After Effects for beginners: make your first animation

The short answer

After Effects rests on three ideas:

1. Compositions. A canvas with its own size, frame rate and duration. Compositions can contain other compositions, which is how complex work is built.
2. Layers. Everything is a layer: video, text, shapes, solids, adjustment layers. They stack, and the top one is in front.
3. Keyframes. A recorded value at a moment in time. Two keyframes with different values makes something move.

Learn those three and every tutorial becomes followable.

Your first animation, in half an hour

An animated title. Simple, and it uses everything above.

1. New composition. 1920 by 1080, 24 or 30 fps to match your footage, five seconds long.
2. Add text. Press Ctrl+T (Cmd+T) and type. Style it in the Character panel.
3. Open the layer properties. Click the arrow next to the layer, then Transform.
4. Set the first keyframe. Move the playhead to 0 seconds, click the stopwatch next to Position. That records the current value.
5. Set the second. Move the playhead to 1 second, then drag the text where you want it to end up. After Effects creates a second keyframe automatically.
6. Preview. Press the spacebar.

It moves. That is animation, and everything more complex is the same mechanism repeated.

The setting that separates amateur from professional

Your title currently moves at a constant speed, starting and stopping instantly. Nothing in the physical world does that, and it reads as cheap.

Fix it: select both keyframes, press F9. That applies Easy Ease, so the motion accelerates in and decelerates out.

Then go further: open the Graph Editor (the icon above the timeline) and shape the curve so the movement starts fast and settles slowly.

That single habit, easing everything, does more for the quality of your motion than any effect in the program.

Motion design is mostly timing and easing. Beginners spend their time on effects and wonder why it still looks homemade.

The properties worth animating

Every layer has five transform properties, reachable by shortcut:

• A: Anchor Point (the pivot)
• P: Position
• S: Scale
• R: Rotation
• T: Opacity

Press the shortcut with a layer selected. Learn these five and you will not touch the menus for most work.

Anchor point is the one beginners ignore and then fight. If a layer rotates around the wrong spot, its anchor point is in the wrong place. Move it with the pan-behind tool (Y).

Five more things worth knowing early

Shape layers. Vector shapes built inside After Effects. Most motion graphics are these plus text.

Adjustment layers. An effect applied to everything below it. Excellent for grades and global effects.

Pre-composing. Select layers, right-click, Pre-compose. Groups them into their own composition so you can animate them together. This is how projects stay manageable.

Parenting. Attach one layer to another so it follows. The pick whip is the spiral icon in the timeline.

Masks and mattes. Hiding parts of a layer, or using one layer's shape to reveal another. This is where compositing begins.

Adobe's After Effects user guide is the reference for all of these.

Why it feels slow

After Effects renders every frame from scratch, and effects compound. This is normal.

Things that help:

• Set preview resolution to Half or Quarter.
• Pre-render heavy sections and replace them with the rendered file.
• Keep compositions short and combine them at the end.
• Close everything else.

Expect it to be slower than editing. It is doing more per frame.

When to use After Effects and when not to

Use it for animated titles and lower thirds, motion graphics, logo animation, compositing, effects, and anything drawn and animated rather than filmed.

Do not use it for cutting footage together. That is Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve. There is a comparison of After Effects and Premiere if the split is unclear.

Editing a five-minute video in After Effects is possible and it is the wrong tool, in the same way that a chisel is the wrong tool for a nail.

Where to learn it

The After Effects certificate covers compositions, keyframes, shape layers, motion graphics and effects in order. Adobe's Premiere Pro user guide is worth having alongside it, because the two are used together constantly.

One subscription opens the whole Video Editing & Motion Graphics school.

Two keyframes, then F9. That is your first hour.