to take as a single shot. For it to be effective, the key is in the details. In this course, Mark Christiansen shows how to produce feature-film-quality keys in After Effects that fit well within their new scenes, while retaining the subtle details—be they strands of hair or soft or translucent edges—that make the results believable.

Beginning with a brief explanation of the keying process, Mark takes you through the steps involved in creating a perfect green-screen key: generating a rough matte, eliminating color spill and matte lines, and refining problematic edges. He shows how to work with Keylight and Primatte—two indispensable keying tools in After Effects—and explains when to use one over the other. And for times when green screen won't work, he shows how to generate high-contrast mattes, or luma keys, based on the luminance data in your footage. Last, learn about compression and how to prep a shot for keying.

So you've decided to rotoscope. Performing a "roto," an animated selection with masking and paint tools, is time consuming, but the result can be amazing. In this course, Mark Christiansen teaches you how to roto, and how not to roto, in After Effects. His technique relies on a mostly manual masking and painting process, but he also introduces some procedural tools, such as tracking, to make your job go faster. Learn how to build simple rotos and more advanced articulated rotos, replace missing or mismatched backgrounds, separate foreground action to visual effects, and make the results look more realistic with soft edges and motion blur. Mark also reveals techniques for painting with the Brush and Clone tools and tricks for working with the Roto Brush.

Tracking is one of the most powerful ways to make your After Effects work more sophisticated, and one of the hardest to get right. The human eye has an uncanny ability to sense the accuracy of motion. But once you learn to take advantage of the automated 3D tracker, automated motion stabilizer, and 2D point tracker in After Effects—as well as third-party scripts and planar tracking with mocha—a world of possibilities is opened.

Here, Mark Christiansen shows how to use the five different After Effects trackers, customizing them to work best in the situations that motion graphics artists encounter most often. He covers the fundamentals, as well as opportunities to think outside the box, especially when an automated approach won't work.

Are you looking to add something extra to your Animate CC projects? After Effects offers camera motion; special effects such as fractal fog, motion blur, and glow; and 3D environments that you can't achieve in vector-based programs like Animate alone. This course reviews the Animate to After Effects compositing pipeline, starting with importing Animate scenes into layered AE compositions. Instructor Dermot O' Connor shows how to control the individual layers and add filters and effects to achieve just the look you want. He covers lighting and tone adjustments as well as atmospheric effects, distortion, and camera animation. Then he shows how to quickly assemble a 3D environment and import your Animate characters into the scene. Finally, Dermot explains how to render your composition and collect the final assets for archival and sharing.

Are you looking to add something extra to your Animate CC projects? After Effects offers camera motion; special effects such as fractal fog, motion blur, and glow; and 3D environments that you can't achieve in vector-based programs like Animate alone. This course reviews the Animate to After Effects compositing pipeline, starting with importing Animate scenes into layered AE compositions. Instructor Dermot O' Connor shows how to control the individual layers and add filters and effects to achieve just the look you want. He covers lighting and tone adjustments as well as atmospheric effects, distortion, and camera animation. Then he shows how to quickly assemble a 3D environment and import your Animate characters into the scene. Finally, Dermot explains how to render your composition and collect the final assets for archival and sharing.

Mograph designers and artists are always looking for new templates—and they're often willing to pay for them. Building template-based projects in After Effects is also a great way to earn extra income while improving your design skills. In this course, you'll create a working project template in After Effects and prepare it for sale. You'll learn how to build the project from flexible shape layers and text layers, adding some effects along the way. You'll also find out how to set up the project to make it easy for other designers to make changes to the color, text, and animation, and customize the project to suit their needs. Author Angie Taylor also shows the best ways to save and package template projects for web delivery or for submission to Adobe's Creative Cloud Market.

In this workshop, Adobe Technical Support Lead Todd Kopriva shows you all of the ways that you can track motion in After Effects, either to stabilize the motion or to apply the motion to another object. Get up to speed on the new Warp Stabilizer effect, which makes stabilizing shaky handheld footage much easier than it was in the past. Plus, see how to use the point tracker, which is the best way to stabilize motion in After Effects CS5 and earlier, and is still useful for some purposes in After Effects CS5.5. Finally, Todd shows how to use the mocha plugin—which ships free with After Effects—for scenes that can't be effectively tracked using the point tracker.

This course highlights some of the most exciting features in the latest release. These include enhanced 3D lights, cameras, and effects; the Warp Stabilizer; new stereoscopic tools; and the simplified audio workflow between Audition and After Effects. The course also includes bonus tips, "Tweaks for Geeks," on working more efficiently in After Effects, including searching, sorting, saving, and more.

After Effects CS5.5 New Creative Techniques was created and produced by Trish and Chris Meyer. We are honored to host their material in the lynda.com Online Training Library®.

