Big picture concepts

- [Instructor] If this is your first time into After Effects, I highly recommend going back and watching the basics course first, before getting into this one. This course that you're watching now assumes that you have a basic understanding of the six core concepts of After Effects. Which we'll briefly re-visit here. The six core After Effects concepts are: layers, compositions, animation, effects, 3D, and rendering. Much like Photoshop, After Effects works in layers. And I've often heard of After Effects described as animatable Photoshop. However, unlike Photoshop, After Effects layers can be anything from images, movies, vector art, cameras, lights and sound. - [Guitar Girl] The D chord is for destruction! - [Instructor] Compositions in After Effects are basically containers that hold our layers. Compositions can also live inside other compositions in a method called nesting. This allows us to make multiple instances of a source composition. And it's a very powerful feature, since we can change one property inside the source composition, and have it trickle down into the nesting compositions. After Effects is well known for its animation capabilities. Just about every property for a given layer, including position, scale, and rotation, can be animated with keyframes. By giving us complete control over our keyframes After Effects lets us bring life to our characters. Next up are effects, which are applied at the layer level. Effects allow us to alter art layers in different ways. Including image distortions, and color alterations. And we can stack effects on top of each other feeding the results of one effect into the other. After Effects works in a 3D compositing workspace, which means that we can take 2D layers and mix them in with 3D layers inside of the same composition. And lastly, we have rendering, which is the process of writing a file of our animation off to disk. This allows us to share it with others in its finished state. So by knowing how these six building blocks of After Effects work together, we can effectively use them to give life to our creations when building animation.