From the course: After Effects CS5 Essential Training

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What is a composition?

What is a composition?

Now we are ready to talk about compositions, basically the foundation of everything you do in After Effects. A composition is kind of like a storage container for all of your footage. It's basically what you are seeing here onscreen. Think of them as little mini projects. So, we have all this footage in the Project panel, but we don't see it onscreen until we add it to a composition. To see what I am talking about, let's get our fingers dirty and make a new composition from scratch. At the bottom of the Project panel, I am going to click this little button, and this little filmstrip icon is the icon for Composition. So, if we click that, we'll get the Composition Settings dialog box in preparation for making a new comp. So, I am going to title this New Comp and from this dropdown we could choose a preset if we wanted to from a series of very common formats, standard definition up here, some web sizes here, some high definition ones here, some film resolutions here. For right now, I am…

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