In this course,, visual effects guru Mark Christiansen covers the relevant new features of After Effects CS5.5, including the new Warp Stabilizer, 3D Stereoscopic workflow, and Lens Effects tools. The course also covers light falloff enhancements and workflow improvements in this release.

In After Effects CS5 Essential Training, author Chad Perkins discusses the basic tools, effects, and need-to-know techniques in Adobe After Effects CS5, the professional standard for motion graphics, compositing, and visual effects for video. The course provides an overview of the entire workflow, from import to export, as well as detailed coverage of each stage, including animating text and artwork, adding effects to compositions, working in 3D, and rendering and compressing footage. Exercise files are included with the course.

In this course, author Ian Robinson introduces Adobe After Effects CS6 and the world of animation, effects, and compositing. Chapter 1 introduces the six foundations of After Effects, which include concepts like layers, keyframes, rendering, and moving in 3D space. The rest of the course expands on these ideas, and shows how to build compositions with layers, perform rotoscoping, animate your composition with keyframes, add effects and transitions, and render and export the finished piece. Two real-world example projects demonstrate keying green screen footage and creating an advanced 3D composition with the expanded 3D toolset, an important addition to CS6.

Get up to speed quickly with the new features in After Effects CS6. Join veteran After Effects user Chris Meyer as he explores the key enhancements to this industry standard visual effects and motion graphics software. Chris shares creative ideas and important production advice while covering the strengths of features such as memory optimization with the new global performance cache, 3D motion tracking with the 3D Camera Tracker, and the new 3D rendering engine for ray-traced 3D rendering.

Adobe After Effects CS6 has lots of new and enhanced features in many areas of the program, from importing and compositing to effects and especially 3D animation. In this course, Adobe Technical Support Lead Todd Kopriva walks you through all of them, including extruded text and shapes, the ray-traced 3D renderer, the 3D camera tracker, fast previews, and variable-width mask feathering. Plus, learn about changes to performance and the user interface, and how these can affect your workflow.

Speed up your character rigging and animation workflows with Duik, the free script-based toolset for After Effects. Duik is known for its inverse kinematics (IK) rigging and animation tools, but it also can help you save time and add diversity to everyday motion graphics. Owen Lowery takes you on an in-depth tour of all the essential tools in Duik, studded with challenges to test your skills and mini-projects that show Duik in action. Learn how to rig characters with the IK tools, rig bones of puppet pin-based characters, animate a walk cycle, and control keyframe interpolation and speed. Plus, find out how Duik can extend 3D cameras and discover how to create traditional frame-by-frame animation with the Cel Animation tool. Owen also shows how to make a character rig dance, without adding a single keyframe!

Learn how to create an animated shower scene for a product visualization inside Adobe After Effects. The complete scene features a chrome showerhead, water streams, steam, and a realistic background—all built in true 3D space with Element 3D, an AE plugin that makes it easy to build 3D objects and particle systems. Explore different shooting angles with the scene camera, and learn to add a depth-of-field camera. Discover how to completely automate the stream speed and thickness in a very natural looking way, all with sliding controllers. Then turn that effect into multiple similar (but not identical) streams, for a realistic shower spray.

This is a project-based learning experience. Each step of the process is rich with object lessons that are applicable to the variations that a motion design and compositing artist will face in the real world.

Expressions are an advanced feature of After Effects that many editors shy away from. The perception is that you need to be good at scripting to be able to use expressions. But basic expressions are easy to apply using simple point-and-click methods. They're incredibly useful for adding randomness to animation and effects, linking properties to synchronize animation, or even making effects react to music.

After Effects Expressions for Premiere Pro Editors is a creative, project-based workshop. Editors take a basic Premiere Pro edit and bring it to life using After Effects expressions and Dynamic Link, following author Angie Taylor's expert instructions. The concepts are broken down into manageable 3–5 minute videos, covering techniques such as randomizing effects, linking animation and color to sound, automating animation, and more.

As a designer, you're constantly challenged to create new and compelling imagery for your projects. That sometimes requires new tools. After Effects is known for animation, but it's also a powerful program for graphic designers. Its panels and basic features are similar to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, which makes After Effects easier for designers to learn. This course offers a unique workflow, combining Photoshop with After Effects to create stunning, unique, and professional-quality assets for print, web, and photography. Instructor Chris Converse—founding partner of Codify Design Studio—shows how to create special effects, add dramatic lighting to photos, color key images, build textures and patterns, and generate artwork from almost nothing, producing effects like water, bubbles, lightning, and rain. The course is for any designer—even if you've never used After Effects before. Chris demos each example step by step, and shows how the results can be used in real-world design projects.