Before you start

- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files included with this course, then I highly recommend that you follow along with me. Access to the exercise files are beneficial not only because you can follow along with me, but also because you can break apart and analyze, and otherwise deconstruct how some of these scene files were created. You can reverse engineer things and use it as a guide to help you understand further beyond what's presented in this course. When you first open up an After Effects file, however, you may find something that looks like this. We have color bars in place of where artwork should be, and this is After Effects telling us that footage items are missing. It can no longer find the art work on disc at the same location when this After Effects project was saved. So, we need to simply relink this media. To do that, lets come over to our project window and click on this magnifying glass icon. In this dropdown, we can select Missing Footage and After Effects will filter through and leave us with all the footage items that's missing source files, as evidenced here by our color bars. Now to relink, all we have to do is double click on this file and target our Exercise Files folder, wherever you saved that on your computer, and dive into the Assets folder, and a majority of the files that you'll need are found here. In this case, we're looking for an audio file called D chord is for destruction part 1. Inside our audio folder here we can click on that file and when we say Open, After Effects will relink everything else found inside that folder. If we continue on, we can see that we have a Photoshop file here, and the naming convention for these are layer name, slash, Photoshop file name. So the Photoshop file name here in this case is called lip sync.psd. Let's go ahead and click here and we'll step up a level and go to our bitmap folder. In here we'll find lip sync.psd. The remaining items are relinked to that one PSD file and lastly we have our rock grrrl.ai, an illustrator file. So a similar convention applies. We had the layer name as well as the file name itself. So, in this case we're looking for rock grrrl. Now one alternative way to relink these files is to simply search for the file name. So, I'm going to to target my Exercise Files folder and under Assets I'll come over to my Search bar here and type in rock grrrl. Now I do need to target my Assets folder and inside here, here's our rock grrrl.ai. And just as before, all those missing layers are now relinked. So, if we run this missing footage filter again, we'll click out and turn on Missing Footage. We should end up with nothing inside the results. One last note before we start, this course covers a lot After Effects concepts that have been around since the application first started. However, because Adobe Creative Cloud Apps are frequently being updated, you may encounter slight UI variations between what you see recorded on screen and the version of After Effects CC that you're running on your computer. But no worries, you'll still be able to follow along despite this.