After Effects Guru: Mastering the Timeline

- Hi. My name is Rich Harrington, and welcome to this course where we'll explore the After Effects timeline. The timeline is where all of your animation properties occur, as well as how you can control the composition of elements and the general timing of all your pieces. Now, while most users are quite comfortable with the basics in the timeline, there are lots of advanced features that are easy to miss. In this course, we'll cover everything that really is going to help you get the job done. We'll start by talking about navigating the timeline. This includes using workspaces, moving around to specific times, as well as taking a look at playback controls.

Then, we'll talk about adjusting the timeline. This affects what properties you'll see. We can hide and rearrange columns, adjust to control which layers are shown, as well as get organized using labels. Next, we'll have an in depth discussion on key frames. Key frames define the key positions that you used to animate an object. And After Effects has several advanced options that are quite easy to miss. Once you've got key frames down, we'll talk about switches. There are many properties that have different switch controls.

This can include things like the handling of vector files, as well as the quality settings for an individual layer. We'll also talk about layer blending modes. So we could take a look at how different layers are composited, or mixed together. As well as how we could take advantage of things like track mats. Finally, we'll take advantage of composition and layer markers to help us precisely place elements for timing or to leave notes for the future. Now, there's a lot of cover, so let's go ahead and get the exercise files downloaded and jump in.