Day 16 - After Effects - The Basics (2/3)

What I did:
Today,  I went on in learning the basics of After Effects. Today, I added an animation to the picture so now I know how to make the watermark move around and I can use that for comedic effect if I ever feel like it. I also added effects to the composition such as adding a blur and a glow. I also learned a lot more about shortcuts and how to use them to maximize time efficiency. There are many ways to do certain things in After Effects but you can do the exact same thing in less time if you know how to.

Adding the glow:

Making the keyframes and animating the picture:

What  I learned:
Today, I learned many new things about After Effects. I learned how to make a picture move, how to immediately import the picture into your composition, how to add effects to your videos, and how to change up the effects. These things that I learned today will help me in getting better with after effects and they will improve future videos I make if I decide to use after effects to edit them.

1. I learned how to immediately import the video from the project section to the composition without having to drag it into a new layer. All you have to do is hold "Ctrl" and "?" to put the picture in the middle of the composition. 

2. Next, I learned about keyframes and how to animate a picture. After you insert and resize a picture to your liking you can animate it by, first, selecting the stopwatch key right next to the picture in the timeline. It will appear next to "position" or "scale" in the timeline. Then you can move the picture to where you want it to go and it will automatically create a keyframe. You can move the keyframe to change how fast the picture will move if you want.

3. Next, I learned about effects. There are many effects in after effects that you can add to your video to give it a special touch if you please and there are many places where you can go to select the effects. You can go to the top and click on effects but there's an easier way in that to the right of the composition box, there is another box that lets you type in effects that you want. This makes it so much faster and easier to access effects. I decided to add the blur effect first and you can do that by typing in "blur" and it will give you options. I selected "box blur" and dragged it into the video section and it looks like this. 

4. Finally, you can decide how much blur you want by going to radius section and typing in a number. To add another effect, you can just type it in and drag it under the previous effect that you had which was the box blur for me. I added the glow effect as well as you saw earlier in this post.

What I plan to learn tomorrow:
Tomorrow, I plan to continue with the basics. Tomorrow is basically the day, I learn what there is left to learn about creating videos like I do. So, I plan to learn about voice overs, text, splitting clips, etc. There are still things like masks that I need to learn as well. I want to learn these things because I've heard that after effects is better in some ways than Sony Vegas at editing so if I find out how to do some of this stuff, I will gladly switch over to this program but I am much to familiar with Sony Vegas to make that call right now.